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tanarillI fell off the intarwebz again.
THINGS WHAT HAPPENED:
1. I went home for the weekend, and the power went out. We had a wind storm, which presumably knocked down the power line. So instead of Oven Pizza Saturday, we had Sushi Saturday, followed by "sit in the dark and tell stories to each other by candlelight" night. It was not bad. Not something I would do for tremendous amounts of fun, but not too bad.
2. I have been to Science! seminars. Today the one was the one where they made every possible single point mutation it is possible to make in the gene for a protein called ubiquitin. (It is everywhere in every cell. The scientists at the time thought this made a good name.) Then they studied the fitness, by which we mean the ability of the organism to survive long enough to make more of itself. They used yeast, because twenty yeast generations takes about two days.
What they found was that out of the mutations that don't immediately kill the yeasts, there are some as good as not-mutated ubiquitin, but there are not any that are better. To which the obvious response is, duh. Do we think us scientists with out fancy-shmancy labs and our directed evolution can come up with anything better than Nature has in billions of years? It might not be an intelligent designer, but it has been tinkering for longer than our genus has existed. So the real conclusion that the lecturer made was that even the ones that, to us, look "as good" probably do have some not-as-helpful-as-the-not-mutated-kind effects, which only show up on timescales longer than two days.
3. I have been trying to make almost-but-not-quite dead cells, which are the kind which are too sick to notice when you add a few bits of DNA into them. These are E. coli cells, so it is kind of amusing that I am making the bugs sick. So far, it has not worked. Wah.
4. I got a rotation for next term! I will work on gamma-hyrdoxy-butyrate, possibly better known as the "date rape drug". For such a horrible drug, it turns out that very nearly no research has been done on how it affects our brains. It was only last year that a quick-test sensor (developed by my prof) was put into production. So now we can tell it's there, at least. Huzzah.
5. Passover in two weeks. I hate that [censored] holiday.
6. It is finals week. I am ded.
Now I go to fall off the internets again. Bye bye!
THINGS WHAT HAPPENED:
1. I went home for the weekend, and the power went out. We had a wind storm, which presumably knocked down the power line. So instead of Oven Pizza Saturday, we had Sushi Saturday, followed by "sit in the dark and tell stories to each other by candlelight" night. It was not bad. Not something I would do for tremendous amounts of fun, but not too bad.
2. I have been to Science! seminars. Today the one was the one where they made every possible single point mutation it is possible to make in the gene for a protein called ubiquitin. (It is everywhere in every cell. The scientists at the time thought this made a good name.) Then they studied the fitness, by which we mean the ability of the organism to survive long enough to make more of itself. They used yeast, because twenty yeast generations takes about two days.
What they found was that out of the mutations that don't immediately kill the yeasts, there are some as good as not-mutated ubiquitin, but there are not any that are better. To which the obvious response is, duh. Do we think us scientists with out fancy-shmancy labs and our directed evolution can come up with anything better than Nature has in billions of years? It might not be an intelligent designer, but it has been tinkering for longer than our genus has existed. So the real conclusion that the lecturer made was that even the ones that, to us, look "as good" probably do have some not-as-helpful-as-the-not-mutated-kind effects, which only show up on timescales longer than two days.
3. I have been trying to make almost-but-not-quite dead cells, which are the kind which are too sick to notice when you add a few bits of DNA into them. These are E. coli cells, so it is kind of amusing that I am making the bugs sick. So far, it has not worked. Wah.
4. I got a rotation for next term! I will work on gamma-hyrdoxy-butyrate, possibly better known as the "date rape drug". For such a horrible drug, it turns out that very nearly no research has been done on how it affects our brains. It was only last year that a quick-test sensor (developed by my prof) was put into production. So now we can tell it's there, at least. Huzzah.
5. Passover in two weeks. I hate that [censored] holiday.
6. It is finals week. I am ded.
Now I go to fall off the internets again. Bye bye!
no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 07:18 pm (UTC)I'm a little lazy, educate me if you know anything about it?