Today I Learned:
1) Trash incinerators are kind of awesome. Modern incinerators burn hot enough to reduce plastics and similar trash almost entirely into water and carbon dioxide, with trace amounts of NO2 and similar small molecules. Moreover, the heat is usually recaptured and used either directly for municipal heating or to produce electricity, and many incinerators are energy-positive.
In fact, a few places in the US and central Europe have a weird problem where their public waste system has quotas of trash they *have to produce* in order to generate electricity. This makes it rather difficult to recycle in these areas -- there's a lot of incentive to burn the recyclable materials instead.
2) Lily crossbreeding is apparently a big deal in the herbological community, and has been for thousands of years. There are, however, several varieties of lilies that have never been cross-breedable (sorry, I don't have their names). No matter what you do, the crossed seeds won't take.
Until now! Turns out that you *can* grow them, if you grow them on agar plates with the right hormones. Score one for science!
(Bonus plant-cross fact: You can buy a plant called a TomTato, which is a splice between a tomato plant and a potato plant. It grows tomatos on its stalks and potatos in its roots. It costs about 10£ (also learned how to type "£" on an American keyboard!).)
3) If you run a TX-TL reaction on a gel diluted about 100-fold, you can see clear bands at about 1.5 kb and 3 kb, plus a messy blob in the 0-500 bp range. My tentative hypothesis is that these are rRNA bands, though this begs the question of how those rRNAs get dissociated on a gel, or alternatively where the full ribosome falls....
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