February 21, 2016 at 02:32AM

Today I Learned: 1) How to use Solidworks! ...ok, not really, I've had two tutorials in solidworks before, but today was my first time building something new in Solidworks from scratch, with no guidance. I think it's even what I intend! Will need Erik!!!! to check me on that, though. (Also, for those who don't know, Solidworks is a program for designing 2D and 3D models of things; for my purposes, it's a tool for drawing stuff to 3D print) 2) KL740 E. coli grown at 29 C on LB-ampicillin plates take somewhere between 12 and 36 hours to grow colonies, according to my most recent batch of transformations. At 12 hours there was no visible growth at all, and I thought they'd all died. At about 38 hours, there were big, fat, overgrown colonies. By 45 hours, there were little tiny satellite colonies. Now you know. 3) ...how to make methanol from CO2, enzymatically. You bind three enzymes (formate dehydrogenase to convert CO2 to formate ; formaldehyde dehydrogenase to convert formate to formaldehyde; and alcohol dehydrogenase to convert formaldehyde to methanol) into a sol-gel (basically an aerogel), then run a bunch of CO2 through the gel. You can also bind each of the enzymes onto a separate platform, as I've described in an earlier TIL, and do the conversions one at a time. Details on the former here (http://ift.tt/21hulZA) and the latter here (http://ift.tt/1TxBio6) (sadly, probably behind a paywall).