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.