Moving the blog

I am hoping to move this blog today to blog.philipdowney.com. Update your bookmarks. I hope the feeds follow.

Welcome to Canada

The Office vs. Battlestar Galactica

The best line is, "It's practically a shot-for-shot remake."

More logarithmics maps of the universe

Today's xkcd features a logarithmic map of the universe. It's much like the one J. Richard Gott did a few years ago. It's up to you to decide which is more useful.

Round two of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin

Radiohead - House of Cards

Cool video using lidar.

Facebook count good!

Clearly, they are very popular: (0 accepted, 0 accepted...)

Popular events in the BU network.

Silent Disco

Silent Disco

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This Weekend's LINEUP w/ Special Gu...

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AEPi Party Mothafucka!!!

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iSTEP!!

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Roegones vs. Vogons

It turns out Roegone's (crazed anti-choice 527 group) have a lot in common with Vogons.

Vogons (from wikipedia):

According to the series, far back in prehistory, when the first primeval Vogons crawled out of the sea, the forces of evolution were so disgusted with them that they never allowed them to evolve again. Through sheer stubbornness, though, the Vogons survived, wrecked the planet, and emigrated en masse to the Megabrantis cluster, where they form most of the Galactic bureaucracy, most notably in the famous Vogon Constructor Fleets (which allows them a socially-acceptable way to spend their time demolishing things).

Roegones:

"THEY STARTED A FIGHT WE PLAN TO FINISH." [sic]

But really, I just wanted to be the first to have Roegones and Vogons in the same post.

My Dada album cover

From Joey, I tried the Dada album cover meme. From wikipedia, a random article as band name, I got Spring Creek, South Dakota, from quotations.com I got this quote "I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what." from Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird", (the last four words are the album title) and this picture from flickr's recent interesting posts (3rd picture).

Science songs busting out everywhere

This video is making the rounds of biology blogs faster than an ebola outbreak. What could get nerds so excited? PCR.



Nature's The Great Beyond has a nice roundup of other science songs.

But they missed one of the best, They Might Be Giants - Why Does The Sun Shine?

ipspotting

Dresses made from condoms

Smugmug link

Surprisingly colourful creations.

Copyfighting in Canada

Terence Corcoran gets a couple things very, very wrong, but I'll go with just one:

Changes to Canada's copyright law have been sought for years by artists, performers and corporations who have seen their rights ignored as technology swept ahead of existing laws. Canada has also agreed to international copyright agreements, but has not yet implemented them.

Not all artists, performers and corporations want the changes to copyright law, especially many of our best and well known (link 2). 1, 2,

House is now HouseMD

In accordance with several suggestions, tags for the television show House, M.D., are now tagged as HouseMD. House music is retaining house.

Making Up Dirty Words

Language Log has an interesting post on word aversion, with a followup video by Monty Python. To it, I add The Frantics - "Make Up Dirty Words".

Fungus identified

Tom Volk, a professor of biology at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, has identified my fungus. (Not my fungus, it's on a neighbour's tree.) It's Polyporous squamosis. Thanks!

Indexed's book deal

Indexed has a book deal. Good for her! I'm not sure why I'd buy what she's giving away for free.

Erase and Rebuild to Program Stem Cells

My second Just Science post:

Biologists from Shanghai have discovered that cloned cells follow an "erase and rebuild" strategy to return to a state where they can begin dividing again. This isn't much of a surprise, since it's long been suspected that something like this happens. But it's nice to put a mechanism to things.
Huizhen Shang and colleagues report in a special stem cell issue of Cell Research that the developing (single) egg cells of mice erase many of the transcription factors and other modifications that control protein expression. The erasure strips away most of the programming done by the mouse's cells, leaving the cell in a "blank" state. (More technically, the chromatin, a mixture of DNA and proteins, factors are nearly all removed.) Then the egg cell gets rebuilt/reprogrammed after fertilization by sperm, and is ready to develop as a stem cell that forms a complete mouse.

In the early days of cloning (ten years ago), this reprogramming was done by electrocuting cells after a nucleus had been transferred into a denucleated oocyte. Nobody knew why this worked, but it did. With this new discovery, biologists can now determine how and what control factors are erased and reset.

Needless to say, but worth mentioning, is that this finding was not discovered in the U.S., due to the federal government's failure to support stem cell research.

Nitrogenase

Nitrogen is a fundamental element for life. There are no living organisms which do not depend on it, because it is found in DNA, RNA and protein. Therefore, obtaining it is absolutely essential.

The ultimate source of nitrogen is the atmosphere, which is 80% nitrogen gas, composed of two nitrogen atoms bound by three strong bonds. In this form, it is absolutely useless to life. It must be broken apart, and there are only a few ways of doing this. (Oxygen gas, which is composed of two oxygen atoms with two bonds, has been broken down every second of your life by enzymes.)

1. Lightning.
2. The Haber process.
3. Enzymes.

If we relied on lightning we'd be dead, since it doesn't produce enough freed nitrogen. The Haber process was only invented in the early 20th century, and is the source of fertilizer. That leaves enzymes, which are the source of nearly all the nitrogen in your body.

The enzyme that does this is nitrogenase. It is found in bacteria that live in the roots of plants. If you ever pull up a plant by its roots and find the roots covered in small nodules, those bumps are probably filled with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. There, they break atmospheric nitrogen and form ammonia and hydrogen gas.

N2 + 8e + 16MgATP + 8H+ = 2NH3 + H2 + 16MgADP + 16Pi.

This equation says take nitrogen gas, electricity, energy, protons, and convert them into ammonia, hydrogen gas, and spent fuel. Ammonia is easier to convert into nitrate, which is now biologically useful.

The enzyme is one of the most difficult ones to study. What happens "inside" it as it breaks nitrogen has been nearly impossible to observe by traditional methods, because the delivery of electrons can't be controlled. Biochemists know that the bonds are broken one at a time. A new paper by Dmitriy Lukoyanov et al. (subscription required) has unravelled much of the first part of the reaction. They find that no bonds are broken, and that nitrogenase accumulates four of the eight electrons before breaking a single bond. Their discovery finally links electronic states of the enzyme to hypothesized intermediates, and gives a better idea of the order of events performed by nitrogenase.

Just Science blogging week

I will be blogging this week for Just Science, where a bunch of science bloggers will be posting on science every day from February 5th to the 11th. Stay tuned. Should be a lot of great posts, maybe even some from me.

Don't buy Vista!

Michael Geist has a great column in The Toronto Star about why Windows Vista is going to take over your computer, erase your hard disk and burn down your house. Essential reading, and more signs that the movie and recording industry doesn't like the people who buy things from them.

Best of all, it appears at the top of Google News listing of Vista stories. Ha-ha!

I love indexed

Girl + marker + index cards = Great blog

The speed of links

Everybody else is doing it. Link to this! It's science!