sulfur hexafluoride, cold Lake Michigan, female cycling, bubble wrap test tubes, yeast protein names.

So, in recent Jimmy-gold; Jimmy Fallon posted a clip wherein he and (a very hesitant) Morgan Freeman inhale helium then do a bit of an interview. Kicking this around with Bryan, who mentioned sulfur hexafluoride, which makes a person's voice super-deep, and that he'd like for Mr. Freeman to try that one, instead. This lead to me pricing Sulfur Hexafluoride - sticker shock at $389 for  227 grams from Sigma Aldrich, until Bryan quick-calculated it 1296.97 liters of gas at room temperature. Given that a standard sized bathtub is 270 liters, that's a lot of gas, and a lot of deep voices.

As recently documented, i learned that one actually CAN surf in Wisconsin, but that the water's pretty darn cold. My friend Kelly AT and her family took a trip north to Wisconsin's Door County, a very scenic peninsula that extends out into Lake Michigan, but they weren't able to go swimming due to the extremely cold water. We were wondering how cold the water truly is, and if the hard, extended winter has affected this year's water temperature at all. A quick internet toss yielded this Chicago Tribune graph for the Lake Michigan water temps in recent years, and it looks like, indeed, at  the water's about 10-15 degrees colder this year, with a mid-July temp of 61 degrees F. Gosh.

Being a female who cycles, sometimes social dress situations call for wearing a skirt. i came across this legit bit of advice/videoclip for keeping properly covered while cycling in a skirt - apparently, taking a penny and rubberbanding the two layers of skirt together (around the penny) between yourknees. Also, saw this vintage article warning women about something called 'bicycle face', and this additional article regarding 'rules' from 1895 for women cyclists. Particularly relevant (err...) for Wisconsin women cyclists,
"

• Don’t scream if you meet a cow. If she sees you first, she will run." 

This report from NPR is pretty nifty - apparently, bubble wrap bubbles can be used in place of eppi tubes in lab? Even MORE interesting, is the statement " Whitesides' students filled the plastic bubbles with a solution of food for microorganisms and looked to see if bacteria grew inside. After four days, no microbes appeared. To their surprise, the air and plastic inside the bubbles were completely sterile ", which is where i would have thought there might be issues. They DO point out that to use bubble wrap, you need syringes, which are sometimes hard to source in developing countries where the bubble wrap might otherwise be perfect. Anyway, nifty idea.

This just in from dear Jack, a gif of a clever corvid attaining a drink of water from humans.

Spent a large chunk of time Thursday of last week reconciling what is know for nuclear pore proteins in Yeast versus what is known in vertebrate systems. There was a lot of e-whining:

 me: blinking yeast people and their own naming systems

 Sent at 1:18 PM on Thursday

 Lauren:  blinking yeast?

 me:  bleeping, flipping, friggin'

 Lauren:  ah

 me:  barking, blanking, etc

 Lauren:  i was thinking of really special yeast

 me:  ya know, the sort that blinks

 Lauren:  but yes, i agree

Yeah. The problem is that yeast folks name their gene/proteins different names from the vertebrate orthologues, and so everything needs to be 'translated'.  Every practical, Bryan pointed out that there is some recourse found at the Sacchromyces genome database people do name their stuff via chromosome position, but for direct vertebrate orthologues, it's kinda a cross-referencing situation.

Chikungunya, etc; Word Crimes, Papal soccer neutrality, Texas and Wisconsin surfing, Titin protein.

So, various things in the virosphere. The first case of Chikungunya transmitted locally in the US (not travel-related) has been confirmed. (Chikungunya is a mosquito-borne viral illness, known to cause painful swelling in the joints and fever, among other symptoms. There have been notable outbreaks in the French Caribbean and into South America starting this part December, and 31 US states have previously reported travel-related cases). i was talking about this with Bryan this morning, and he suggested this article as being highly informative, and it is. Also, there seems to be a 5th type of Dengue, of which i was unaware. Upon mentioning the local Chikungunya transmission report to my labmates, Ryan mentioned that recently, a Republican congressman Phil Gingery (an MD?!) recently sent a letter to the CDC in which he suggested (entirely improbably) that Mexican immigrant children and families might be bringing with them Ebola as they cross the border. This Politifact article offers a very nice synopsis of the situation and response, but just so we're perfectly clear here, how is this physician suggesting that immigrants are crossing the border with a viral infection that has never been found outside of Africa? Seriously?! This is some piece of sensationalism right there.



Weird Al put out a new album, and posted one of the songs to his youtube page. Word Crimes is a very nice parody of last summer's Blurred Lines. Another recently shared music video is this clip of R2D2 dancing to MJ songs, via LZ.

Too much else since i last posted. Germany won the World Cup, and the final match was against Argentina. i had joked around earlier that with the (soccer-fan, native Argentine) Pope on their side, how could Argentina lose? But further checking this out, it looks like others (including Brazilian fans) were concerned about the Pope playing favorites, so he apparently promised no special prayers for his home team. Also, adorably, i came across this report of the Swiss Guard inviting Pope Francis to watch the Argentina-Swiss match with them, but he declined.

i've previously mentioned seeing Transformers 4, and that it features some gorgeous footage of the Texas Hill Country, being partially filmed there. One of the characters is a (Texan) surfer, and Jack asked if there is surfing in Texas. My response was that yes, there is, but only if there's a hurricane coming. Synchronicity being what it is, Slate featured an article last week about a Texas surfing photographer, and it backed me up, " He wanted to photograph a good hurricane swell for the book, which proved elusive until Hurricane Isaac in 2012. But that didn’t bother him too much. Like many Texas surfers, he’s used to waiting. “One has to watch the weather and water conditions in order to time out the best surf in Texas. And even though the surf gets quite good at times, it usually doesn’t last that long" ".  Interestingly, that article also calls Sheboygan, WI, the 'Malibu of the Midwest', apparently with surfing occurring on Lake Michigan. Moreover, they host the largest lake surfing competition in the world, called the Dairyland Classic. Youtube has a few clips which document this, true, but those dudes are all wearing full body wetsuits - that water's cold, even in the summer.

Also, Jack and Leslie, it looks like henna tattoos 'develop'; " The color of your design will at first be a shade of orange (ranging from very light orange highlighter color to pumpkin orange). It will get darker over the course of the next 48 hours, turning anywhere from orange-brown to maroon or chocolate brown. Your design will be at its darkest after 1 or 2 days.  ". Interesting.

It's looking like i might have to do some work with on a 358 kDa protein, which is kinda larger than the usual proteins i work with. Out of curiosity, further research indicates that the largest known protein is a muscle protein commonly called Titin, weighing in at ~3816 kDa. Whoa. Also, it's IUPAC name is also the longest word in the English language, as illustrated by this 3 and a half hour long youtube video of someone reading it. (i did not listen to all 3+ hours, but did skip around the youtube clip. Humorously, the flowers wilt, and the gentleman's facial hair lengthens.)

boxer crabs, history tumblr, Tim Howard is a bad@ss, temporary tattoos

While this is not really safe for work due to severe language, i found this tumblr trail about boxer crabs hilarious (and i'm trying REALLY hard not to learn the words to the little ditty, just in case i accidentally start singing it in lab at some point, but it's super catchy. Also, 'that illustrates the diversity of that word').

While it is is currently the 4th of July, everyday is the Independence Day at this awesome tumblr, rally 'round the history. The woman in charge goes by the handle of Lady History, and does highly amusing things like caption portraits of George Washington to hilarious effect (and please note that there are 10 iterations of those by now, all stellar, also, ghost children). Also, apparently the exclamation 'Well, spangle my stars!' is a thing. i'm going to have to start working that into conversation.

So, the World Cup is ongoing, but the US team is out as of Monday. They made it out of the famed 'Group of Death' intact, but not the 16-team round. However, i know i'm not the only person who, when they see the team name USMNT, thinks for a splitsecond of the close acromyn TMNT, because i did a google search and came up with, notabe among other offerings, this page. Anyhow, yesterday's game was against Belgium, and the US goalie Tim Howard did a breathtaking job defending the goal  at a record 16 saves. The best article covering this feat and the American response/appreciation can be found here, and please check out the collection of memes at the bottom. Also, here's another collection of T.H.-related memes. Since we're on the subject of World Cup coverage, i've been enjoying the humorous analysis of the ex-pat English dudes, Men In Blazers.

Every once in a while, i get a hankering for a bod mod not-the-result-of-injuring-myself. i usually end up with temporary tattoos, and was wandering around Etsy the other day when i found these rather sophisticated offerings. (Side-foray, i was curious why etsy is so named. From the wikipedia site, " Kalin said that he named the site Etsy because he "wanted a nonsense word because I wanted to build the brand from scratch. I was watching Fellini's 8 ½ and writing down what I was hearing. In Italian, you say 'etsi' a lot. It means 'oh, yes.'(actually it's "eh, si" And in Latin, it means 'and if.'" ")

This web comic concerning womens' roles in action films was linked to me this afternoon, and i feel like it's entirely too accurate. Went with Jack and Leslie last night to see Transformers 4, where it applied to a main female character, as well as in Godzilla, which we saw a week or two ago. It's pretty sad.

This ridiculous quiz result simply confirmed what we all knew. And while i was sad to read this article about Chikungunya edging it's way toward the US, the virologist part of me is super intrigued.