July 20, 2016 at 02:17AM

Today I Learned: 1) Today I got to be a cyborg! Specifically, I wore a headset mic with a hip-speaker for a good chunk of the day, for the benefit of those around me whose hearing isn't up to picking up my feeble voice (which is a lot of people). It was a surprisingly fluid experience in terms of audio experience. As I suspect is the case with most cyborg enhancements, the biggest problem was physical discomfort -- I found wearing a mic on my head got annoying surprisngly quickly. It was much more comfortable wrapped around the back of my neck, with the mic pointed up at my face. 2) You can get your genome sequenced for about $1000. Veritas Genetics offers a $1,000 full-genome sequencing service (averaging 30x, according to the company blog). I'm unsure of whether you actually GET YOUR SEQUENCE, though, or if they just give you a bunch of interpretation like 23andme (which runs about $200, and just gives you a bunch of variant-calling, which is cool and much cheaper, but you can't analyze it yourself). FullGenomes offers a guaranteed 30x full-genome service for $1500, and they promise a BAM file, which if you know how to interpret it is all the information you could possibly want. Data analysis services cost more. Then there's µBiome, which will give you a gut microbiota sequence, with analysis, for $89. From what I'm reading in reviews, µBiome doesn't really give you that much useful information, largely because nobody really has any solid idea of what effects different gut bacteria have on the human body. 3) Bio lab fact: There are two definitions of concentration of T4 DNA ligase, cohesive end units and Weiss units, both abbreviated as U (or, more usually, U/mL or U/µL). Cohesive end units are defined as the amount of enzyme required to ligate together 50% of a the HindIII fragments from lambda DNA at a concentration of 300 µg/mL, in a certain buffer, for 30 minutes, at 16°C. Weiss units are defined as "the amount of enzyme required to convert 1 nanomole of [heavy phosphorous]-labeled inorganic pyrophosphate into Norit adsorbable material in 20 minutes at 37°C, using specified reaction conditions", which is about 200 times as much as a cohesive end unit.