measure twice, cut once

i watched this movie back in school. we all knew the biochemical cascade of inflammatory response, but finally being able to visualize it made the process that much cooler. this movie was more relevant to my job at that time, which was heavily rooted in discovery and exploration. now i'm just a glorified mechanic of things nano. here, fix this. it's broken.

here's another good one that i hadn't seen until recently about the nifty little silencing enzyme, dicer. measure twice, cut once.

to die in the name of seed diversity

i should have been a field biologist. this is yet another example of how life would be better not under fluorescent lights.

"Stalin wanted nothing to do with genetics, and Vavilov's progressive ideas amounted to heresy. In 1940, in his early 50s, Vavilov was jailed for pursuing "impractical science." Three years later, he starved to death in prison."

loss of diversity.

"In the past 200 years in the U.S. alone, 75 percent of the variety within crops has vanished... Crop yields will need to roughly double in the next 50 years to keep up with the pace of population growth."

seed vault.

"Dug nearly 400 feet deep into a sandstone mountain, the vault's interior temperature is immune to changes in the surrounding permafrost. It sits roughly 425 feet above sea level, protected against flood even if all of Antarctica were to melt... capable of holding 4.5 million samples of vital crop seeds."

who knew.

"Before it gained notoriety for its prison, Abu Ghraib was the site of Iraq's national seed bank. It was destroyed and looted after the 2003 American invasion, its collections of lentils, rye, barley and other seeds gone forever."

chemistry

careful who you work for: the birth of vx

custom blend

about 2 yrs ago i started mixing my soft drinks 1/2 diet, 1/2 full strength at the fountain thinking it might cut some unneeded calories while satiating my carbonated sweet tooth. specifically i was hoping to get rid of my 30th birthday present (tummy fat, the kind that makes your belly button look deeper). i have not noticed a difference. at all. reading this blurb and the corresponding journal article in bne makes me wonder. i'm a firm proponent of highly evolved, hardwired physiological response. our biochemistry dates back to well before our species originated in africa 200,000 yrs ago. not to mention the empirical evidence that the general consumer of the diet drink is big as a house.

it may be time for some self-experimental data taking.

dear bad date,

i dedicate this article to my lousy date some months back at the starbucks in westlake. that was my 1st of 2 lousy dates at that place. who wants to meet at an abominable $4 coffee place in an uppity neighborhood? free market capitalists. that's who.