(Crocheting) reefer madness!

Just wanted to say happy birthday to Ol’ Captain Skellet and also well done on her contribution to the RIAus crochet coral reef. All the contributors for the reef have made a freaking awesome display. They’re starting up FREE workshops again, so if you want to try your hand at it, register here. I was lucky enough to get to visit the reef a couple of months ago and get a few snapshots, which are shared down below. They are quite amazing. The exhibition opens again in early December at the RiAus. Get in on it.

More pictures after the fold

Resident

Sorry, kids. No time for a big post, but here’s a poem I wrote about resident bacterial/viral flora  to tide you over.

 

Civilisation
That’s what they call it
We live
In the plains, in the valleys, in the walls
Stigmatised
As disease-causers and bloody anarchists
Innocent life
Almost unnoticed by the self-appointed Empire

Uneasy truce
Between us and this floating isle
A grain of greed
Tempts tumbling, cascading white cells
Itchy fingers
Coiled tightly around taut leashes
Maddened by M.A.D.
We embrace awkwardly amongst sleeping dogs

A crack
as klaxons echo throughout the ranks
Invaders!
Peacekeepers ready their weapons
Refugees flood
Shot and sunk for the company they keep
Pioneers lost
The finest sieve finds no justice

Meanwhile
In geological time, slow as melting glaciers
A resentful kiss
Between lovers, contains more bitterness than it seems

 

TT

Lustful oxygen

Yo, just so you know, I’m going to be reciting my 2nd-place winning poem tomorrow at the Great Big Science Read: Where worlds collide event held at the RiAus. It’s free and I’m going to be there, so if you have a couple of hours you should also come and get some culture, both artistic and bacterial (that’s what we in the poetry business call a double entendre).

Anyway, this post I’m going to analyse the poem that I wish had won -

Lustful oxygen

Filled-valence prudes tut-tut

An extinguished flame

Aw, yeah, lustful oxygen. (Photo of James Kleinig flicking water on some tealights by Colin Sinclair)

I was taught in high school that all chemistry is electrons. But, of course, it is all eclipsed by things blowing up. Fire is the thing that I most closely relate to chemistry. It is a source of intrinsic passion, of instinctial awe, of heat and danger. And it’s all caused simply oxygen in the air binding to stuff (carbon in the above case). Oxygen is one of the most reactive elements out there, meaning that it has strong desire to bind and couple with other atoms and molecules. When it does so, it relaxes a bit and releases some energy. That energy is the heat.

But if atoms are already bundled up in couples of high affinity, not even oxygen can break that bond (under normal conditions). Nitrogen gas (N2) is an example of atoms that naturally strongly bound together. This bond means that the two nitrogen atoms share electrons (3 from each atom, in this case) and are both satisfied. Satisfaction as atoms are concerned is defined in terms of valency (a complex topic involving periodic tables, electrons and oxidation states). Once an atom’s valence is filled, then it is stable.

Nitrogen gas makes up 70% of the atmosphere. So we blow out mostly nitrogen when we exhale.  What we do when we blow out a candle is basically surround the oxygen with highly stable nitrogen gas. Oxygen can’t bind to the nitrogen and can’t get to the carbon that it can bind to. What happens then is that the flame is extinguished because no heat is being produced.

Woo, science!

TT

Hepatitis C Virus – The celebrity hepatitis

Edit: A version of this article was published in The Advertiser on September 13, 2011.

July 28^th was World Hepatitis day; the day to raise awareness of hepatitis B and hepatitis C. Both are very important diseases: together they cause >1 million annual cases of liver cancer, one of the most deadly cancers. Hepatitis viruses (A, B, … G) are completely different viruses. The thing that they have in common is that they all infect the liver.

You may have heard of Hepatitis C recently, as an anaesthetist was charged with infecting 54 women with Hepatitis C in a Melbourne hospital a few months ago.

Biohazard cookies! (Cookies by James Kleinig and Gen Sinclair; photo by Thomas Tu)

The cause of Hepatitis C, the Hepatitis C Virus (HCV), was discovered very recently in 1989. But since then, we’ve recognised that 3% of the world’s population have been infected with HCV. Famous patients include Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson, the infamous Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read, and stuntman Evel Kinevel.

Wherein awesome things happen

Holy crap, yesterday was a good day.

Firstly, one of the blog pictures (from here) gets included in the very awesome photoblog “Things Organised Neatly“. As you see here, it was reposted around the place with comments like “I miss using micropipettes @.@“,  “ahh brings me back to my 10th grade genetics class…fuck“, and (for some reason) “Is it odd that this is sexy to me?“

Yes, it bloody well is odd (Photo by Thomas Tu)

Secondly, I won second place in an open science haiku competition! The Royal Institution (in conjunction with the Friendly Street Poets) organised the second annual Sci-ku competition earlier this year with the themes being International Year of the Forest and Year of Chemistry. I was picked for second place for this:

Frenzied matter zoo

Then, Mendeleev’s table

The world ranked and filed

I’ll explain this poem a little bit.

Get up off your arses!

Are you comfortable there with your improved health? Not dead because of some penicillin-sensitive bacteria? Good. Now get up and support Australian medical research because less money means fewer medical discoveries that keep you comfortable and alive.

A cut of $400M (absolute peanuts with respect to the size of the Austrlian budget of ~$354600M) over 3 years is being slated for the major federal medical science funding body, NHMRC. To put that in perspective, the NHMRC has an annual budget of ~$700M,  and that’s only after scientists had worked hard for 10 years previously to get up to that competitive rate.

It won’t affect everyone equally. Money gets handed out first to those continuing grants. Those really affected are those young researchers going for new grants; researchers who are more likely to up and change jobs. This would leave a gaping hole in continuing line of researchers and disrupt the entire structure of research. Stop/start funding has huge effects.

Not only that, investment into science is investment into your well-being: pennicilin, cochlear implants, cancer treatments, discovery of the cause of stomach ulcers are all things that have been made possible with Australian research. This is all pretty obvious stuff that has been covered in much better detail by others and still others.

It’s time to do something. Rallies around Australia against these cuts have been planned. Get along to them if 1) you value further medical discoveries that will make your life much more comfortable and 2) are not a jerk. Please visit Discovery need dollars for more details and fliers.

MELBOURNE - State Library – Tuesday 12 April @ 12:45-2PM
SYDNEY - Belmore Park – Tuesday 12 April @ 12:45-2PM
ADELAIDE - Steps of Parliament house, North Terrace – Tuesday 12 April @ 12:30PM (Adelaide time)

Click here to get signs in a printable format

 

TT

I actually do some work…

Lookit! I’m in The Advertiser today with my poo transplant article. To celebrate my continuing fame (and to convince people who are visiting because of the paper that this blog isn’t completely dead), I’m actually going to put up a post.

This week, I’m putting up a new banner containing work that I’ve actually done in the lab.

 

Pretty colours in the liver (Immunofluorescence and photo taken by Thomas Tu)

This is a picture of a slice of liver. It has pretty colours because I’ve stained particular cells with different fluorphores: the blue represents the nucleus of all the cells; the red is the hepatitis B virus-infected cells; and the green are the stem cells and connective tissue. What you can see is that hepatitis B virus only infects the main liver cells and not the stem cells and connective tissue.  And it’s pretty!

TT

Leprosy – How the leper got its spots

Oh crap, I forgot about World Leprosy day (celebrated on January 31st or the closest Sunday). Quick! Read this old article on leprosy that I wrote for On Dit.

Leprosy is a disease wherein the slightest tug to a limb will tear it off like a well-cooked chicken. It is also highly contagious; such that simply touching a person with leprosy will infect you and will certainly and very shortly cause your arms and legs to fall off. *SLAP!* You useless child! *SLAP!* You know nothing about leprosy! Now before I lock you in the basement, I’ll straighten you out…

 

Ahhh! Is it catching? (Photo by Thomas Tu)

Leprosy is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae. (Funky fact: In 1873, M. leprae was the first human-disease-causing bacterium to be identified!) Depending on the strength of immune response incited after infection, one of two types of leprosy may be experienced: tuberculoid, which tends to produce more nerve damage; or lepromatous, which manifests itself in a more skin-oriented way. Don’t be fooled, leprosy is not an insignificant disease, leprosy infected an estimated 410 000 people worldwide in 2004, 75% of whom lived in the poorer countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The serenity of a lab

On new year’s day, I entered the lab having just been on a holiday at a beach shack. Fully refreshed and in an absolutely silent lab, I felt at peace. I needed to set up an experiment and the exciting potentiality of its results reflected the potentiality of a new year for me (hopefully the one in which I will be submitting my thesis).

Like a tea ceremony, I filled tubes with familiar reagents, each with their own personality in my mind. It didn’t matter if the results were what I wanted or not; the performance of the experiment was the most important thing at that particular time. I took a photo to represent what I was feeling at the time.

Lab-time serenity (Photo by Thomas Tu)

Anyway, happy new year! Hope it’s less crap than the last one.

TT

2010 in review thanks to WordPress.com

WordPress.com sent us this summary of our year at WordPress. Some interesting stats for those that are interested

 

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 34,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

 

In 2010, there were 117 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 135 posts. There were 194 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 131mb. That’s about 4 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was April 8th with 1,269 views. The most popular post that day was The Wednesday Post (7/4/10).

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were stumbleupon.com, researchblogging.org, facebook.com, reddit.com, and twitter.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for exploding head, biofilm, pneumococcus, ulcerative colitis, and disease of the week.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

The Wednesday Post (7/4/10) April 2010
4 comments

2

Exploding Head Syndrome – No pun required June 2010
13 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

3

P. aeruginosa, Biofilms and Honey July 2010
23 comments and 2 Likes on WordPress.com

4

Crohn’s Disease – Your Body Hates Your Guts February 2010
3 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

5

The Pneumococcus: “Captain of the Men of Death” January 2010
3 comments