July 21, 2016 at 02:17AM

Today I Learned: 1) ...how to load (and use) an electric drill. 2) ...of an interesting technique for metabolic engineering. I actually forget the name, but the key is to link the output of a metabolic pathway you want to build to some key growth factor or antitoxin or something else that is good for the host chassis, whether it be bacteria or yeast or something more exotic. Then you basically just grow the stuff. Since the output is good for cell growth, the host will tend to evolve more efficient variations of the metabolic pathway. There are some problems with this technique. The output has to be something either beneficial to the cell or something that can be tied directly to something beneficial to the cell. The more indirect that link, the more likely it is the population will just evolve to break it and just produce whatever it is that is good for growth, dropping the pathway you actually want completely. Still, in the narrow cases where it works at all, this seems like a pretty nifty technique. 3) Saw Hollywood today for the first time. I'm not particularly impressed. It strikes me as similar to the rest of LA, but busier, more densely packed with rich people, and with worse congestion and roadways. There's probably some interesting history to be found actually *inside the buildings* there, but I'm not sure if it's history I care about enough to go back to check out.