Old cartoon

Adding certain numbers

While grading with Kene, I admitted that "adding 8 and 7 has always been really hard for me."

With a horrified look on his face, Kene proceeded to tutor me using sentences like "But 7 and 7 is 14, right??" and "So, what is 9 and 7 then?" and "I can't believe you." In the end, I was left with the impression that 8 and 7 is probably about 15.

The whole interaction ultimately made me want to die, but it also reminded me of how I've been unsure of numbers my entire life. As a child, I was constantly asking questions like "is 9 plus 8 seventeen?" and my mom would reply "every time." I hated that answer, and it never really assured me that the next time 9 and 8 were together, seventeen would be the result of their union.

Now that I'm older and even less confident about life and the world in which we live, I did what every quailing individual with an embarrassing problem does: I Googled "adding 8 and 7 difficult."

As expected, I didn't get a lot of valuable information. However I did find an article in the American Psychology Association's Monitor, where the following paragraph was highlighted:

Children in the United States eventually learn that the number system is base 10 and that teens are tens plus ones, but only the most mathematically adept children ever learn to add by adding up to 10 and then adding the remaining ones (as with adding 7+8 by breaking 7 into 5 and 2, adding 2 to 8 to get 10 and then adding 5 for 15), says Fuson.

I took two things away from this. First, in the miasmal and amorphous realm of single-digit addition, 7 and 8 must be the most challenging pair to really wrap your mind around. Even mathematically adept children must deconstruct the numbers for it to make any sense at all.

Second, I'm an idiot.

Terrible Disease of the Month Club

To kick off year two of graduate school in style, I thought I would make you all members of the Terrible Disease of the Month Club. I'm enrolled in a Human Genetics course and while familiarizing myself with the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man [OMIM] database, I stumbled across this little gemstone:

Fatal Familial Insomnia is September's Terrible Disease!

That's the OMIM entry, which is neatly and less-accurately summarized by Wikipedia. Skip right to "Presentation" if you want-- it's what I did.

So if you find yourself at age 45 with a complete inability to sleep, you probably did something so heinous in a past life that, at the moment your parents' gametes fused, the Mutation Fairy gave your genome the middle finger and waved her wand at aspartic acid 178 in your copy of the PRNP gene, changing it to an asparagine residue. Granted, this change would only result in a disease phenotype if the amino acid residue in position 129 happened to be a methionine-- but let's assume you did something extremely heinous in that past life.

Actually, there is no correlation between how shitty you acted in a past life and your chances of harboring this rare mutation, but I'm sure sufferers of FFI do a lot of apologizing to no one in particular in those last six months.

My favorite part of the Wikipedia entry is the "Treatment" section because it is absolutely 100% grim. Let's highlight all the words that contribute to the excruciatingly hopeless tone of this little paragraph:

There is no cure or treatment for FFI; hopes rest on the so far unsuccessful gene therapy. Sleeping pills have no effect. While it is not currently possible to reverse the underlying illness, there is some evidence that treatment modalities that focus upon the symptoms can improve quality of life.

Big sigh.

I'm curious about these "treatment modalities that focus upon the symptoms" and what kind of improvement they could actually make in the life of a deranged middle-aged person who hasn't been able to sleep for six months and is definitely going to die. Like, are we talking about upping their Netflix membership plan to the 8-at-a-time unlimited option? Getting rid of their bed to make space for one of those mats with dance steps printed on it? Sun lamps? Moon lamps? If it were me, I would ask to be locked in a room far from my friends and loved ones and get into some heavy duty drug experimentation. I would make the best Christmas cards.

I would also make a really terrible Genetic Counselor.

Lab Doors

Because I am a very incipient second year
it means that I've chosen a lab in which to do my PhD thesis, and that I've been working there for about a month. I am interested in better understanding how the position of the nucleus impacts cell polarity in Drosophila melanogaster's developing photoreceptors. I will also be addressing the importance of centrioles in nuclear positioning. And this is where I will sit while doing so
I bring my laptop and sit at my window seat, and surround myself with flies
I also tear out the brains out of fly larvae and spend some time with various microscopes, looking at the position of the nucleus. In this picture, I'm not looking at anything at all
But there is much more important research being conducted in the Science Center. In fact, I have recently stumbled, inadvertently, across some highly sensitive experiments in the hallway near the elevator
The rusty rooster is critical to understanding magnets.

Now we are going to get to the feature of this post: Lab Doors.

I have only photographed three of them so far, but I'm awfully sure there are hidden treasures on almost all of them. Lab doors are decorated, plastered with regulations and restrictions, but mostly they want to remain shut. And locked.
I see that tape-strangled door every morning, and every morning I wish the window wasn't covered with butcher paper.

These following notices are taped to the door I have to open and walk through every morning. This is by far the most demanding lab door. Because it is self-locking, I always carry my bunchy metal keys in my back pocket and end up sitting down on them, and that is painful. Often, I unlock the door for the day-- breaking all rules painstakingly taped to the Obnoxious Door.

Here are some other random lab door signs:
I have a feeling I will be TA-ing in that room.
Whatever SNAC panels are, they are beyond this door. But what IS beyond? Can we find out if we walk through this door?
And, finally, the instructions for getting clean in the Emergency Shower Once you bathe yourself in the Emergency Water, the Emergency Eye will come and also be bathed prior to saving you from whatever horrible chemical burn you are suffering from.

This is how we do.

Goodnight, you granules of stress...

...you bodies of processing.

And just as Michael Caine gently closed the door to that room filled with wheezing orphans, I closed the door on my Outside Defense topic. And then I got really drunk, made out with a cast-iron bust of Louis Rosenstiel, and ate my very first burger. Just as Michael Caine would have.

"It's complicated" with Processing Bodies and Stress Granules

And now, when anyone else in the world performs the Google search that has been haunting my fingers for 5 months, they will get this entirely unhelpful "model."

Processing bodies (PBs) interact with stress granules (SGs) to recruit Lena Webb (LW) which, in turn, upregulates the expression of love and interest (here symbolized by a "heart"). Interestingly, this is a negative-feedback loop and leads to the degradation of LW.

Lena gets rude with Linux

Seriously, quit messing with me. I am not staying here with you. I'm calling a cab.

The Order of the Science Scouts

The Science Creative Quarterly has managed to totally delight me again, this time by calling together those of us who take science so seriously that we're extremely aware of how ridiculous it can actually be. Together, we are The Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique [OOTSSOERAAAP]. Individually, we are nerds. Nerds with badges.

After careful consideration, here are the badges I feel entitled to thus far. Click on each badge to read what merits it represents!

If you listen carefully, you can hear my wine-soaked voice saying "so you can insert this sequence that folds up into a loop and binds the MS2 protein, which you have tagged with green fluorescent protein, and then you can see your mRNA inside the living cell! Wait, I should draw this-- do you have a pen?"




You're looking at it! Maybe even reading it!






I made my 10th grade biology teacher an oil painting of a thromboid mass as a "thank you" for doing such a great job teaching me about the clotting cascade. And I've seemed like a particularly obnoxious kiss-ass to other science students ever since!




Oh, I'm very confident... To smell your own burning hair is to know yourself on a level that doesn't even exist for most.






For example, this is just plain crap-- am I right or am I right? I won't back down, you can't make me.







When sorting out male fruit flies for my crosses, I always pick the ones with the "most apparent" genitalia. Because I'm a shallow whore.






...and also a prick. I once punched a guy for asking me "well did you add dNTPs?"







I toured the Mass General Hospital's pathology department and was encouraged to put my index finger inside a disembodied human bladder from a "fresh autopsy." Well, of course I did!







I froze an egg, and it was pretty boring!





Pearl literally had to drag me away from the cuttlefish tank at the Boston Aquarium. I could have tried to communicate with them using my mind all day!






Yeah, okay, but one [especially a scientist] should never say never!






I will be so drunk when this drinking game is invented. I really hope one of the rules is "if you have ever undertaken a step in the cloning process while drunk, drink!"







I once "made wire" by burning the fuzz off pipe cleaners! Guys? Are you still there? Hello?







This badge exactly depicts me "working with acid" and I have the drop-sized scar on my hand to prove it! 18M nitric, baby.







It's true, I do. And so do you! Congratulations, you are a scientist!

A Flowchart, starring: The Internet, me, and David Ng

The World's Fair is an example of the kind of blog I wish I was responsible for, but only for a fleeting moment because I enjoy browsing it so. One of its authors, David Ng, is the editor of The Science Creative Quarterly-- a website I like so much, that I recently ventured a contribution.

Apparently, my contribution leaked from the SCQ over to the The World's Fair, with additional commentary from David Ng in flowchart form!

Molecular Biology Comic a la Far Side

I suppose this means I should find the time to draw more cartoons, huh?

Work it like your brain is on a slide and you're dead

I am working with Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, as a model organism in my latest lab rotation-- and all models love to be photographed.

Unfortunately, these models can't blow lines of coke off make-up counters and enjoy bottles of Dom prior to their 30 seconds of strut time. My models have their brains ripped out through their mouth holes with metal forceps. That's what my people want to see-- not their tiny bodies, but their tiny brains.

But while they're waiting in the glass vials I make sure to play Prince, or whatever it is fashion models enjoy walking too, just for irony's sake. Here is an image of fruit fly larvae waiting in the wings, sans wings:
Hopefully this gives somewhat of a sense of how big they are. If not, they are about the size of a bold 12 pt Arial "l". Their brains are probably about 1/20th of that, and I take pictures of them using a digital camera hooked up to a Zeiss Axioplan light microscope.
This brain is magnified 4x, and yes, it does resemble a dick and balls with some other stuff. The dick is the nerve chord, the balls are the two brain hemispheres, and the other stuff is the two eye disks. You can see that parts are brown in color. That is because I stained the brain with an antibody-conjugated dye that is specific only to the axons of photoreceptor neurons in the eye disk. The eye disks are the developmental precursors of actual fly eyes-- larvae don't need eyes because they just live in their slushy food and eat their way around, kind of like little Roseanne Arnolds. Here is a 40x magnified image of the axons that connect the photoreceptor cells to the brain hemispheres:
In this case, they're not connected because someone's touch isn't delicate enough for micro-histology.

While the axons are lovely, I am most interested in the position of the nuclei of these cells. I won't tell you why because I don't feel like it, and I was taking these pictures mostly for practice and it turned into more of an aesthetic adventure than anything truly informative. So I also used a stain that stains only the nuclei of photoreceptor cells, and here is a 10x magnified image of the two eye disks separated from the brain and bespeckled with nuclei:

And here are just two lovely images:


I'm glad that I'm able to see these things, and show them to you as well. I'll make sure to post the vacation photos soon-- the vacation where they go to the beach and get their brains torn out through their mouth holes with metal forceps.

McSweeney's for REAL nerds

Today the Science Creative Quarterly will be featuring a submission of mine, which in turn features some old cartoons of mine.

Check it out and peruse the site here

The Lab, part II, etc.

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