January 06, 2016 at 10:15PM

Today I Learned: 1) Near the Salton Sea (which I talked about in my last TIL) is a place called Slab city. Slab city is an abandoned marine bunker facility, now inhabited part-time by (mostly very poor) snowbirds and full-time by a core community of very dedicated folks. The city ("city", really) has no electricity, sanitation, running water, or, as far as I can tell, government of any sort, but it makes up for the lack of these in art. Thanks to Lady Jade on this one! 2) There's an alternative to non-homologous end joining* called microhomology-mediated end joining, or MMEJ. MMEJ can occur when double-stranded DNA breaks with short, matching sequences (microhomologies) nearby on each side. The cell can find these microhomologies, pair them together, and fill in any gaps. This process deletes any sequence between the break and the microhomologies, making it a destructive repair process, and MMEJ is a common cause of cancer-inducing mutations. Why would we have a repair pathway so prone to causing cancer? I really don't know. I mean, destructively repairing a double-stranded break is usually better than the cell just dying, which is what happens if you leave a break un-stitched (which itself is probably better than trying to replicate with a double-stranded break... that could cause all sorts of havoc). Maybe it's a last-ditch effort to patch things up in damaged cells before replication? Whatever the reason for its existence, MMEJ can be used for genomic engineering. Check out http://ift.tt/1OPGBYr for details, if you have a Nature subscription. Credit to the Addgene Facebook page on this one. * The most common process cells use to stitch broken DNA back together. 3) You can make chefs knives out of bamboo. Anyone have experience with these? Andrew Andy Halleran? Thanks to Mengsha Gong Bonus) Sharks. In volcanos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e3t18rrjOA (Thanks again Mengsha Gong)