This is from the GE Life Sciences handbook Gel Filtration: Principles and Methods. It is shown on page 45 with no context whatsoever, other than potential applications of their fancy technology. For non-biologists, this is a so-called gel filtration trace, which is a technique used to separate a mixture of proteins based on their size. The peaks (which range from the big sharp one at ~45 minutes to the smaller lumpy things around 20 minutes) correspond to the proteins that are present in tears. The most basic interpretation of this figure is that there are at least 6 or so proteins that make up the majority of those found in tears. But there are so many more questions!
What are these different proteins?
Whose tears were these?
How were the tears obtained? Did someone go to a funeral with a test tube and collect tears of grief? Did they stab somebody for tears of pain? Perhaps an olympic athlete donated tears of joy after winning the javelin throw.
Would the protein components of the tears be different depending on whether they are tears of joy/sorrow/pain?
Why is the buffer so salty (0.5M NaCl) and acidic (pH 5.3)? Are tear proteins only happy under salty acidic conditions?
It would not be hard to answer some of these questions. For #1, I’m thinking that you could take a few tears (probably wouldn’t need very many), TCA precipitate all the proteins, perform a trypsin digest, then identify them using peptide mass fingerprint analysis.
#4 could be a Nobel-prize winning experiment. Say for example that with joy tears, the peak at 65 minutes goes way up. You have now identified the Hope protein. I’ll go so far as to name it Hopease.
Stephen Colbert belted out an awesome rendition of Friday on last nights Jimmy Fallon.
There is an easter egg at the 3:48 point; some weirdo in the background holding up a giant square barcodey thing (technically a QR Code). Here are some screencaps I took. I couldn’t find any online tools to parse these, it seems like the only way to read them is with an app for your mobile phone. I used QR Reader for iPhone. If you are too lazy to install and take a picture of your computer I will tell you it is a link to this website.
I was in the post office yesterday, and I noticed they have these flat-rate shipping boxes, advertised with the slogan “If it fits, it ships.” So you pay $13.95 to ship anything that will fit inside a 12″ x 12″ x 5 1/2″ box, for example. Wouldn’t it be funny to fill up one of these boxes with the densest element on the periodic table, then go to the post office and ship it?
Of course the element I speak of is osmium, which weighs in at a hefty 22.6 g/cm3. If my math is correct here, that 12″x12″x5.5″ box translates into 792 cubic inches, or 12.98 liters. Fill it up with a huge block of osmium and it would weigh 293 kilograms, or 646 pounds.
So you’d probably actually need like 6 people to lift the box. And the fact that osmium costs ~$30/gram, this little prank would cost $8.8 million to pull off. Depleted uranium might be a little more economical. It’s only 19.1g/cm3, so fill up that same box with DU and it would only weigh 546 pounds. Still pretty funny.
I have been tortoise-sitting for my friend Andrew’s pet tortoise Woodward. Through a series of discussions it was decided that we needed to make a music video starring the beast, wherein a hacked Playstation webcam would be used to videograph the world through Woodward’s eyes. Jesse and Olivia and I spent Christmas day on the project. Olivia whipped up an awesome application to capture hi-res video from a USB webcam. Here is a rough cut using the footage that resulted.
Back in 1886 some relatives of mine (I assume) founded the Stiles Brick Company in Bridgewater, MA. The industrial revolution demanded mountain piles of high-quality bricks, and the SBC cranked them out with maniacal fervor. Take a walk through Lowell, Waltham, etc… these towns are 99 and 44/100% pure Stiles brick. I have often dreamed of having a house built entirely out of Stiles bricks, obviously with the “STILES” side facing out, so as to passionately declare that it is MY HOUSE.
At some point, the SBC underwent a merger of some sort and became the Stiles and Hart Brick Company. This business move created an unstoppable juggernaut of brick production that is in full force to this day. However, it entailed a redesign of the logo on the bricks, and they now feature a more modest “S+H” insignia. These bricks are everywhere, but you might never know it since the plain side is usually facing out.
Well yesterday I was wandering around Central Square in Cambridge, MA, where most of the sidewalks are brick-lined. I happened upon a few bricks that were overturned, and was pleased as punch to see that familiar S+H shining up at me. Yes, this entire sidewalk is constructed out of Stiles + Hart Bricks, so as far as I’m concerned it belongs to me. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that much of the metro/Boston area is similarly paved with my bricks, and I would be entitled to claim ownership of all the sidewalks if it ever came down to that.
Some time ago I bought these silicone ice cube trays from Ikea. Ice cube tray a very serious misnomer, because the ice that comes out of these things is anything but cubes. But the ice is in fun shapes (I got the arrows and crosses), so it’s a little sad to see that the Ikea PLASTIS line of ice-making molds is no longer in stock (nb: you can still purchase a very similar item from Amazon).
So I’ve been making humorously-shaped ice for quite a while now, and the other day I was torn between using ice arrows or ice crosses to cool my tasty beverage. At this very moment I questioned which shape would cool my drink more quickly. That is, does the ice arrow or the ice cross have more surface area?
It’s a pretty simple problem to solve, and anyone who graduated from Jr. High geometry should be able to figure it out in less than 5 minutes. I present here the precise measurements that are necessary to get the answer. My solution is here (spoiler alert!). I hope you agree.
This train of thought led me to conclude that an ice shape that would cool your drink most quickly would be one with the maximal possible surface area in a given volume. If only someone could engineer a tray that makes ice in the shape of a high-order icosahedron. That would get your drink cold in no time flat. Or better yet, something approaching a fractional dimension, where you’d probably need advanced degrees in math to even predict the cooling effects of such a hypothetical ice shape on a beverage.
