BioCurious has a nifty methods article on Labeling λ DNA—if you've ever wanted to know how to tag a strand of DNA with a bead so you can tow it around with your optical tweezers, here's the theory (and they've got optical tweezers? I am so jealous.)
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You need:
a pair of binoculars
a pair of tweezers
a bottle
a cork
an elephant call.
What's the application? Optical tweezers use focused light beams to trap small particles in the focus of the beam, and drag them around by moving the beam.
One of the many very cool things going on in the Laser Cooling Empire at NIST is
nanoscale views: March APS Meeting II
The latest from New Orleans.
Santa: What do you want for Christmas, little boy?
PZ: Multi-beam fast-steerable optical tweezers!!!
Santa: You'll pluck your eye out, kid!
This is the part where I look horrified and start to cry, right?
Really cool. Did you know that you can use the laser pointer (yup, the kind you use for giving talks) to play golf with neurons? You can push them around the plate until each cell is sitting inside the little hole on bottom of which is an electrode so you can monitor electrical activity of each neuron.