Tea Chemistry Set by Art Lebedev
Adorned with a traditional Gzhel pattern, this porcelain chemistry set has been repurposed as a Russian tea set. The best kind of science is the type you can drink.
(via: yankodesign)
This set would look great on my bookshelf.
My inner mad alchemist/mad hatter/tea enthusiast all just came rushing to the forefront of my mind screaming “*YES!*”
Tauri's little space in the Interweb
Ten’s Ties
(Source: david-tennants-little-fangirl)
View Larger A scanning electron micrograph of human red blood cells. Courtesy of Wellcome Images.
“Blood biopsies”
When a tumor grows beyond a certain size, it begins to shed cells, not unlike particles flaking off dry skin. Exactly when or why this happens in humans isn’t known, but these cells, called “circulating tumor cells” or CTCs play a major role in the spread of cancer to other parts of the body, the process more formally known as metastasis.
Scientists believe CTCs could be a new and invaluable source of information in the diagnosis and prognosis of cancer, but a big part of the current challenge is finding enough them: For every million or so circulating blood cells, there may be only a few CTCs. It’s the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack, only the needle is infinitesimally smaller and moving inside the human body. CTCs are also not generally inclined to announce their presence – at least not until they’ve lodged somewhere else (a distant organ, for example) to colonize and grow a new tumor.
The existing gold standard for isolating and identifying CTCs is an assay in which blood samples are exposed to magnetic beads coated with an antibody that binds to specific proteins on the surface of cancer cells. The capturing efficacy of this method ranges between 60 and 90 percent, but it also takes time and is prone to contamination from leukocytes – white blood cells that may also stick to the beads.
Recently, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center described a new, alternative filtering technique that employs microbubbles. Writing in the March issue of PLOS One, principal investigator Dmitri Simberg, PhD, assistant project scientist, and colleagues said each microbubble is about half the diameter of a blood cell, filled with perfluorocarbon gas (for buoyancy and stability) and coated with an antibody. Exposed to a blood sample, the bubbles quickly attach themselves to any CTC encountered and puls them into a greater concentration (think soda bubbles rising to the top of a glass).
In tests using blood samples from mice and humans, Simberg said the microbubble assay worked better and faster than existing approaches, reducing the risk of contamination or sample degradation.
Though more research is required, he noted that the microbubble method may represent “the emerging field of blood biopsies, in which highly pure CTCs could be used as a source of tissue for personalized molecular diagnostics.”
(Source: magicplacee)
The Arabidopsis Nucleosome Remodeler DDM1 Allows DNA Methyltransferases to Access H1-Containing Heterochromatin
Nucleosome remodelers of the DDM1/Lsh family are required for DNA methylation of transposable elements, but the reason for this is unknown. How DDM1 interacts with other methylation pathways, such as small-RNA-directed DNA methylation (RdDM), which is thought to mediate plant asymmetric methylation through DRM enzymes, is also unclear. Here, we show that most asymmetric methylation is facilitated by DDM1 and mediated by the methyltransferase CMT2 separately from RdDM. We find that heterochromatic sequences preferentially require DDM1 for DNA methylation and that this preference depends on linker histone H1. RdDM is instead inhibited by heterochromatin and absolutely requires the nucleosome remodeler DRD1. Together, DDM1 and RdDM mediate nearly all transposon methylation and collaborate to repress transposition and regulate the methylation and expression of genes. Our results indicate that DDM1 provides DNA methyltransferases access to H1-containing heterochromatin to allow stable silencing of transposable elements in cooperation with the RdDM pathway.
Thanks
My biotechnology professor posted this on Facebook and it made me laugh.
Loool
▲ A 100-second recording of the sound of the Big Bang, created by University of Washington physicist John Cramer.
Here’s What the Big Bang Sounded Like
In the beginning, there was a righteous bass.
So says physicist John Cramer, who has not only found evidence of the sound created during the Big Bang, but has also created a simulation of the low, deep noise emitted as the universe came into being.
After the Big Bang, the universe expanded so rapidly that matter itself resonated to create a deep bass noise, and sound waves themselves became stretched and warped. “As the early universe expanded, sound waves propagated through the dense medium that closed back on itself, so that the hypersphere of the universe rang like a bell,” Cramer, a professor of physics at the University of Washington, explained.
The effect would have been similar to that of a magnitude-9 earthquake that caused the entire planet to actually ring, Cramer said. However, in this case, the ringing covered the entire universe.
That sound is long gone, of course, but it left its imprint on the cosmic microwave background, which is a thermal echo of the energy released during the Big Bang.
In 2003, NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite gave scientists an unprecedented picture of the cosmic microwave background. In an article for science-fiction magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Cramer wrote how this thermal data could be extrapolated into wavelengths of sound.
In other words, the universe’s cosmic microwave background is kind of like a recording of the Big Bang’s phat beat.
Two years after Cramer published his findings, the mother of an 11-year-old elementary school student wrote to Cramer, asking if there was an actual recording of the sound that her son could use for his school science-fair project. Cramer responded that there wasn’t — but there could be.
To recreate the Big Bang’s sound, Cramer converted WMAP’s wavelength data into sound using a computational program called Mathematica.
The resulting sound is low, creaky, and almost unassuming.
Recently, more precise data from the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope has allowed Cramer to create an even more accurate sound profile, which he has exported as audio files. The files are, of course, a simulation: the true sound is so deep that Cramer had to boost the frequency 100 septillion times to put it within the range of human hearing.
The sounds are available on Cramer’s website at the University of Washington. So remixers, have at it!
