Cue the shears and hair razor! Things are going to get a bit hairy up in here! I’ve always been a bit fascinated by hair. By age 14, I was dyeing my hair. By age 15, I was cutting my own hair. And I haven’t stopped since. My hair and I have a sort of love/hate relationship. It’s naturally straight and curly, with a bit of wavy thrown in for the hell of it. In it’s natural s... »
Last week, I wrote about our involvement in a ballet recital and how I had the opportunity to actually make costumes for 3 of my daughters for the recital. The post discussed Zoë’s skunk costume and gave a bit of information about actual skunks themselves. As stated in the previous article, my twins were cast as frogs in the recital. Upon hearing that she got the frog part, Briar immediatel... »
If you believe certain musical groups, everybody wants to live forever (while ruling the world?). Our fascination with immortality is such that it’s a hallmark of mythology. In our daily lives, we obsess over staying young and healthy (or at least many advertisers and marketeers think we do, or at least that we obsess over how to appear young and healthy). And as a species we’ve funnel... »
Sometimes as parents we say things to our children that unintentionally lead us down paths we had no idea we’d be taking. I had this happen recently with my girls. They had caught a butterfly while they were outside. They brought it in and asked if they could keep it. I told them that keeping a butterfly as a pet isn’t a very nice thing to do to a butterfly since they only live 2-4 weeks. That’s w... »
I’m doing a bunch of staining experiments at work right now. That means that, hopefully, in the next couple weeks I’ll get a bunch of pretty pictures to analyse. It also means that I had the good fortune to spend much of yesterday at the cryostat (basically a meat slicer designed to make incredibly thin, frozen, sections – or slices). Sectioning is a zen experience for me, much a... »
Sometimes it seems like the “Age of Synthetic Biology” is actually the “Age of Writing Great Works of Literature Into DNA”. While the tools of synthetic biology increase the potential of genetic engineering by letting us finely control the genomes of experimental organisms, many of the demonstrations of how minutely we can write out DNA sequences have more to do with the we... »
With all of the controversy surrounding Texas schools teaching Creationism (including Young Earth Creationism which teaches that the Earth is only 6,000 years old), and Texas Governor Rick Perry stating “In Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution,” when he was asked a question by a young boy during his campaign, scientific-minded Texans have cause for alarm. But even in the bible belt there... »
I’ve dedicated a couple posts to how we generate images of biologically relevant molecules. I’m going to zoom out significantly, and move from molecules all the way up to cells. Images like the featured image to the left are a mainstay of many biological studies. But, once again, there is a surprising amount of post-processing required to generate an image like that: the sample never l... »
