Milk Hero

That's a cup in the foreground. I wish I could play this every morning.

A sure sign of a healthy lab

Whiteboard, day 1:

THURS 3:30
GROUP MEETING
DANNY

Whiteboard, day 2:

THURS 3:30
GROUP MEETING
Oh DANNY boy

Paper attached to whiteboard, day 3:

Oh Danny boy, pipets, pipets are calling,
From bench to bench, and in the TC hood.
The gels are gone, and all the yields are falling;
'Tis you, 'tis you must make the data good.

So come ye back, where we cells are abiding,
Or when the lab is lonely as the grave.
'Tis here we'll be, in log-phase swift dividing...
...if you will please not put us in the autoclave!

Life lessons for synthetic biologists

1. A serious lesson

"Biology may or may not care about the physicist's insatiable desire for elegance." -- Jeff Hasty

Figure 1: In other words, sometimes this happens. From Hasty et al, Physical Review Letters 2002 | doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.88.148101

2. Another lesson that is just as serious

Humor in lab is essential, of course. However, if you just heard the great story about the giant biohazard bag full of innocuous things in your PI's car... finish laughing before you load your gel.

The idea, of course, is to prevent this from happening. [Original photo source]

Silliness: Legos and BioBricks

It's finals week around here, which means you get a brief post while my brain tries to figure out electroosmosis and Van der Waals forces.

The similarities between Legos and BioBricks are legion -- in fact, if I'm explaining synthetic biology to someone and I've got more than ten minutes of their time, I'll break out my favorite Lego Analogies for the desirable properties that we want biological parts to have.

But they're similar in another way. Everyone refers to BioBricks as BioBricks, but you're supposed to call them BioBrick Standard Biological Parts.

Trumpet fanfare optional. [Source]

Likewise... hope I'm not ruining all your childhoods here... The LEGO(tm) corporation will be very, very sad if you refer to their product as "legos" instead of "LEGO bricks" or "LEGO toys". They might even cry.

Apparently if you went to legos.com, you used to see this before being redirected, according to Mental Floss.

This sort of prescriptivism amuses me a little. I don't know enough about the relevant laws to comment on the legal necessity of being anal about plurals. But I was in a class co-taught by Drew Endy once, so I know he can say "BioBrick Standard Biological Parts" until he's blue in the face. Better him than me, I suppose.

Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuun!

I was reading my perfectly innocent-looking homework assignment, when all of a sudden I saw this:

Figure 1: Augh!

You know, I figured a biomechanics class (which is, after all, all about the realistic physicality of biology as opposed to magic cartoon enzymes that always work) would feature more realistic estimates of a bacterium's size.

Figure 2: I also figured it would feature less fleeing and primal terror. [Source]

Of course, the answer is that E. coli are measured in μm (micrometers), not meters, and that the micro sign simply failed to render due to some strange failure of MS Word. The lesson is clear: Mistakes in character encodings will kill us all. Go forth boldly, my friends, and godspeed.