Cottenham Balloon Terror
A Virgin hot-air balloon was looming low over Cottenham, just North of Cambridge City on the evening of 22nd June. Drinkers enjoying the sun and the ale outside The Chequers pub were stunned to see the enormous inflatable bobbing low over houses opposite. The pilot seemed desperately trying to gain height and had the burner on full power.
The balloon eventually lifted up and floated a few metres above the sweetshop and Chinese takeaway opposite heading for the Community Centre and Co-op store on the dangerous dog leg in Cottenham’s long High Street. Fortunately, it was at an altitude of about 40 metres at this point...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - June 23, 2016 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Science Source Type: blogs
How is your favourite research area doing?
Just out of curiosity I wanted to check out some of the publication trends on some of my favourite research topics. I used an online tool that outputs data the number of query publications for each year (available here). Below I plotted the results of a few. The queries with multiple words were put in quotations. Importantly the results for cancer in the plot were divided by 100 as to fit on the scale of the graph. So not only is cancer a much larger topic, with about 14 000 / 100 000 papers on pubmed, but it is also growing at over 100 / 100 000 papers every year. This is much faster than the other topics presented. Data ...
Source: Bayblab - June 21, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Rob Source Type: blogs
Classic Chords #13 – Purple Smoke in Japan
Almost every budding axe hero of a certain age used to play the seminal heavy rock riff that opens “Smoke on the Water”, from Deep Purple’s 1972 album Machine Head and the more exciting live version from Made in Japan. Almost every budding axe hero played it wrong. You can even watch Jack Black playing it wrong in the film “School of Rock”.
For a start, Ritchie Blackmore does not use a pick (plectrum) when playing that riff, but more importantly he doesn’t play the root note of the implicit chords. The fledgling guitarist assume it’s power chords all the way, but it’s n...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - June 21, 2016 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Science classic chords Deep Purple G5 guitar Machine Head Made in Japan Smoke on the Water Source Type: blogs
Classic Chords #13 – Purple Smoke in Japan
Almost every budding axe hero of a certain age used to play the seminal heavy rock riff that opens “Smoke on the Water”, from Deep Purple’s 1972 album Machine Head and the more exciting live version from Made in Japan. Almost every budding axe hero played it wrong. You can even watch Jack Black playing it wrong in the film “School of Rock”.
For a start, Ritchie Blackmore does not use a pick (plectrum) when playing that riff, but more importantly he doesn’t play the root note of the implicit chords. The fledgling guitarist assume it’s power chords all the way, but it’s n...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - June 21, 2016 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Science classic chords Deep Purple G5 guitar Machine Head Made in Japan Smoke on the Water Source Type: blogs
Classic Chords #12 – Message in a Bottle
The Police were a post-punk, new wave band, but the power pop trio all had jazz backgrounds. It’s not surprise then, that they used motifs from that world in their pop songs. ‘Message in a Bottle’ from the band’s second album, 1979’s Regatta de Blanc, could have just been a standard pop tune if it had followed a relatively conventional four-chord progression C#-minor, A-major, B-major, F#minor and then breaking out into an A-D-E.
However, the Sumner/Summers/Copeland combination opted to add the minor-9th note of the scales and arpeggiate the progression across a driving three-note guit...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - June 19, 2016 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Classic Chords Andy Summers guitar pop rock Songs The Police Source Type: blogs
Bee orchid – Ophrys apifera
Apparently, we have a bee orchid, Ophrys apifera, growing on the margin of our front garden. This is, according to a neighbour, a rare(ish) wildflower. Aside from being rather pretty and having flowers that attract bees as pollenators, the chemistry of their pigments is intriguing. The flowers contain quercetin and kaempferol glycosides as acylated or as cinnamic acid derivatives, while the pink outer sepals contain anthocyanins.
The specimen in our garden is in a bad way, it being effectively on the edge of the relatively busy pavement outside our house, and rather downtrodden, trampled underfoot in the words of Led Zep...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - June 16, 2016 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Science Snaps Source Type: blogs
Once again, with the real bicyclomycin!
Last month I wrote that we were abandoning our plan to test whether the antibiotic bicyclomycin induces competence in Haemophilus influenzae, as it does in Legionella pneumophila, because (i) the free 'bicyclomycin' we'd been given by a colleague turned out to be bicyclomycin benzoate, and (ii) the real bicyclomycin we wanted to test cost hundreds of dollars per milligram.But last week I got the budget statement for our NSERC grant and discovered that we're not as broke as I thought. The credit for this goes mainly to the PhD student, who has been earning a large fraction of his annual stipend by working as a teachin...
Source: RRResearch - June 15, 2016 Category: Molecular Biology Authors: Rosie Redfield Source Type: blogs
Input DNA fragment sizes and shape of uptake peaks
The grad student has completed an analysis of the size distribution of the DNA fragments in the chromosomal DNA preps used for his uptake experiments. Now we need to think about how we'll use this information.He used two DNA preps, one sheared to an average length of about 6 kb (the long-fragment prep) and one sheared to an average length of about 250 bp (the short-fragment prep). He analyzed both with a Bioanalyzer belonging to a neighbouring lab (thanks neighbours!). This produced intensity traces for each sample (red line), with size-standard peaks (blue).The intensity traces reflect the number of base...
Source: RRResearch - May 29, 2016 Category: Molecular Biology Authors: Rosie Redfield Source Type: blogs
Bicyclomycin ≠ bicyclomycin benzoate
A month ago I wrote a post about a planned experiment using the antibiotic bicyclomycin, to see if it induces H. influenzae cells to develop competence. At the time I couldn't remember why this was a reasonable question, but a commenter pointed me to this paper, which describes the induction of competence by bicyclomycin in Legionella pneumophila.Bicyclomycin is expensive, and we're close to broke, but a generous colleague had given us 4 mg of it to use in a trial experiment. So I put our summer undergraduate to work on the project. She began by testing H. influenzae's ability to grow in different concent...
Source: RRResearch - May 23, 2016 Category: Molecular Biology Authors: Rosie Redfield Source Type: blogs
I Plan to Steal-Marry Some of These Ideas
This is my final post on Morten Christiansen & Nick Chater’s new book, Creating Language.
I’m a fellow of wide interests, but on this blog I try to be single minded and ask So what? of every thing I report. So what does this or that bit of news have to tell us about the origins of language? Mainly, C&C’s new book argues in favor of the position I took a few years back in my own book about how language began (Babel’s Dawn). Our ancestors became community minded enough to be willing to share knowledge, and turned to using their babbling sounds in a meaningful way. Others were able to repeat and use the same ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - May 16, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
One more toxin/antitoxin growth experiment
I have one more experiment to do for our toxin/antitoxin manuscript. I need to make sure that survival into and recovery from stationary phase is normal in the antitoxin-knockout mutant. This strain overexpresses the toxin gene and cannot inactivate the resulting toxin protein. We already know that it produces a normal-looking growth curve using the Bioscreen; one of the lines in the graph below is for the antitoxin knockout), but this analysis is based on changes in culture turbidity and does not consider whether some of the cells contributing to turbidity might be dead. This isn't a concern for ra...
Source: RRResearch - May 16, 2016 Category: Molecular Biology Authors: Rosie Redfield Source Type: blogs
True Must See TV: John Oliver on Science, Hype, and Science Reporting
This is really really really worth watching. I was pointed to it by dozens of people. And they were all right about it. Thanks people. Also see these stories about itJohn Oliver’s rant about science reporting should be taken seriously by John Timmer in Ars TechnicaWhen Science Reporting Goes Horribly, Horribly Wrong - Phil Plait in SlateJohn Oliver explains why so much ‘science’ you read about is bogus - Rachel Feltman in the Washington PostMegan Thielking in Stat
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This is from the "Tree of Life Blog"
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of Califo...
Source: The Tree of Life - May 12, 2016 Category: Microbiology Authors: Jonathan Eisen Source Type: blogs
Pleasantly surprised by the National Microbiome Initiative
So I got this email a few weeks ago inviting me to the White House. Not every day that I get invited to the White House. And I thought I was probably on their shit list after removing my name from the "Unified Microbiome Initiative" paper due to it being non open access. So I asked a colleague if she could teach in my large introductory biology class for me on May 13 and she said yes. So I RSVP to the meeting and told my mom I would be coming to the DC area (where I grew up). And I told everyone, proudly "I am going to the White House".I realized I had a tight schedule for flying in and out since I ...
Source: The Tree of Life - May 12, 2016 Category: Microbiology Authors: Jonathan Eisen Source Type: blogs
Meaning Comes First
Note: This post continues a discussion of the book Creating Language by Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater. For previous posts see here, here and here.
Books are a time for making yourself clear, so I have to shake my head a bit as I find myself wondering about an author’s fundamentals. For instance, Christiansen and Chater never say so directly, and I can hardly believe it, but they seem to go along with the Chomskyan view that form comes before meaning. Traditional scholars assumed that the form of a sentence reflected the speaker’s meaning and rhetorical touches. Then Chomsky came along and imagined a sente...
Source: Babel's Dawn - May 8, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
CRISPR/Cas9
Never have I missed being in a lab as much as I have since I started hearing about CRISPR/Cas9 a couple years ago. This is a genome editing technology that was developed by adapting an antiviral mechanism found in bacteria. If anyone has some first hand experience I would love to hear about it.Here is a good introduction to CRISPR/Cas9, where it came from, and how it works.I was also interested in what kind of commercial products are available to make this even easier, and here is a video of the CRISPR/Cas9 offerings from ThermoFisher (long 41:49). I don't think I've really grasped the implications of this technology howev...
Source: Bayblab - May 2, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Rob Source Type: blogs
