February 17, 2016 at 12:59AM

Today I Learned: 1) A good method of finding a plane to separate several corners of a cube (or other parallelopiped) from the other corners. In brief: * Draw out the cube, mark the corners you want separated. * Try to draw points in the edges that separate those corners. * Connect the points into a plane, if possible (having the edges marked makes this much easier) * Pick three of the intersection points and make a rough guess at their coordinates. This works best if your cube is arranged nicely with respect to the basis axes of your space. * Now that you have three points, you've defined a separating plane! Just remember that a plane satisfies aX + bY + cZ + d = 0, plug your three points into this, solve for the coefficients (you'll have one free parameter that you can set however you want), and you have your separating plane. 2) The Grant Study and the Glueck Study are probably the two longest-running social experiments in, uh, social science. The two parallel studies followed several hundred young, white, male Harvard undergrads (Grant Study) and disadvantaged Bostonian inner-city youths (Glueck Study) for 75 years, and as far as I know is still running. These studies have required an absolutely ridiculous amount of legwork and has been overseen by at least four separate directors. The main results can be found on the wiki page for the Grant Study, but it can be roughly summed up as: alcoholism is really bad, having good-quality relationships is really, really, really important. 3) Corynebacterium glutamicum is a popular bacteria in industrial production. It can produce a wide variety of compounds, and it's prarticularly hardy under anaerobic conditions with lots of metabolic byproducts (basically, they continue production in stationary phase). Just in January, Korean scientists engineered a strain of C. glutamicum capable of metabolizing xylan-based hemicellulose, which is a completely novel carbon source for that species. Amazingly enough, none of my facts came from Anders Knights today! Maybe next time, Anders.