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

Terminology

Last week in Engineering Cell Biology we learned about ligands in mammalian signaling pathways called Desert Hedgehog, Indian Hedgehog, and, of course, Sonic Hedgehog.

This week while programming I learned that when working with an empty matrix, text objects have no children.

What's next?

Two experiences

The Twilight Zone: getting to campus by 7:00 or 7:30 and being the only one around. Going into my office area and seeing only empty cubicles. An earily timeless.

Hell: I went to the fitness center at my apartment complex and, like the office, was the only one there. Except at the fitness center, the tv was on and tuned to a sports talkshow with the volume up and the remote NOWHERE to be found. I could feel my brain cells dying.

Life update

My apologies, faithful readers, for the lack of posts. Graduate school, it turns out, is not all fun and games. I suddenly find myself lacking in free time, sleep, and a social life. At the moment I'm frustrated because it is a GORGEOUS fall day outside, and I'm inside pecking away at this computer.

If you've time to burn, you can see a bit of what I live in at these sites:
- The Dahl Lab
- The Davidson Lab
- PhD Comics