Cool Case, RNases, and Indian Food

Today I Learned:
1) ...what the inside of a Dell Precision 470 looks like. One of the lab computers stopped working and gave a hardware error, so I and a colleague took it apart. It has a really cool case -- it's held closed by a latch, so there're no screws involved, and the whole front and side hinge out (http://ift.tt/1WVyePS). The big green box is an assembly that shunts air off the processor heatsink and out the back. The power supply sits *under* the rest of the computer, which makes it nicely balanced and keeps it out of the way. It was also the most remarkably clean desktop I've seen after multiple years of operation.

(incidentally, we think we traced the problem to one of the RAM slots. If we take out the second of two RAM sticks, it boots; if we move the second RAM to the first slot and keep the first RAM out, it boots; no other configurations seem to boot.)

2) ...the difference between RNase I and RNase A. Both are enzymes that specifically degrade single-stranded RNA. RNase A cleaves the RNA backbone at specific bases (I don't recall which), so it leaves behind small RNA fragments. It's also the one that's demonically difficult to inactivate -- it's the one that can be autoclaved and happily keep chewing up RNA. As far as I know, the only way to deal with it, short of ridiculous things like fire, is to extract it out with phenol-chloroform.

RNase I, on the other hand, chews up any ribonucleotide backbone bond, so it leaves only ribonucleotides as long as you let it digest for long enough. It's also inactivated by incubation at 70 C, which is nice for downstream applications.

3) Apparently the Indian food served in restaurants in the US is very much rich people food, traditionally speaking. Small sample size here, and India's a big place, so I'm sure this is massively overgeneralizing, BUT a friend of mine from India tells me that day-to-day Indian food is much more rice and beans, eaten for sustinance rather than enjoyment. Though that's changing recently? This is all very second-hand.