Today I Learned:
1) Transposable elements* are preferentially found in areas with open chromatin structure. Makes perfect sense — open-chromatin regions are more accessible to most things, so it stands to reason that a transposable element would be more likely to land in one — and it turns out to be true. Beautiful.
Thanks to Andrew Halleran for pointing this out to me.
* These are “genes” that, as far as we know, do nothing but move themselves around the genome, sometimes duplicating themselves.
2) With very few exceptions (as in, awardees of very prestigious scholarships), you have to pay money to get a PhD at Cambridge University (the british one). Thank goodness for the American model. To be fair, British PhDs aren’t really the same as American PhDs — they’re much faster and in some ways closer to a Master’s degree. Still, that’s three years of no income, which sucks.
3) It’s a bad idea to let the last little bits of soap bars go down the shower drain — they’ll nucleate hairballs and clog it up.
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