Please excuse the mess. I'm moving the site and, as expected, broken a ton of things.
Hopefully it'll all calm down in the next day or two as the DNS resolves and all.
Life blog
Molecularist = a person who creates, modifies, and hacks molecules and then makes them do wondrous things.
Entries from February 2011
27 February 2011
26 February 2011
links for 2011-02-25
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Culturing yeast off of raisins, using the raisins as sugar source. Indeed, sima, a lightly fermented spring drink from Finland, is inoculated with packet yeast, but I think originally was inoculated with the raisins that are part of the recipe.
24 February 2011
Kickstarting a great new documentary
I'm a film hack. Yeah, some of my short vids have hundreds of thousands of views or even millions, and some (nameless) have contributed to big donations, but I'm still a hack. Last fall I had a very very brief moment of insanity when I thought, just thought, fantasized, really, that, maybe, I could do a documentary on iGEM, synthbio, and DIYbio.
Y'see, we're living in the early days of a renaissance in Biology. Wouldn't it be great to capture all that, travel the country, talk science in a broad-sweeping documentary?
But then I realized what it would take for me to do it: being a hack, it would be much harder to get to the level I wanted. The gap between my skill level, equipment access, time, and money and what was needed was way too large, even to try and fund it via Kickstarter.
But then, at iGEM 2010, I bumped into two guys whom I had initially met at iGEM 2009, and who now had a cool project they were working on (see video below).
Yeah, it's a documnetary about synthetic biology.
And they are raising funds via Kickstarter.
And I pledged $300. Don't know about you, but $300 is a big deal for me. But, it's also a big deal that this documentary get made.
Will you join me and help these guys get the funds they need?
These guys have great style, sensibility, and focus (loved the trailer, below, and check out the cool excerpts). It's gonna be an awesome documentary and will kick ass at Sundance. But only if you join me in helping them.
What are you waiting for? Head over to Kickstarter and pledge something. Wouldn't you say 25 bucks should help?
And then get all your friends to help out too.
22 February 2011
links for 2011-02-21
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"One of UCSF’s brightest young scientists and a key member of the Bay Area’s emerging synthetic biology community is heading east."
[via @jrkelly]
21 February 2011
links for 2011-02-20
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"I've pulled out from Baum's comments a range of timely ideas that help bring some perspective to the rapidly evolving and often-intersecting areas of data warehousing, purpose-built appliances, business analytics, Big Data, and how companies are trying to leverage all of that to turn insight into foresight."
20 February 2011
links for 2011-02-19
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The odd thing is that I too had my smack-pack liquid yeast not really take in my boho pils. Panicked that it'd get contaminated I pitched in some yeast from a bottle of an Oktoberfest ale I had around (didn't have time to get to the brew shop). It's bubbling away now, but I sure hope it's not contaminated (it would be my first). I'll know in a few days when I move it to the secondary. And I think this was the first time I've ever used liquid - I always prefer dry, but they didn't have any.
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"The images taken with the scanning electron microscope of sauerkraut, kombucha, and some stinky cheeses show beautiful and complex landscapes made by and of microbes."
Really cool EM images of food bugs.
Searching for practical microbes in the Amazon forest for the production of cellulosic ethanol. (In Portuguese). Brazil is a major producer of ethanol from sugar cane. Now they want to see if they can branch out to other sources of carbohydrates for ethanol production.
19 February 2011
links for 2011-02-18
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Excellent overview of all the ways we use microbes (useful bugs!) in the production of food. I learned that cacao is fermented and a new term SCOBY, "symbiotic colonies of bacteria and yeast". A bit cooler than "cooperatives" (my use) or "consortia" (science term).
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Animated MRIs of foods. Pretty cool.
16 February 2011
links for 2011-02-15
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A personalized computerized fitness center, with visual guidance, and a hat tip towards quantified self nuts. Haven't found out if anything can be downloaded or what online tools they have to visualize.
15 February 2011
links for 2011-02-14
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"The researchers found 14 that did the trick, but one molecule—named RNPA1000—was especially effective against S. aureus. RNPA1000 killed cells from all 12 major strains of methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA)."
Biochemistry and molecular biology informing anti-bacterial targets. Quite cool.
(tags: biochemistry molecularbiology molecularist practicalmicrobes science biology microbiology staphaureus drugs interesting)
14 February 2011
links for 2011-02-13
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"A natural biorefinery in itself, the Q microbe, Clostridium phytofermentans, is an anaerobic organism with a unique combination of natural characteristics that dramatically streamline the production of cellulosic ethanol."
Though not sure if this is a recombinant organism - no reference to it, but choice use of the word "natural".
13 February 2011
links for 2011-02-12
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Another one.
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Cool. I'm starting to find these databases of enzymatic pathways - pick a molecule, find a pathway. Yet, all of these could use a better UI. Networks of stuff always seem better in multi-dimensional graphical interfaces you can manipulate. Just saying.
12 February 2011
links for 2011-02-11
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"Speaking of their discovery, Derek Lovely said, “We placed the microbes under conditions in which they had to work together in order to survive and grow using the alcohol we gave them as an energy source. They’re the ultimate drinking buddies, collaborating to consume ethanol.”"
07 February 2011
links for 2011-02-06
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Finding the mechanism through clever sleuthing.
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How do you isolate new cellulolytic genes from microbes in a cow rumen? Easy, poke a hole in the side of the cow (a fistula), throw in some bags of grass, pull out grass later and isolate bugs breaking down the grass. A great example of old-time microbiology and new-fangled metagenomic.
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Educators, hobbyists, entrepreneurs, investigators - which are you? [Meant to bookmark this long ago.]
05 February 2011
links for 2011-02-04
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The world is spiky. And science is a northern endeavor.
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"A row has broken out in France over whether 15- and 16-year-olds should be allowed to create transgenic Escherichia coli bacteria in the classroom."
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