October 01, 2016 at 12:47AM

Today I Learned: 1) There is a style of restaurant called an automat which is essentially a giant vending machine, for food. They were apparently fairly common until the 70s? They died off primarily because a) fast food restaurants offered more flexibility and competed them into the ground, and b) inflation made it no longer feasible for customers to pay in coins, which is all most automats were set up to take (at least in the US). 2) Vacuuming robots can suck up a surprising amount of dirt. 3) CcdB is a gene coding an antibacterial. Today I learned how the ccdB protein works. It's an inhibitor of DNA gyrase, which is a protein that helps relax supercoils in DNA during replication. If all it did was inhibit DNA gyrase, that would be pretty bad, but it's actually much nastier -- the ccdB/gyrase complex can still function halfway, which involves snipping open one strand of the DNA helix and letting it unwind. It just can't stitch it back together, so ccdB turns DNA gyrase into a genome fragmentation machine.