Comments

Allow me to indulge in what may be intense irony:

Comments below YouTube videos and CNN.com can provide some of the most astonishing insights into peoples' minds. And not usually in a good way. Consider these comments below a result CNN article on the Lawrence Livermore nuclear fusion lab:

- Why do "scientists" insist on trying to find new ways to destroy the world?
- I thought fusion was drink and fission was something you did with a pole and bait down at the creek.
- YAY!!!! a new place to cook my meat loaf! cmon guys, its called common sense.
- Didn't these guys watch Spiderman I. Dr. Octopus did the very same thing and it didn't work out so well for him...Do these guys really think that Spiderman will save them when this thing causes the end of the world...when will it be done again...oh yeah, end of 2012 when the Mayan Calnder ends!!!
- What a waste of time. You can't create a star without an immense amount of mass.
- We could use your mom. Gravity problem solved!

The list goes on. Simultaneously funny, sad, and aggravating. Mostly sad.

For more, see http://xkcd.com/202/.

Numbers

- Most cells are microscopic, yet most human cells have over 3,000,000,000 base pairs (in the right order) packed inside them.

- The average human body has trillions of red blood cells (1,000,000,000,000), and produced 2,000,000 new ones per second.

- e. coli can replicate themselves every 20 minutes. One bacterium can thus yield eight in one hour, or, in theory, 4 thousand billion billion bacteria in a day.

Biology is awesome.

Tissue engineering

It's what I want to do. And no, it has nothing to do with Kleenex. I am not getting a PhD so that I can spend my life engineering new ways to make blowing your nose more pleasurable. The goal of tissue engineering is to re-create biology tissues for replacement and repair of damaged ones. The closer you can get to the real thing, the better. For all the brilliant minds devoting their efforts to engineering, we can't do better than nature. We keep trying, and we can't do it. So instead, we take our inspiration from nature. It's called biomimetic engineering. It's good stuff.

In the meantime, I'm studying molecular biomechanics. Mechanical engineering on the teeny-tiny scale. Micro-meters and nano-neutons. The forces on cell nuclei and embryonic tissue. That kind of thing.

That's all I've got for now. Thanks for reading.

Winter in pictures

Last time I posted pictures, it was of leaves changing color. That was a long time ago. This also happened to be my first winter; these pictures are for anyone who doesn't live in a ridiculous climate like that of Pittsburgh.

Snow is cold and wet and inconvenient and completely awesome. My next ambition is to make snow sculptures a la Calvin and Hobbes.

Blog 2.0

Dear readers,

I'm restarting my blog with the purposes of 1) informing, 2) educating, and 3) entertaining. It's not intended as 1) a rant, 2) a procrastination tool, or 3) replacement for real interpersonal communication. That's the plan, anyway. Possible topics include:

- Where the wild things are: my experiences as an undergraduate

- Heiku: when eighteen syllables is one too many

- Graduate school and goldfish

- Pyramids built by slaves: an analogy for academic research

- Sex(AI) before cleavage, and other oddities of bioengineering

Enjoy!

Richard