Technical wizardry

Hey, Blogger just changed the image-posting technology for these things! This may not impress you much, but I always like it when I can just press a button and get it to come out looking nifty. Lord knows it's smoother than the hack-job I was using to get pictures on here before. It's also an excellent excuse to post a random microbiology picture.

That's Thermobifida fusca, a thermophilic actinomycete which is one of my critters. I should take a picture of it growing in a flask sometime. It's fun. It forms little fuzzballs in the flask. They're extremely cute, as bacteria go. They do smell kind of funny, but what are you going to do?

What I need today

Some of you may already be familiar with this website (Mom...), but today it seems strangely relevant. I think I need to invest in a hammock.

"Our Mission Statement

Well I think we should all sit down and have a nice cup of tea, and some biscuits, nice ones mind you. Oh and some cake would be nice as well. Lovely."

Whoa.

Latest Hubble image of Fomalhaut, 25 light years away...



(from New Scientist.)

Wacky Science #2

From Science:

A team of researchers went down to a deep sea hydrothermal vent, two and a half kilometers underwater, and isolated a bacterium with an.. interesting lifestyle:

"Reporting online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes the first example of a photosynthetic organism that doesn't need the sun to live. As long as it gets sulfur and CO2, the bacterium--known as GSB1 for the time being--seems to get by on the kind of light provided by vent glow."

Vent glow being mostly the infra-red light given off by hot water. :-) Crazy little dudes, eh?

Flitting to and fro

Today was the day of pretending to be a social butterfly of the highest order. We went to two barbeque / picnic things today, one with a bunch of microbiologists and one with some co-workers of Anita's, so we both got to spend hours hobnobbing with people we don't really know and eating mysterious food of dubious provenance. Needless to say, we're a bit frazzled by the whole experience. Normally we don't interact with people this much in a month.

However, several important lessons were learned:

1. Soaking peaches in balsamic vinegar and rosemary and then grilling them is actually a really good idea.

2. I suck at kickball. Anita is a vicious kickball machine.

3. Veterinarians supply better beer at picnics, on average, than microbiologists.

4. Mustard stains turn red when you rub detergent into them, but then pretty much disappear after they dry.

I think I'm set for fun for the weekend. I intend to spend the rest of it sleeping, if it's all the same to you. Good night.

And I don't even like viruses!

There's an article in this month's ASM News which just blew my fragile little mind... A research group in France just sequenced the genome of mimivirus, which looks like this:



The kicker is that mimivirus is fully 400nm across, and encodes over 1200 genes. that is to say, it's both significantly bigger in size and gene content than a good number of parasitic bacteria. It has enough highly conserved genes that they were able to place it on the phylogenetic tree of all life as a fourth domain branching off near the root of the eukaryotes. I love this stuff.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

I got your "old-timey" right here

I just put up a new tune on my music webpage.

It's a very old tune called "Old Baggum". It's a variant of Child Ballad #18. (Beware of annoying MIDI music on that website.) Francis J. Child was this crazy folklorist who went around the English-speaking world in 1850's collecting all of the old oral tradition songs that he could find and writing them down. The oldest written version of "Old Baggum" is from the Percy Manuscript, circa 1640 or so. My version is of Appalachian ancestry, more or less. The lyrics I'm singing are from Joel Mabus' version, and the banjo arrangement is my modification and mashing together of some tablatures I found on the Internet.

It's a fairly grizzly little song, but it sure is fun to play! (Even if it is about half a step too high for me to sing... :-) Let me know what you think.

Must... Find... Motivation...

Gah. Too much heat, not enough sleep, too frazzled to think of anything interesting to say. Pfui. I'm going to go stand in the -20°C coldroom until my brain cools down enough to function. Hopefully I'll have something coherent to say this weekend.

Thrilling Adventures, Part 2

So, after delving into the Cave of the Mounds, we drove past Little Norway (which, we found out later, is a reenactment community featuring the transplanted "Norway" exhibit from the 1893 World's Fair. Who knew?) into the charming town of Mount Horeb, WI, "Troll Capitol of the World".

So, the deal seems to be that around 1993, a new highway bypassed Mt. Horeb, and the Chamber of Commerce decided they needed to come up with a plan to counter the foreseen loss of business. The plan they devised was simple: give the entire town a troll theme.

Simple, elegant, yet completely insane.

We came into town along the main Trollway, stopped for lunch at the Grumpy Troll Brewpub (and had a very tasty "Skogstroll" burger), and took our pictures with some of the carved wooden trolls which line the main street:




It seems like a nice enough little town. Heavy on the antique shops, but otherwise very pleasant.

I should note, though, that Mt. Horeb has more than just trolls... It is also home to the world's finest Mustard Museum.



Yes, in fact, the tourist literature of Mt. Horeb goes so far as to call it the "Cooperstown of Condiments", which may be pushing it a little, but they certainly have a lot of mustard:



As I'm sure you can understand, after that, we had had quite enough and drove wearily home to have a rudimentary dinner of leftover rice and frozen pork buns. It had been a long, fruitful day, and we collapsed gently into a deep sleep, dreaming only of swarthy trolls swimming in a sea of gourmet mustard...

(For pictures of our previous adventure in southern Wisconsin, take a look here.)

Thrilling Adventures, Part 1

It was a hot, sticky day, with threats of thunderstorms and hail, when we set out into the wilds of south-eastern Wisconsin for the first Adventure of the season. We managed to avoid certain death at the confusing intersection of Nakoma Dr. and Highways 18 and 151 S, purchased a peanut butter snack bar to sustain us, and cruised relatively uneventfully to the Cave of the Mounds, one of the foremost natural wonders of the Mount Horeb area.

It really is a lovely little cave, cool and cozy, and absolutely gorgeous. We shared our tour with a platoon of girl scouts, but they were pretty well-behaved. Sadly, most of the pictures we took in the cave turned out blurry, but here's one that turned out fairly well:



It was a perfect day for underground tourism. We managed to time our tour carefully to avoid the torrential downpour, and now my car is clean!

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which we have lunch in Mount Horeb and are beset by trolls...

Science, by gum

You see that? That's data there! Ha!