February 15, 2016 at 01:11AM

Today I Learned: 1) There's a class of fluorescent proteins called fluorescent timers, which are used to... time things. Sort of. The primary feature of a fluorescent timer is that it changes color over time. First-generation fluorescent timers were derivatives of mCherry (a red fluorescent protein, but not Red Fluorescent Protein (RFP)) that changed color from blue to red as they matured. These timers tended to clump, though, making them not that useful. More recent fluorescent timers (first made back around 2012, from what I can tell) are made from fusions of two fluorescent proteins -- for instance, a fast-maturing GFP fused to a slow-maturing mCherry. If you look at it and it's green, then it's a young protein. If you look at it and it's green AND red, it's old. By tagging various proteins with the fluorescent timer motif, you can do some pretty cool experiments. For example, it turns out that yeast cells preferentially move older copies of at least several different proteins into their daughter cells when they bud, which we know because you can tag those proteins with fluorescent timers, and you see more red/green ratio in newly-budded cells than in their parents. What would *you* like to do with a fluorescent timer? 2) You know that idea of ether that was disproven conclusively back in the... 20s? Nope, wow, I just learned that the Michelson-Morley experiment was performed in 1887! That's quite a bit earlier than I thought. Anyway, what I *meant* to write about was exactly what feature of the ether was disproven. See, as a canny poster on Reddit's AskScience noted, the idea of ether, an all-pervading medium in which light propagates, is oddly similar to the idea of, say, the electromagnetic field of quantum field theory, which is an all-pervading medium in which light propagates. The important thing that was disproven by the Michelson-Morley experiment was the idea that there might be a *universal reference frame* in which light moved. There is no such reference frame. 3) The Star Wars Customizable Card Game (SWCCG, for short) still has a tiny but active player base, and a team of community members that makes rulings, runs tournaments, and "prints" new cards. It currently has an actively maintained comprehensive rulebook that appears to rival that of Magic: The Gathering in size and complexity, a fact that would have been nice to know back when I played. Just so you understand what this means to me, the SWCCG was THE card game between several of my friends and I during elementary school. The game was made by Decipher Inc., which has always been good at making incredibly resonant games based on established franchises (they made a Star Trek card game that was, in its day, one of the most popular trading card games behind Pokemon, Magic, and SWCCG; they later made a Lord of the Rings card game that was mechanically fascinating but outcompeted HARD by the Magic juggernaut and several other popular games like Yu-Gi-Oh that were establishing themselves at the same time). SWCCG was an interesting mix of awesome-looking cards, innovative mechanics, and a slavish adherence to flavor that, while cool, resulted in some of the weirdest mechanics of any card game I've ever seen. For example, there were several cards (H'Nemthe is the one I remember) that specifically affected cards representing male characters. How do you know if a card is male? From the rulebook: "Only characters (even droids) have gender. To determine the gender of a character, examine title, lore, and game text for words which will indicate the gender (he, she, him, her, male, female, princess, etc.). If there are none, check the picture and see if a reasonable person would conclude that the character is female (if you are not a reasonable person, find one). If it is unclear, the character is considered male." Yeah. Also, there were a bunch of mechanical traits that could only be determined by reading the card's flavor text -- to find out if a character was a spy, you check the flavor text for the word "spy". I could write at some length about the idiosynchracies of the SWCCG's design, but suffice it to say that it was one of the coolest, most poorly-designed-but-surprisingly-fun-anyway games I've had the pleasure of playing. It was also among the most popular card games (#2 behind MtG for a while) before ridiculous power creep kind of killed sales and poor money management caused Decipher to more-or-less implode, leading to the game's official demise around 2002 or 2003. I'm glad somebody's keeping it alive.