Today I Learned:
1) How to make spring rolls! The crispy chinese kind. Without meat. Anyway, here's what goes in them:
* About 2/3 of a block of tofu, finely chopped
* a cup or so of finely minced vegetables (recipe recommended carrot, onion, and wood-ear mushroom; I used wood-ear mushroom and Trader Joes' cabbage/carrot slaw mix)
* A couple cloves of garlic
* A cup or so of cooked bean thread (I used rice vermicelli and it worked fine)
* Some small amount of soy sauce
* Some small amount of sugar
* Some small amount of pepper
* Some small amount of salt
These things get mixed in a bowl. Then you lay out a spring roll wrapper (get these at Asian marts, internet recipes claim American ones suck, but IDK), put a little bit* of the filling in one corner, roll it up enough that the filling is tucked in, fold the sides over so that the edges are "vertical", and wrap it the rest of the way up. Use a mix of water and corn starch to seal the last bit. Repeat this until you run out of filling or you run out of wrappers, whichever comes first.
To cook these things, just fry them in vegetable oil at about 300-350 F (yeah, I actually measured it -- it was slightly below a 5 on my stovetop). Make sure the rolls have room to move around in the pan/pot/wok. Takes about 7 minutes of cooking per roll-batch.
* The trick for apportioning is to bear in mind that the final roll is going to be a little bit bigger than the size of the stuffing (though oddly, variation in stuffing size mostly seemed to change the length of my rolls, not their girth). It doesn't take much.
2) When making sushi, don't make all of your ingredients salty. It's good to have something a like cucumber or avocado or crab meat to offset the saltiness of the rice and any pickled ingredients.
3) The civilized part of the Star Wars galaxy has about a million inhabited planets of note. Also, the New Republic never gained control of nearly as many planets as the Empire before it or the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances (the reformed government put together from the scraps of the governments that survived the first half of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion).
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Roman Taxes, Restriction Enzyme Etymology, and Collapsed Lungs
Today I Learned:
1) The Roman Republic (this was Rome before Julius Ceasar) collected taxes using private contractors. These contractors would bid on how much money they would supply the government using tax money from some province or another. I gather that this was something of a gamble, because it was hard to tell exactly how much tax would be collectable from a province until someone actually went out and did it. The winning contractor would then loan their bid to Rome, go out and collect whatever taxes they could, and return. The contractor would give whatever they bid to Rome, Rome would pay back the initial loan, plus some interest, and any tax money collected in excess of the bid would be kept by the contractor.
2) Restriction enzymes (enzymes that cut DNA at (usually) specific sequences) are called restriction enzymes because they were first discovered as enzymes that "restricted" the growth of lambda phage in E. coli. Yet another poorly-named biology term.
3) How a collapsed lung works. Er, doesn't work. Anyway, there's apparently a membrane covering the outside of a lung which attaches the alveoli in the lung to the musculature that controls breathing. If the lung detaches from that membrane, it collapses and sticks to itself like a wet plastic bag, and the body can't pull the lung apart.
1) The Roman Republic (this was Rome before Julius Ceasar) collected taxes using private contractors. These contractors would bid on how much money they would supply the government using tax money from some province or another. I gather that this was something of a gamble, because it was hard to tell exactly how much tax would be collectable from a province until someone actually went out and did it. The winning contractor would then loan their bid to Rome, go out and collect whatever taxes they could, and return. The contractor would give whatever they bid to Rome, Rome would pay back the initial loan, plus some interest, and any tax money collected in excess of the bid would be kept by the contractor.
2) Restriction enzymes (enzymes that cut DNA at (usually) specific sequences) are called restriction enzymes because they were first discovered as enzymes that "restricted" the growth of lambda phage in E. coli. Yet another poorly-named biology term.
3) How a collapsed lung works. Er, doesn't work. Anyway, there's apparently a membrane covering the outside of a lung which attaches the alveoli in the lung to the musculature that controls breathing. If the lung detaches from that membrane, it collapses and sticks to itself like a wet plastic bag, and the body can't pull the lung apart.
Friday, October 30, 2015
Chinese Dishes and Two NASA Plans
Today I Learned:
1) Many Chinese dishes are named after a story or metaphor. For example, there's a Sichuan noodle dish called "ants climbing up a tree" because it kind of looks like that.
2) NASA plans for any manned missions to Mars to run on a vegan diet. Why? Because animal products go bad too quickly, and animals are too inefficient to cultivate on-ship.
3) Speaking of NASA, NASA is planning a mission to capture an asteroid and move it to the moon. The idea is to park it in lunar orbit until around 2020, when a manned mission can go retrieve samples and bring them back. This mission will also test some key technologies for removing dangerous asteroids in the future, in case NASA or an equivalent agency ever gets the money to be able to detect city-destroying asteroids in time to launch a mission to stop it. (Right now we can probably detect extinction-event-level asteroids, but not city-busting ones)
1) Many Chinese dishes are named after a story or metaphor. For example, there's a Sichuan noodle dish called "ants climbing up a tree" because it kind of looks like that.
2) NASA plans for any manned missions to Mars to run on a vegan diet. Why? Because animal products go bad too quickly, and animals are too inefficient to cultivate on-ship.
3) Speaking of NASA, NASA is planning a mission to capture an asteroid and move it to the moon. The idea is to park it in lunar orbit until around 2020, when a manned mission can go retrieve samples and bring them back. This mission will also test some key technologies for removing dangerous asteroids in the future, in case NASA or an equivalent agency ever gets the money to be able to detect city-destroying asteroids in time to launch a mission to stop it. (Right now we can probably detect extinction-event-level asteroids, but not city-busting ones)
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Ant Pheromones, Supercoiling, and Off-Target Cas9
Today I Learned:
1) As of a couple years ago, the most thoroughly-studied ant pheremone system was that of the invasive red fire ant.
2) The supercoils introduced during transcription and replication are permanent. They're not just a physical winding that can be relaxed easily -- those supercoils are at least some of the time made permanent by helicases and gyrases.
3) It seems there have been a number of studies of off-target binding by Cas9. One of the somewhat (though not very) surprising findings is that Cas9 binding is not very predictive of Cas9 cutting. The vast majority of off-target binding sites don't get cut, and it isn't always the strongest-bound sites that do get cut. Moreover, sequence similarity (measured by simple Hamilton distance) is not a good predictor of where Cas9 will bind. Off-target binding sites do, however, pretty much universally have a correct PAM site upstream of the target.
1) As of a couple years ago, the most thoroughly-studied ant pheremone system was that of the invasive red fire ant.
2) The supercoils introduced during transcription and replication are permanent. They're not just a physical winding that can be relaxed easily -- those supercoils are at least some of the time made permanent by helicases and gyrases.
3) It seems there have been a number of studies of off-target binding by Cas9. One of the somewhat (though not very) surprising findings is that Cas9 binding is not very predictive of Cas9 cutting. The vast majority of off-target binding sites don't get cut, and it isn't always the strongest-bound sites that do get cut. Moreover, sequence similarity (measured by simple Hamilton distance) is not a good predictor of where Cas9 will bind. Off-target binding sites do, however, pretty much universally have a correct PAM site upstream of the target.
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
CCR5, CXCR4, and Klein Bottles
Today I Learned:
1) There is a human cytokine receptor called CCR5 which HIV uses to enter human immune cells. Individuals with homozygous knockout mutations in their CCR5 gene appear to be immune to HIV, and in a few rare cases, bone marrow replacement by CCR5-negative donors has cured individuals of AIDS. Today I learned that there is a non-HIV-related phenotype associated with CCR5 knockout -- CCR5-negative individuals are somewhat more succeptible to West Nile virus, and possibly other viruses. Specifically, they're just as likely to get infected by West Nile, but their clinical outcomes are worse once they're sick.
2) Speaking of CCR5, today I learned that a group of scientists from Wuhan University, China, have built a Cas9-knockout system for CXCR4, another cytokine receptor required by HIV. Their adenovirus-based system is pretty effective at removing CXCR4 from cultured cells, and seems to pretty much prevent HIV from infecting those cells.
3) How a Klein bottle is *actually* shaped. If you go buy a Klein bottle at any of the usual places, you'll get a jug where the handle passes back through the side of the jug and out the bottom, effectively putting the entrance to the bottle on its bottom. These are cool, but they're not *really* Klein bottles. A true Klein bottle doesn't intersect itself at all.
Here's how to imagine a real Klein bottle. Take a commercial Klein bottle. Consider the part where the handle intersects the body. Firstly, fill in the bit inside the handle so that the body has a complete, hole-less surface. Now grab the handle where it intersects the surface of the body and pull it out of plane in the 4th dimension a little bit -- this is similar to layout out a string so it crosses itself and pulling one of the threads out of plane in the 3rd dimension.
...and that's why nobody makes real Klein bottles.
1) There is a human cytokine receptor called CCR5 which HIV uses to enter human immune cells. Individuals with homozygous knockout mutations in their CCR5 gene appear to be immune to HIV, and in a few rare cases, bone marrow replacement by CCR5-negative donors has cured individuals of AIDS. Today I learned that there is a non-HIV-related phenotype associated with CCR5 knockout -- CCR5-negative individuals are somewhat more succeptible to West Nile virus, and possibly other viruses. Specifically, they're just as likely to get infected by West Nile, but their clinical outcomes are worse once they're sick.
2) Speaking of CCR5, today I learned that a group of scientists from Wuhan University, China, have built a Cas9-knockout system for CXCR4, another cytokine receptor required by HIV. Their adenovirus-based system is pretty effective at removing CXCR4 from cultured cells, and seems to pretty much prevent HIV from infecting those cells.
3) How a Klein bottle is *actually* shaped. If you go buy a Klein bottle at any of the usual places, you'll get a jug where the handle passes back through the side of the jug and out the bottom, effectively putting the entrance to the bottle on its bottom. These are cool, but they're not *really* Klein bottles. A true Klein bottle doesn't intersect itself at all.
Here's how to imagine a real Klein bottle. Take a commercial Klein bottle. Consider the part where the handle intersects the body. Firstly, fill in the bit inside the handle so that the body has a complete, hole-less surface. Now grab the handle where it intersects the surface of the body and pull it out of plane in the 4th dimension a little bit -- this is similar to layout out a string so it crosses itself and pulling one of the threads out of plane in the 3rd dimension.
...and that's why nobody makes real Klein bottles.
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Colony Variation, Workers and Soldiers, and Measures of Spreading
Today I Learned:
1) There is good evidence that within-colony genetic variation is good for most social insects. There's some tension to this fact, because sociality requires very *close* genetic relatedness. There's a very narrow evolutionary window of intracolony relatedness through which a species has to pass to become eusocial.
2) I've always thought of ants belonging to one the four castes of queen, drone, worker, or soldier. Myrmicologists more or less also recognize this, but the worker is known as a "minor worker" and the soldier a "major soldier", and major soldiers also include storage castes in some species (as in, they store food for other ants).
3) The usual measure of "spreading" in statistical mechanics is mean squared displacement, which has units of distance^2. However! Many authors also measure in *root* mean squared displacement, which has units of distance. If you're ever reading about characteristics of diffusion, make sure you know which measure the author is using!
1) There is good evidence that within-colony genetic variation is good for most social insects. There's some tension to this fact, because sociality requires very *close* genetic relatedness. There's a very narrow evolutionary window of intracolony relatedness through which a species has to pass to become eusocial.
2) I've always thought of ants belonging to one the four castes of queen, drone, worker, or soldier. Myrmicologists more or less also recognize this, but the worker is known as a "minor worker" and the soldier a "major soldier", and major soldiers also include storage castes in some species (as in, they store food for other ants).
3) The usual measure of "spreading" in statistical mechanics is mean squared displacement, which has units of distance^2. However! Many authors also measure in *root* mean squared displacement, which has units of distance. If you're ever reading about characteristics of diffusion, make sure you know which measure the author is using!
Sunday, October 25, 2015
Circumnavigation, Octopus Shelters, and Brain Surgery
Today I Learned:
1) Ferdinand Magellan was not the first man to circumnavigate the Earth. In fact, he died along the way fighting natives to prove the value of Christianity to a local king he had just converted.... Anyway, today I learned that the first man to circumnavigate the Earth was probably one of Magellan's slaves. After three months sailing the Pacific ocean, the crew knew they were getting close to the East because this particular slave started to be able to understand the locals they were encountering. Turns out he'd been born somewhere out in the East, and was returning to somewhere near his homeland.
2) There is a species of octopus which builds underground burrows in the sand. It liquefies the sand with a spray of water, forces itself in, shoves the sand away from itself until it's got a nice burrow with a ventilation shaft, then spreads mucus on the interior to keep its shape intact.
More here: http://ift.tt/1R7PcZA Props to New Scientist for actually including a link to the relevant journal article -- this is surprisingly uncommon in popular science articles, much to my infuration.
3) Most brain surgery is done with the patient awake and conscious. Local anesthetics keep the skull-being-opened part from hurting, and poking around in the brain doesn't hurt anyway, so it's supposedly not *that* unpleasant. It's also very helpful to the surgeons to be able to ask how the patient is doing, and for the patient to be able to tell the surgeons if anything seems wrong.
1) Ferdinand Magellan was not the first man to circumnavigate the Earth. In fact, he died along the way fighting natives to prove the value of Christianity to a local king he had just converted.... Anyway, today I learned that the first man to circumnavigate the Earth was probably one of Magellan's slaves. After three months sailing the Pacific ocean, the crew knew they were getting close to the East because this particular slave started to be able to understand the locals they were encountering. Turns out he'd been born somewhere out in the East, and was returning to somewhere near his homeland.
2) There is a species of octopus which builds underground burrows in the sand. It liquefies the sand with a spray of water, forces itself in, shoves the sand away from itself until it's got a nice burrow with a ventilation shaft, then spreads mucus on the interior to keep its shape intact.
More here: http://ift.tt/1R7PcZA Props to New Scientist for actually including a link to the relevant journal article -- this is surprisingly uncommon in popular science articles, much to my infuration.
3) Most brain surgery is done with the patient awake and conscious. Local anesthetics keep the skull-being-opened part from hurting, and poking around in the brain doesn't hurt anyway, so it's supposedly not *that* unpleasant. It's also very helpful to the surgeons to be able to ask how the patient is doing, and for the patient to be able to tell the surgeons if anything seems wrong.
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