sporte | November 6, 2006How does biomedical research impact you? Have you (or has someone in your family) benefited from vaccinations, pharmaceutical drugs, medical devices, surgery, or transplants? How does biomedical research affect the health of your dog, cat, or other pet? How might biomedical research touch your life in the future?
Do you know any middle school students who are interested in the life sciences? If they can write an essay, they might be able to win a prize.
If you know any middle school students or teachers in Washington, Idaho, Montana, or Oregon, let them know about the NWABR middle school…
sporte | November 6, 2006I wrote earlier about videos of lab protocols and the benefit these could bring to people who are trying to learn new techniques or perhaps troubleshoot their own. Unfortunately, I suspect that the people who would benefit the most from movies of others doing lab procedures correctly are those who are already pretty observant.
Nevertheless, I have some ideas for improvements to these kinds of movies, ala acting and editing, that could benefit the truly-technically-impaired.
We need lab movies of people doing things wrong.
Last night we watched the episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus,…
sporte | November 4, 2006You've probably heard about enterprising researchers attaching cameras to dolphins, dogs, and other animals, in order to learn how things look from the critter-point of view. Now, some enterprising lab rats have added a new twist to this technique.
It's lab cam!
From Attila Csordas , we have a report about researchers documenting their work through film in an unusual way. They put on a funky-looking hat with a digital camera attached and film their hands doing the experiments. There's even a short movie made by John Cumbers from OpenWetWare, on preparing Drosophila embryo chromatin for…
sporte | November 2, 2006I've written before about some of the explainable reasons why lab procedures don't work. I forgot to add that sometimes experiments don't work because of outside forces that have nothing to do with your technique, inability to do algebra, or poor experimental design.
Sometimes, the whole thing is just doomed from the start.
A friend of mine once spent a summer as an intern at a local, now-defunct, biotech company. During this time, he worked for a very demanding technician for whom he developed a strong dislike. Every day, he patiently stood by as she unpacked sample jars filled with…
sporte | November 1, 2006These are the real things that give nightmares to post-docs and graduate students.
One thing that you don't learn, until you either do a research project in a lab or you start graduate school, is that science isn't really the straightforward cut and dry: we do this step, then we do this step; sort of field that you might imagine. You come to graduate school all bright-eyed and amazed, with the scientific method burned into your brain, only to find out that it's usually the little things that no one told you about that make the difference between productive experiments and a waste of time.…
sporte | October 26, 2006Is your precious pup spending an unusual amount of time time hanging around by the pond? Is poochy looking a little green around the gills? Does fido seem a little feeble?
My friend you've got trouble. Trouble with a capital "T".
What's the canine equivalent to catnip?
Picture by asmuskoka
Toads!
Yes, your dog might be out sucking toads.
Last year's IgNoble award for biology went to researchers who personally sniffed the peculiar odors of 131 species of frogs to see if the frogs were feeling stressed. (Now that I think about it, I kind of wonder about those researchers).
This week…
sporte | October 18, 2006Reposted from the original Digitalbio.
About a decade ago, I took a fascinating summer course at the UW on bioethics. We read about the Nuremburg trials and the Geneva conventions. We learned about horizon problems and eugenics. And we discussed lots of challenging scenarios with genetic testing, autonomy, family relationships, and the problems faced by people seeking to have children, trying to get insurance, or looking for a job.
So naturally, when I started a biotechnology course for non-science majors (Biotechnology and Society) at our community college, I used many of those examples…
sporte | October 16, 2006I don't write about politics very often nor do I intend to do so in the future. But, time is running out for the Tripoli Six. Imprisoned in 1999, five nurses and one doctor were tortured until they confessed to a horrific crime; infecting over 400 children with the virus that causes AIDS. They later protested that they were innocent and the scientific data backed them up. Now, they may be executed for a crime they didn't commit.
I know some of you are thinking, "What does this have to do with me?"
Nature magazine, reminds us what can happen when we fail to speak up on another's behalf, in…
sporte | October 15, 2006
Welcome to the October 15, 2006 edition of Mendel's Garden. Join me as we walk through the fields and admire the harvest.
Evolutionary geneticsAs we stroll into the evolutionary biology plot, we notice a shape in the ground that looks suspiciously like a footprint. Who walked this path before? Where did they come from? Today, we have some interesting tools for learning about ancient peoples and satisfying our curiosity about the paths they trod. Or do we? Inspector RPM, from Evolgen, turns his magnifying glass on those methods and asks if they really tell us what we want to know. Take…
sporte | October 13, 2006Yikes, I've spilled some DHMO on my hands! What do I do now?
Do you know the truth about DHMO?
Look at this web site and tell me if you still want to go swimming.
sporte | October 13, 2006In last week's episode, your assignment was to think of an interesting plant trait and find a description about a gene, related to that trait, by searching PubMed.
Since coming up with an interesting trait might be a challenge for some people, let's think about how to approach this step.
Picking your trait. If you're having a hard time thinking of a trait, it might be helpful think about where plants grow, why we grow plants, and why it might be hard or easy for plants to grow.
Some of the environmental factors that affect plant growth are: climate, soil composition, nutrient…
sporte | October 11, 2006When does a little artistic license go a little too far?
We don't always expect the truth in science journalism imagery. We've all seen the newspaper pictures of the famous scientist wearing a lab coat and gazing intently at a gel, looking through a microscope, or contemplating an agar plate streaked with lovely colonies of bacteria. Some of us find these pictures pretty funny, especially if we know that the subject of the photo hasn't run a gel in the past twenty years and never wears a lab coat unless they have to give a lecture to medical students.
Okay, perhaps the glossified,…
sporte | October 11, 2006No one in a life science-related industry or research lab, in Western Washington, is safe at this time of year.
Surely, you're joking!
No, seriously, there are teachers and science enthusiasts everywhere looking to sign you up! And don't call me "Shirley."
Sign me up?
That's right, it's time to prepare for the
BIOTECH EXPO
This is the Western Washington version of the science Olympics! Those science enthusiasts are out scouting for anyone who does something related to science or a life-science industry to act as an advisor (sort a mentor with a lower committment level) to high school…
sporte | October 10, 2006Why is an eye, an eye and a nose, a nose? Why do different cells create different kinds of tissues when all the cells in a single organism start out with the same set of instructions (aka DNA)?
Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes is a learning activity that helps students discover, for themselves, that certain genes are expressed in some tissues but not in others. My goal here, as part of our NSF-funded project, is to show how students can learn biology by doing science with bioinformatics tools.
If you already know all about ESTs, you might want to jump ahead and read about the activity. If…
sporte | October 9, 2006Mendel's garden in Bruno, CZ, may be too far for physical travel, but you can still imagine what Mendel might have thought if he'd gotten a look at this version of his vision.
Maybe I'm taking alliteration a little too far, but that doesn't mean that you have to show any restraint. All you have to do is submit to me by late Saturday afternoon and sometime on Sunday, you can see the fruits of your labor posted here in technicolor.
Send 'em in everyone - I want to see GENETICS at it's best: digitalbio at gmail dot com
UPDATE: Just to be absolutely clear, Mendel's Garden is a carnival of…
sporte | October 9, 2006How can you extend a blood typing activity with an active learning approach?
The blood typing lab, part I. What went wrong? and why?
Blood typing part II. Can this laboratory be saved?
The learning objective: To understand the inheritance of blood type.
In this activity students:
1. Identify which blood type a person would have based on their alleles,
2. Observe the alleles that an offspring would have and identify the blood types of the offspring,
3. Use the observations and rules gleaned from step 2 to predict the blood types of other offspring, when given the genotypes of their…
sporte | October 9, 2006In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, there's a land that's fair and bright,
The handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars all are empty and the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarete trees,
The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
Big Rock Candy Mountain by Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock (Warning: this site plays the music)
To some inhabitants of the ivory tower, industry looks like paradise.
When I was a graduate student and my husband first started working in a biotech company downtown, sometimes I'…
sporte | October 7, 2006The blood typing lab, part I. What went wrong? and why?Blood typing part II. Can this laboratory be saved?
Those wacky non-major Zoo students are at it again! And this time they drew blood!
Mike's undergraduate students learned about blood typing, a common tool of detectives and real crime TV. They did the classic blood typing lab, and by golly, they refused to parrot the correct answer on the test! The nerve! After all, he pretty much told them the answer and even used the exact same wording that was used on the test question. Why didn't the students just memorize it and regurgitate…
sporte | October 6, 2006Many science experiments are carefully thought out. Often, the procedures we follow have been thoroughly tested. We measure everything we can at every point that we can, so that we can determine if a procedure, like isolating DNA, is working properly and if the procedure doesn't work, we can determine what went wrong. When the procedure is done, we analyze our data to determine if our experiments really gave us an answer. Then, we present our data to others, in venues like lab meetings and conferences, subjecting our work to review to the toughest critics we can find.
Every act of…
sporte | October 5, 2006Many of you might take this for granted, and I know it seems amazing today, but I when first started teaching, our access to scientific literature was pretty limited. I could go to the UW and use Grateful Med to search Medline, but we didn't have anything like it at my college and web browsers, like Mosaic, had yet to be invented. So, when I first started giving workshops for teachers on biotechnology and the world of the web, many were quite surprised to find out about the PubMed database.
Since PubMed is (to me) one of the best resources to ever come along, I think we should explore it a…