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Sometime in the next day or two, Scienceblogs will shut down.  We've enjoyed the opportunity to blog here for the past 10+ years. Not to worry, @digitalbio and @finchtalk will continue blogging, but more so from their own site at Digital World Biology.  The Scienceblogs posts have been reposted at…

@synbiobeta concluded it’s #sbbsf17 annual meeting on synthetic biology Oct 5, 2017. The progress companies are making in harnessing biology as a platform for manufacturing and problem solving is world changing. Locations of Synbio Companies What is Synthetic Biology? Synthetic biology is a term…

On Sept. 30th, I'm going to be co-presenting a Bio-Link webinar on Genome Engineering with CRISPR-Cas9 with Dr. Thomas Tubon from Madison College.  If you're interested, Register here.  Since my part will be to help our audience understand the basics of this system, I prepared a short tutorial with…

It's well understood in science education that students are more engaged when they work on problems that matter.  Right now, Zika virus matters.  Zika is a very scary problem that matters a great deal to anyone who might want to start a family and greatly concerns my students. I teach a…

Did you know small fragments of DNA are circulating in your blood stream? These short pieces of DNA are left behind after cells self-destruct. This self-destruction, or apoptosis, is a normal process. In the case of fetal development, certain cells in our hands die, leaving behind individual…

"By night all cats are gray"  - Miguel Cervantes in Don Quixote   I've always liked Siamese cats.   Students do, too.  "Why Siamese cats wear masks" is always a favorite story in genetics class.  So, when I opened my January copy of The Science Teacher, I was thrilled to see an article on Siamese…

Imagine a simple hike in a grassy part of South America.  You hear a rattle and feel a quick stab of pain as fangs sink into your leg.  Toxins in the snake venom travel through your blood vessels and penetrate your skin.  If the snake is a South American rattlesnake, Crotalus terrific duressis, one…

When finding a female scientists' data turns into an archeological treasure hunt. A few months ago, I decided it would be interesting to celebrate various scientific contributions by making images of chemical / molecular structures in the Molecule World iPad app and posting them on Twitter  (@…

When my parents were young, summer made cities a scary place for young families.  My mother tells me children were often sent away from their homes to relatives in the country, if possible, and swimming pools were definitely off limits.  The disease they feared, poliomyelitis, and the havoc it…

We've been fans of the Molecule of the Month series by David Goodsell, for many years. Not only is Dr. Goodsell a talented artist but he writes very clear descriptions of the ways molecules like proteins, RNA, and DNA work together and function inside a cell. To learn about proteins and their…

To have an effect, a molecule must bind to a receptor and trigger a signal.  Studying a receptor's structure can give us insights about the way this triggering process works. Capsaicin is a fascinating molecule that puts the "pep" into peppers.  Curiously, the amount of capsaicin in a pepper is…

National DNA Day has a fun challenge for teachers and classrooms using Pinterest.  Your class can join a larger, national, effort to create a National DNA Day Pinterest board by making your own class Pinterest board on DNA, genetics, and genomics.  Some possible topics are: Things to do with DNA…

Pull a spaghetti noodle out of a box of pasta and take a look.  It's long and stiff.  Try to bend it and it breaks.  But fresh pasta is pliable.  It can fold just like cooked noodles. When students first look at an amino acid sequence, a long string of confusing letters, they often think those…

Sometimes when you go digging through the databases, you find unexpected things. When I was researching the previous posts on insulin structure and insulin evolution, I found something curious indeed. Human insulin, colored by rainbow. Image from the Molecule World iPad app by Digital World…

On pinene and inhibiting enzymes. People of a certain age may remember a series of really funny commercials featuring Euell Gibbons and his famous question about whether you've ever eaten a pine tree.  "Some parts are edible" said Euell. Perhaps some parts are, but other pine tree products aren't…

In my last post, I wrote about insulin and interesting features of the insulin structure.  Some of the things I learned were really surprising.  For example, I was surprised to learn how similar pig and human insulin are.  I hadn't considered this before, but this made me wonder about the human…

Sucrose Molecules of sucrose tore apart in their bellies letting glucose course free in their veins. Luckily for us, a system evolved long ago to capture that glucose and minimize it's potential for damage. Removing sugar from the blood and sequestering it in liver, fat, and muscle cells,…

In 1925, dogsledders raced through the frozen Alaskan bush to bring antiserum to the isolated village of Nome.  The antiserum arrived in time, saved the lives of many villagers from the horrors of diphtheria, and inspired the Iditarod, a famous race in celebration of the dog sledders' heroic feat.…

What’s the first you think about when you see a spider?  Running away?  Danger?  Fairies? Spiderman?Do you wonder if spider silk is really strong enough to stop a train, like they showed in Spiderman 2? Whatever your thoughts, you’re probably not thinking about 3D printing in space.  Yet, the time…

Living in Seattle fosters a certain pessimism when it comes to large companies.  Boeing has always been a poster child for employment uncertainty, regularly hiring large numbers of people and just as regularly, laying them off.  Now, we have Microsoft and Amgen joining the club, with Microsoft…

By @finchtalk (Todd Smith) In 2014 and beyond Finchtalk will be contributing to Digitalbio’s blog at this site. We kick off 2014 with Finchtalk’s traditional post on the annual database issue from Nucleic Acids Research (NAR). Biological data and databases are ever expanding. This year was no…

Yesterday, I wrote about students using science blogging as a way to develop an on-line portfolio and document their skills.  One friend wrote me this morning and asked if my instructions to our students were really as simple as I described. Well, no. In fact, it wasn't easy to persuade my…

Why should students blog about science?  Don't they have enough to do already? Last Thursday night I participated in a panel discussion about science blogging (see the video) at ScienceOnline Seattle (#scioSEA)(video) and mentioned that we have two students blogging for us at Bio-Link.  A question…

Tonight, I'm going to be speaking on a panel at the University of Washington with fellow science bloggers: Alan Boyle (@b0yle) from CosmicLog and some company called "NBC" news. (I only watch TV programs on Netflix and iTunes, these days, so I forget TV stations still exist.) Brendan DeMelle (@…

If you want to work in biotech, you have to get work experience. But, how do you find it? One way to find work experience is to do an internship. When do I look? If you're a college student, and you're planning to wait until spring to apply for a summer internship, you're waiting too long. The time…

I've heard you have to sing loud if you want to change the world. Cloning DNA – lyrics by Sandra Porter, sung to the tune of Surfin' USA C ..................G7..................C If everybody had a plasmid, across the U.S.A., C ..................G7..................C then everybody'd be cloning,…

If all the information you had about scientific careers came from newspapers or TV, it would be easy to think that everyone who works in life sciences / biotechnology is either a Ph.D. scientist, post-doc, or graduate student.  In reality, the life sciences are more like an iceberg.  The public…

Many of you may remember a time when music-stealing was rampant on the internet.  Apple changed this situation by establishing a new kind of marketplace. Now people pay for music and download it from iTunes. What if there were a third party group, with an iTunes-like model, where scientific…

The Backstory:  As it stands today,when one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provides the funding for a scientific research project, and those results are published, they must be made freely available to public, within a set period of time.  The reasoning behind this requirement is that…

The C.R.E.A.T.E. strategy is an approach to making biology teaching a better model of biology, the science. From the C.R.E.A.T.E website, ...C.R.E.A.T.E. teaching focuses on on authentic published work--peer reviewed journal articles--with students reading either series of papers produced…