Insect Stomachs, An Unexpected Lubricant, and FRAP Normalization

Today I Learned:
1) Insects have alkaline stomachs, not acidic ones. This is what makes some insecticides insecticides and not generic poisons -- they're only active in alkaline conditions, like the guts of insects.

2) Canola oil (and other vegetable oils) can be safely used as sex lubricant (though NOT with condoms or anything else made of plastic), and appear to be less rough on sperm than commercial lubricants (http://ift.tt/1uJZ4fp).

3) ...a good, simple technique for dealing with unwanted*** photobleaching* in experiments like FRAP** -- just keep track of a non-FRAPed part of the cell while you FRAP, and normalize each time point against the non-FRAPed region.

* Photobleaching is an annoying feature of fluorescent microscopy where fluorophores tend to break down over time, leading to a loss of image signal over the course of an experiment.

** FRAP (Fluorescence Recovery After Photobleaching) is a kind of experiment that turns photobleaching into a feature! In FRAP, you quickly blast a small region of something (usually a cell) with a ton of laser exposure, which completely photobleaches all of the fluorophore in that region. You can then watch fluorophore from the surrounding area diffuse back in, which tells you how quickly the fluorescent molecule diffuses.

*** FRAP intentionally uses photobleaching to blast out a region of the cell; there's still background photobleaching on everything else, though, which corrupts the signal you get out.