fun
cagapakis | January 26, 2011I've been playing a bit with the alpha of Qwiki, a new website that offers users an innovative "information experience." The site collects images, videos, and text about topics from the internet and then displays the images future-aesthetically while reading the information in a delightful robot voice. There are still some kinks to work out, but overall it's kind of cute and fun! Here is Qwiki Science:
And Qwiki Science Heroes--Carl Sagan:
Just like on wikipedia, it's easy to fall into a procrastination spiral clicking on related links, but it's worth signing up and poking around!
cagapakis | January 19, 2011My friend Patrick is embarking on a 48 experiment, studying circadian rhythm and destroying his own in the process. He's also embarking on a social media experiment, live-streaming the whole thing on ustream.
Tune in to watch real science in action and the effects of sleep deprivation on scientists! You can even ask him questions during the three hours between experimental time points!
cagapakis | December 7, 2010An incredible (if unscientific) look at the history of life:
The video has been around for a few months and has a gajillion hits so sorry if I'm late to the party, I just had to share!
By Blu, via Bio Fiction
stoat | October 27, 2010I'm sorry, but information on the list is only available via the list. As soon as you subscribe, you will get an email with full instructions. Please disable your spam filter, as we use steganography to make the more important announcements look like penis enlargement ads. In fact, you may already be subscribed.
stoat | October 26, 2010Thank to Hank, who spotted this.
If you go to Nature's upcoming climate publication, there's an online quiz they're using to decide who gets a freebie: https://www.sunbeltfs.com/forms/nq/subscribe.asp.
At one point it asks what climate-related blogs you read. Naturally, only the finsest quality blogs are listed. There are three blogs:
_Bright Green Blog
_Real Climate
_Stoat
_Other (please specify)
As Hank notes, "Bright Green Blog" -- the Christian Science Monitor's effort -- ended on "February 16, 2010 [a]fter 22 months and some 500 posts".
So, despite their ability to drink prodigous…
cagapakis | October 20, 2010We can babble philosophically about whether or not what we call "red" looks the same from another person's eyes, we can compare the adjectives we use to specify colors--is it maraschino red or cayenne?--but when we're talking to our computers, categorizing flowers, designing objects for mass production, branding a company, or establishing a flag's official colors we have to be able to be specific about which exact shade of red we want.
These days we have standard color systems that define colors as specified mixes of red, green, and blue pixels on screen, specific mixtures of pigments in…
stoat | October 18, 2010No, not a man with a stoat through his head. Instead, what appears to be an utterly gratuitious waste of time and money:
Yes, its a 5x. WTF? Presumably, these people really do have so much spare cash that they can create a new hull [update: more likely a converted coxed four; though rumour says that German quints exist] just for a video (though some of the shorts of the bow-bobble nearly going underwater suggest they may have got the shape a touch wrong [update: nope, that is probably them being pushed by the barge]). Thats assuming all this isn't CGI, but I doubt it - some of the shots of…
cagapakis | October 12, 2010It's not just Scott Kern who thinks that science is only about tedious benchwork and that grad students should be boring robots moving small volumes of liquid around 20 hours a day for the greater good. An unscientific analysis of the 169 comments and numerous comment thumbs ups of Hydrocalypse Industries' most popular video shows that a significant percentage of the commenters who aren't saying something completely inane, off topic, or conspiracy-theory laden are criticizing us for not working hard enough.
I hopefully don't need to go into detail about how many hours we are all actually…
cagapakis | October 7, 2010iGEM students are nothing if not creative, fun, and super nerdy. Here is a taste of some of the awesome videos being made by this year's crop, enjoy!
Cambridge, with a catchy song about new techniques for joining pieces of DNA together:
(via LabRat)
Hong Kong University's Inception trailer:
TU Delft, finding science in pop music:
And of course, Harvard, being dramatic in the lab:
stoat | September 23, 2010I don't, in general, read my fellow science blogs. Not because I hate them, you understand, but because they talk about other stuff. But I was lead to Inventing excuses for a Bible story, and getting them published in a science journal? and was immeadiately struck by (a) how strident it seemed, and (b) how backwards it all seemed. (a) I can excuse: I'm sure I seem the same fairly often, but hopefully not too often (b). Side note: I was "accused" recently of being tedious in my writing on wikipedia, at which I vigourously protested. But it became clear that she actually meant "tendentious"…
cagapakis | September 22, 2010Thanks to the internet, you can find out your pirate name and your Jersey Shore name, and now thanks to the EMBL-EBI learning tools, you can find your protein name too!
When you type your name into the box, the program reads the letters of your name as if they were the single-letter codes for amino acids. Since there are only 20 amino acids, if you have a B, J, O, U, X, or Z in your name the program reads it as "X" which just means any amino acid could go in that spot.
The amino acids are then translated back into one of the possible three-letter DNA codes for each amino acid, and that DNA…
cagapakis | September 16, 2010Our friends at Ginkgo BioWorks are hiring and they asked Hydrocalypse Industries to make them a video! Who Is the Bioengineer of the Future?
It could be you!
cagapakis | September 14, 2010This year's Cambridge iGEM team has made a tiny, wireless lightbulb filled with bioluminescent bacteria! There are two main ways of engineering luminescence in E. coli (I assume these are E. coli, correct me if I'm wrong!). One is to express the luciferase gene from fireflies, which adds ATP and oxygen to the chemical luciferin, producing oxyluciferin and yellow, green, or red light.
Since the lightbulb is blue, this bacteria is probably expressing the Lux operon from Vibrio fischeri, which use their bioluminescence in an awesome underwater symbiosis. From the Cambridge iGEM wiki:
Some…
cagapakis | August 18, 2010A recent survey of 3,000 people worldwide found what many have known all along--that Legos are the best toy ever made. For synthetic biologists, this doesn't come as much of a surprise--Legos are at the heart of the concepts underlying the basics of synthetic biology.
Legos are a favorite analogy for BioBricks, the DNA parts that are made to easily "snap" together using a shared genetic engineering strategy. The iGEM competition is structured around BioBricks, with undergraduate teams combining old and creating new BioBricks for the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, competing for the…
cagapakis | August 10, 2010It turns out that my wonderful iGEM students, besides being brilliant scientists, are also excellent, hilarious actors. Please enjoy their Jersey Shore inspired video about molecular cloning:
stoat | July 29, 2010A friend pointed out just recently: we usually measure a car's fuel efficiency in Miles per Gallon. But some would like us to switch to the more logical Gallons per Mile (or 10,000 miles, to make the numbers more convenient, or whatever), which would be the fuel consumption. But that, technically, is an area, so for example a car which gets 55ish mpg actually has a fuel consumption of 0.051 mm^2 (ht: A/S).
stoat | July 29, 2010I have a funky new watch, a Garmin Forerunner 110. It lets me do kewl stuff like:
although you only get that after post-processing, of course. In fact I haven't even worked out how to make it work like a GPS when running, i.e. display lat/long or grid refs. Nor have I worked out how to persuade the stupid post-processing software to give me mph instead of mins/mile like all the hard-core runners want, pah. But the upload-from-watch (via the provided nipple clamp) to-web-and-graph is impressively smooth and painless.
You're fascinated - I know - so let me tell you that we did two laps: the…
stoat | July 28, 2010As discussed by Viz in the August 2010 edition, #197:
Paul has more useful discussion, but Viz is funnier.
stoat | July 15, 2010
Hugo is disappointed there is no Stw. Although I'm not really sure that is a swearword.
