March 14, 2016 at 01:12AM

Today I Learned: 1) Transcripts degrade exponentially in TX-TL* with a half-life of approximately 18 minutes. It's beautiful how clean the results are... except when they're at high-concentration. Then they decay exponentially for a few hours, then rapidly switch to a *slower* exponential decay. As far as I know, it's not known what causes the transition in degradation behavior. * E. coli guts extracted to use as an in-vitro prototyping environment for DNA circuitry. 2) Got to be a little more careful with cooking wine... it has a stronger effect than I anticipated on fried rice. 3) Not really something I've learned, but a hypothesis to test... I've recently moved my young Novomessor cockerelli (ant) queen into a new enclosure. For the first few days, her workers spent a lot of time in their outworld, which is a basin attached to the nest for the ants to forage in. After a couple of days, I opened up more of the next for the ants to check out, and they quickly moved all the way to the back, right above where I installed a little heating pad. Since then, I haven't seen the ants come out into the outworld. I assumed the reason was because the ants had fed themselves sufficiently, and had switched to taking care of the queen. However, it occurred to me today that the day I opened up the enclosure coincided closely with when I turned the temperature down in the apartment. Ants are very sensitive to temperature, and it's quite possible that they're not going into the outworld because it's too cold out there. To test this, I've turned up the heat in my room to around where it was before. We'll see if the workers start exploring around again.