Hot science!

If only all female scientists look like her… wahahaha!

A life away from my own…

It’s been awhile since i last updated. As always, nothing much has happened. Thing is, nothing very exciting ever happens in your life when you spend 12 hours a day in a laboratory under artificial lighting carrying out experiments.

I guess the one thing that has been relatively exciting is that my scientific manuscript based on my Honours work has been accepted by the peer-reviewed journal Functional Plant Biology. My first scientific paper! So i guess that means that i’m truly a proper scientist now. The paper will be published in the December 2008 issue of the journal and i really do hope that it will help make an impact on plant science, if not meiosis science in general.

On a totally different matter all together, it hit me the other day, that i’ll be going home for holidays soon. It won’t be for long, just a fortnight but i think it will be good. I was sitting in my room one night thinking about home and i tried to picture what thinks looked like the last time i went home. And to my utter shame, i could not remember. I could not remember so many things like what the study room looked like, or what ornaments sit on the cabinet shelves, or the colour of the kitchen cupboards. It truly upset me, deep down in my heart of hearts, it truly upset me. Not being able to conjure images of the home i lived in for almost 19 years of my life… I’m glad i’ll be going home soon… it will be good, i know it will be…

I watched Paris last night. It was a pretty decent show but for those of you that don’t like movies with inconclusive endings, it might not be for you. It is a french movie, as the title obviously belies. Juliette Binoche was in it so that was nice. I like her, for some weird reason or other. I think it’s because she looks like a really friendly person. The movie is based around so many different characters, all exclusive of each other, yet totally inclusive in the universe. You’ll have to watch the movie to understand what i’m trying to say. My only criticism of the movie is that the scope of the characters is so wide that you never truly get to know each of them. It’s more like a small take of each person and the rest is left to your imagination to build up each character as you so choose. I guess it a way it’s artistic, yet in a way, it leaves you feeling slightly disconnected from them as well. So out of 10, i’ll give this a 7.5.

I guess this sis all for now. Hopefully i’ll find the time to update again soon. And just for kicks, i’ll leave you guys with a smile on your face.

Dragon Piss!

For those of you that work with proteins, you’ll know what i mean when i say that they are the hardest things to work with, yes, even harder than RNA. Protein work is not a science, no no, it is more than that; it is an art! Yet, i have always been drawn to protein work. Maybe it was because i use to have the crazy ambition of becoming an anti-venom technologist, or maybe, just maybe, i am a sucker for torturous lab work.

You see, the thing is, proteins are fickle molecules. In their native state, they do what they are designed to do. In their denatured state, well.. they’re like fried eggs… not very good for anything…

If the temperature is too high, the proteins become denatured. If the temperature is too low, they can’t function properly. If the pH is too high or too low, they don’t work… If the solution lacks cofactors, they don’t work. If the solution lacks coenzymes,  they don’t work either… To cut a long story short, you have got to get things right before they work.

But that’s just getting them to behave the way they were designed to behave… what about all the other things you have to do to them when you work with proteins? What about producing them, or extracting them from tissue samples, or precipitating them from solution to remove contaminating material, or purifying them by affinity chromatography, or determining their isoelectric potential by isoelectric focusing, or determining their molecular weights by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, or visualising them with one staining technique or another?!

In the past, one particular staining technique has been notorious for being extremely finicky; the silver stain. You see, once you stain your gel and the proteins start to silver, you have to judge when to stop the reaction or the whole gel ends up completely silvered and it turns black. It is a delicate balance between a good result and a pull-your-hair-out hang-yourself-from-the-lab-ceiling-fan jump-out-the-highest-window-in-the-university kinda result.

Anyways, my supervisor had some very bad experiences with the technique back in days when he used to sit at the lab bench and slave away like the rest of us lab-rats. I’m convinced that those days must have been from a time long long ago, in a land far far away , where the dinosaurs spoke english, and men still thought that the Earth was flat. Hence, when i suggested that i was going to use silver staining, the panic in his eyes was undeniable. He looked like he had to fart something massive but someone had stuck a great big plug up his arse and the gas was going to come out of his eye-sockets… I kid you not, i swear this is the truth… seriously!

He went on and on about how silver staining is a non-reversible process that once the gel is overdeveloped, that it cannot be destained, that the technique was very finicky, that there were so many variables such as water hardness and pH, and yadda yadda yadda….ZZZzzzZZZzzz….

Anyways, i did the silver staining and it worked perfectly. And after that, i completely destained it for him. If you’ve ever worked with potassium ferricyanide, you will know that it is an orange salt that dissolves in water to give the most spoon-bending eye-blinding hallucinogenic yellow solution. It’s like the colour of urine after downing eight cans of Red Bull in two hours. By the way, please do not try that at home! But i digress; anyways, the destain solution contains potassium ferricyanide thus it was this truly brilliant yellow colour. Not ever having seen this destain solution in all his years in science, my supervisor asked me what it was… The conversation went a little bit like this:

 

Supervisor: What is it?

T.A.D.: It’s magic

Supervisor: Shit yea, if it can destain silver stained gels, it’s gotta be! So what is it?

T.A.D.: It’s Dragon’s Piss…

Supervisor:. . . . 

Food for thought…

I heard a sentence today. It was so profound that i had to sit still for awhile to think about it. The sentence was…

“Berlin has never been and never is, but will always be coming.”

Still here…

It’s 8.30pm on the 10th of September 2008 now… I know because i checked it… twice… Still no sign of light bending at curious angles… Still no roar of things being sucked across the face of the Earth… Still no news of panic in Europe… Hmm… i think i’ll pinch myself now…

Ouch! That hurt! Hmm… Maybe we’ll give it another couple of minutes…

I think i’ll pinch myself again… Yup, it still stings like a bitch…

 Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me, or maybe i’m in another dimension… I think i’ll slap myself just to make sure that i’m still awake… #($&#%*#$%*#&$!!! That hurt like all buggery!!!

 Ok, i guess it has to be true then… So much for black holes…

Considering i’m still sitting here and my cheek is still hurting, i’m assuming the Large Hadron Collider launch was a success… Now lets just hope that they find their goddamn Higgs Bosons or at least kill us all doing so. Having spent €6.4 billion on a machine, it had better change the basis of atomic physics or at least go up in a big loud explosion sending us all to our Maker! The only thing worse than not achieving either of these is not achieving anything at all!

Imagine if one day the world really did collapse in on itself having been sucked into a blackhole of our own making… can you imagine how unpopular the guy who turned the machine on that day will be in the afterlife? wahahaha

 

On a completely different topic, here’s a good example of the phrase “Shit happens!”. For female readers that have no idea what the significance of this picture is, ask any guy that knows anything about cars just how much the car in the picture costs…
 

Ok, all together now, “Shit happens!”, say it one more time together with me now, “Shit happens!”

You’re not looking at it the right way!

Ever had a really bad problem that made you think that the world was going to end? That this was the end of life as you know it? That no matter what, nothing else could happen to make you feel worse?

And then, to add insult to injury, did your best friend try to make you feel better by saying, “Aww, poor thing! You’re looking at this the wrong way… Here, if you look at this from a positive view, this happened for the best.” It’s like every cloud has a silver lining for them… even mushroom clouds!

I once read a sentence somewhere that went a little bit like, “When you’re down and out, keep your chin up and your eyes fixed towards the skies, it’s the easiest way back to the stars.” Having seen the picture below, i say DAMN RIGHT IT IS! wahahaha

 

For you, a thousand times over…

If ever you find yourself roaming the shelves of the dvd store looking for a movie to rent, maybe look for a picture of two boys and some kites. The title of the movie is ‘Kite Runner’. It is based on a book written by Khaled Hosseini, an afghan author. I won’t give the story away but suffice to say, it’s an unbelievably good foreign film. For all you foreign film buffs, i’d say that it’s right up there with La Vie en Rose, Die weisse Masai and The Cave of the Yellow Dog. And for those of you that have never even heard of these titles before, shame on you! Go out and rent them, watch them and be moved!

The sky’s on fire…

I’m falling apart, I’m barely breathing,
With a broken heart that’s still beating…

 

The sky was on fire, rooftops bathed in a glorious orange sunset. I sat silently in my bus seat watching the world being illuminated by the last hours of light from a setting sun. And i thought to myself, “Two and a half years… two and a half years…”. How quickly time has passed me by, how unexpectedly things change in the eternity that is the blink of an eye.

 

So i’m holding on, I’m holding on, I’m holding on,
I’m barely holding on to you…

 

Four years later, the sky is on fire, rooftops bathing in a glorious orange sunset. I sit silently in my bus seat watching the world being illuminated by the last hours of light from a setting sun. And i think to myself, “How far you have come, how much things have changed… four years…” How much more quickly will time pass me by, how unexpectedly will things change in the eternity that is the blink of an eye.

 

The broken lights on the freeway left me here alone
I may have lost my way now, haven’t forgotten my way home…

 

Music from the most unexpected places…

This is Charlie Parr, he’s not much to look at. But give him a chance, click for a listen and you’ll be amazed. He’s talented and he’s the singer of ‘1922′, the song featured on the new Vodafone ad. This clip was taken from YouTube.

How much?! Are you serious?!

It’s been awhile since i last updated but i can’t say that there has been anything particularly exciting to blog about anyways. The only thing that comes remotely close to being exciting was the arrival of my CyDyes on Tuesday. These fluorescent molecules will be used to dye protein samples for some experiments that i will be conducting this coming week. When i called the sales rep to inquire about the prices for these dyes, my eyes nearly fell out of my head. Seriously, the price you pay for 5 nanomoles of these dyes is a eye-popping jaw-dropping nose-bleeding artery-clogging testicle-shrinking AUD$4,360!! For 5 nanomoles!!! That’s like AUD$872 for one-millionth of a mole!!! That’s right, not one million moles, but ONE-MILLIONTH of a mole!!

Naturally, when you order something like that, you wait impatiently day after agonising day until it arrives. And when it does, you check to make sure that the product is correct and that is viable. When it arrived, i opened the cardboard box and then unpacked the styrofoam box within it. Opening the styrofoam box, i find yet another cardboard box. Opening that cardboard box, i find yet another cardboard box. Within that cardboard box, i find three black vials. Unscrewing the lids of the vials, i find smaller vials in them. And within those smaller vials, i see the tiny specks of dye powder. Now you know why you have to pay AUD$4,360 for the damn thing. 90% of the price must be for the insane packaging of the damn thing. Seriously, after all the initial boxes, i was half expecting to see a key code entry system on the vials which require a mind-numbing spoon-bending 75 digit password code to be open the damn vials! The damn thing was packaged so well i don’t think that anything could possibly rival it.

I mean, if you’re going to put that much effort into packing the damn thing, why not go all the way? Why not let it arrive on a ten-foot radius thousand carat diamond-encrusted gold plate held aloft by twelve bronze-tanned naked bootylicious amazon warrior princesses?! If it came like that, i wouldn’t even care if the dyes worked or not! Heck, i wouldn’t even care about the price of the damn thing!! I’d go out and buy another pack just to see them ladies come back! wahahaha =P