My iPad makes me one in a million

by Tigr

I am about to feel what 1 million other people have felt over the last month.

My iPad arrived about 30 minutes ago. I’m getting ready to unbox it and start a sync. Anyone who has ever gotten something from Apple knows how great the packaging is. The iPad was held sturdily in the box with 2 paperboard endpieces. No big pieces of hard to open plastic at all.

I know how my evening would be spent, except I have a meeting to oversee from 5-7. Si I will not get to play very much at all. Unless i take the iPad with me and use it as a prop in the meeting.

Yeah, that’ll work.

I’m in the second 500,000 iPad buyers

by mapgoblin

Estimate says Apple has sold more than a million iPads
[Via AppleInsider]

With more than 500,000 confirmed sold in its first week, a new estimate has predicted that Apple recently doubled that amount and crossed the 1 million threshold for total iPad sales.

[More]

According to FedEx, my iPad is on the van, out for delivery. Why doesn’t Fedex give us realtime GPS of the vans? I want to know where it is right now. I’m afraid to leave the house in case it comes. If I knew where it was, perhaps I could go out to meet it?

Crap. I’m such a geek. I thought that it I convinced myself that the 3G model was what I wanted, I could stave off some of this. But then, after the Wi-FI one came out, I made a ration, objective choice to get it. Most of my mobile use has been at places with Wi-Fi so why pay the extra money for the 3G, plus a possible data plan?

Well, I’m thinking maybe it was not just so rational. Maybe I just could not wait. I just realized that the song I’m listening to may be relevant in some odd fashion. Actually, I hope it is irrelevant.

[Listening to: After The Thrill Is Gone from the album "Eagles Greatest Hits Volume 2" by Eagles]

An example of a poor press release for a fun protein structure paper

Montana State chemists unravel secrets of unique enzyme
[Via Eureka! Science News]

Montana State University chemists have determined the structure of an intermediate form of a unique enzyme that participates in some of the most fundamental reactions in biology.

[More]

The press release never states what the name of the enzyme is. And it provides no link to the paper or anything else that would be helpful to gain more information.

In this day and age I should not have to do all this hard work to track down an interesting article.

So I went off to Nature and searched for the lead author. Found him and the article. I wish they had a little more in the press release – such as you can view the structure and manipulate it, seeing all the iron-sulfur centers.

These enzymes catalyze some pretty complex chemistry and the way that they are constructed is of real interest. Especially since these produce hydrogen so readily.

But I am a structure guy so I just love interacting with Jmol. Right click on the structure (control-click for Macs) and you get all sorts of choices to change the way the molecule looks. I’m particularly partial to the stereoscopic view. I’m one of the few people that can see the 3 D structure by either cross-eyed or wall-eyed view.

Wall-eyed is great when I am close to the screen. However, it becomes useless when I am far away. But cross-eyed will work whether you are close or far. It is great to use during slide presentations.

I learned about these approaches over 25 years ago when I took Biochemistry at CalTech. We used the Hood, Wood Wilson and Benbow book Biochemistry:A Problems Approach which had just been published. There are a couple of textbooks I had in college that were incredibly memorable because they provided me useful information in very novel ways.

The Structure and Action of Proteins by Dickerson and Geis was one of those (Holy crap. Someone wants $188.49 for the book. And someone else wants $600 for Biochemisty:A systems Approach! Too bad my versions are falling apart.)

I can’t remember if it was Wood or Hood who taught the class when I took it. I think Hood, whom I have kept in contact with these many years. I do know that we got to beta-test the similar book on Immunology he wrote.

Anyway, the Biochemistry book had the first representation of 3-D protein structures in it and a little tutorial about how to view them. To do wall-eyed, you essentially had to look far away but focus close. I remember the book saying you had to disconnect motor and neural pathways used since birth.

But with some simple figures to practice on, it became easy. Then years later, I learned how to do it cross-eyed.

And like learning to ride a bicycle, something you never forget. In fact, it would be hard for me to actually tell which way I was actually viewing a sterograph. The way to tell is that wall-eyed results in the merged image appearing to be in front of the printed page, with the structure seemingly larger than the individual pictures. IN cross-eyed, the merged image appears behind the printed page with a smaller apparent image.

[Listening to: We Gotta Get Out of This Place from the album "Hope & Glory" by Ann Wilson & Wynonna Judd]

Natural selection in the gut

by If you dream it…

Caltech biologists link gut microbial equilibrium to inflammatory bowel disease
[Via Eureka! Science News]

We are not alone—even in our own bodies. The human gut is home to 100 trillion bacteria, which, for millions of years, have co-evolved along with our digestive and immune systems. Most people view bacteria as harmful pathogens that cause infections and disease. Other, more agreeable, microbes (known as symbionts) have taken a different evolutionary path, and have established beneficial relationships with their hosts. Still other microbes may be perched somewhere in between, according to research by biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that offers new insight into the causes of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and colon cancer.

[More]

The importance of bacteria for our health is becoming more and more documented. It is possible to tell whether someone is obese or not based on the bacteria they posses. Perhaps the bacteria are the epigentic factors that affect weight. In fact, work in mice indicate a direct effect.

The human gut is the largest immune organ in the body and is one of the first lines of defense against foreign invaders. It appears that at least one bacteria has learned to survive well in the gut by making sure its numbers do not produce an immune response. Other wise, something similar to inflammatory bowel disease arises.

Proper health means that our gut needs to maintain a proper immune response. For the bacteria that live in our gut, the immune system serves as a pretty strong selective pressure, pushing bacteria to find a way to survive in the rich environment of the gut without being killed.

I would not be surprised to see regimens in the near future that work to populate the gut with a multitude of ‘good’ bacteria. Perhaps I could start an infomercial

[Listening to: Miss America from the album "The Grand Illusion" by Styx]

Evolution’s first model organism was the pea

by crabchick

feature: How Mendel started genetics by getting it mostly wrong
[Via Ars Technica]

Pity Gregor Mendel. Far enough ahead of his peers that his work wasn’t appreciated in his own lifetime. When the world was finally ready to deal with his results, the scientific community almost instantly went to work demonstrating that Mendel’s Laws were wrong—or at least applied to such a narrow subset of inheritance that it was nearly impossible to generalize them. Yet, despite all these problems, most of the phenomena associated with inheritance, including the majority of exceptions to his eponymous Laws, continue to be termed Mendelian inheritance.

Why does the scientific world celebrate Mendel’s achievement despite the fact that his work languished and then was quickly left in the dust? If we look at the history of his ideas (as we’re about to do here), one key factor seems to be the fact that other researchers quickly linked his laws to the underlying biology. But perhaps more significantly,we’ll see that, even if his laws were wrong, they provided some testable predictions that helped organize an otherwise mystifying field. It’s OK to be wrong in science, as long as you’re wrong in ways that lead to fruitful research.

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Not only is this report a great historical piece on Mendel and his pea plant, it places that work in the proper perspective when compared to the work of TH Morgan and fruit flies.

This is a nice way to gain some understanding of how important Mendel being right was, and how important it was that he was wrong. It is critical in science to be wrong in the right way – by providing testable hypotheses that lead to further study. A good researcher knows that a wrong hypothesis can, if examined correctly, provide insights that lead to true knowledge.

Trying to make ‘God did it’ a hypothesis is not only wrong, it leads to scientific dead ends.

Amazing video of Iceland’s volcano

Visible shockwaves from eruption at Eyjafjalajökull
[Via reddit.com]

submitted by dalliance to science
[link] [74 comments]

[More]

Here is the video itself. The shockwaves initially look like something passing over the volcano causing a shadow to move across. The lava bombs are pretty cool also.