July 13, 2016 at 02:56AM

Today I Learned: 1) Zinc finger proteins have really strong binding, based on some unpublished data I saw. Like, really, really strong binding. 2) One of the trees outside our house appears to be infested with some kind of Dictyostelium-like fungus -- its leaves have broken out in little stalks, spaced roughly an inch apart, tipped with little white heads. I've never seen anything quite like it. 3) ... a couple of benchmarks for visualizing the concentrations of solutions. 0.5 molar copper nitrate is packed with an average spacing of about 10-15 coppers' worth of distance (1.5 nanometers) between adjacent copper atoms (the rest being filled with water and nitrate). Hundred-micromolar primers are surprisingly not-dense, with an average distance of a micron or two between primers. I remember doing this calculation before and finding that they were much tighter than that, so if somebody could triple-check my math, I'd appreciate it.