5 Things Meme

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ilovebacteria
on November 17, 2008
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Abel Pharmboy over at Terra Sigillata sent me this meme and I figured it might be fun. If you don’t already know, there are some decent science blogs over at the aptly named scienceblogs web site and they are definately worth checking out if you are in to reading about stuff what scientists say. Some of the blogs are intellectual, others are less confusing to the small of mind. There are 73 to choose from, so sure at least one will appeal!

Any way, on to the meme thing. If you fancy sticking it on your blog and want me to link to you, drop me a line and it shall be done.

5 Things I was Doing 10 years Ago
1. Just starting out at uni
2. Moving out of home
3. Living on Pot noodles and Smash
4. Drinking a fair amount of beer
5. Plotting world domination

5 Things On My To-Do List Today:
1. Do more work than I usually achieve on a Monday
2. Try to find a way to not have to work next weekend
3. Avoid running anyone down on my driving lesson
4. Fix some of the gaping plot holes in my book
5. Try to persuade boyfriend to let me get some pet rats

5 Snacks I Love:
1. Sushi (just the fish)
2. Chocolate milk
3. Malteasers
4. Marzipan fruits
5. Pork scratchings

5 Things I Would Do If I Were A Millionaire:
1. Stop brushing my hair and live in just pyjamas
2. Build tower science lab so I don’t have go out to work
3. Go to Madagascar to see the lemurs
4. Sit in bed and write books
5. Wear more hats

5 Jobs I’ve Had:
1. Supermarket checkout girl
2. Waitress in a psychic camp for old people
3. Filing slave in an office
4. Science web site goddess…hang on, it doesn’t really count if I don’t get paid
5. Scientist (I don’t think that counts either)

Good god, my life is uninterested.

Confessions from a Disillusioned Postdoc

Published
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ilovebacteria
on November 15, 2008
. 4 Comments

At eight years old, I was peering down my dad’s microscope at leaves, bugs or whatever else I happened to have rammed onto the viewing platform. In my kitchen laboratory, concoctions of pond water, mud, Ribena cordial and half the contents of the spice cupboard became amazing new medicines that my little sister was encouraged to drink. Were these the warning signs that I was destined to become a scientist or a crazy person? I am hoping it was the former, although I am not so sure these days where the line between the two lies.

Fast forward 20 years, and my lifelong dream to become a microbiologist has been fulfilled. So why does it sometimes feel so empty? The problem is that, the older I get, the more thoughts of the future start to matter. Maybe some people would be happy plodding along in a job with no long term security, hoping for the best and just getting on with it. But not me. After how ever many years working to get to this point, surely I should be finding it easier, not hitting yet another wall over which I have to struggle before I can make it to the next level?

The first postdoc is easy to fall into, but there is so much to prove now. If I don’t greatly improve my publication record in the next few years, what are my chances of getting a second postdoc? Then, after two postdocs, I will be drifting into that seven years as a postdoc territory, where I should really be thinking about getting a lectureship or a permanent research position. But there is a seven pound problem with this – what if I decide to have kids?

I will be around 34 years old when I finish a second postdoc (providing I get to that point). There are no extensions on fixed term contracts if you take maternity leave. So, if two candidates go for that all important lectureship, one with a massive, baby-sized hole in their publication record and family commitments meaning they are no longer willing to work all hours under the sun, who do you think is going to get the job? And do I even want such a competitive and demanding job if I have a young family to go home to?

I believe this is why science has such a bias towards men in the top positions. Maybe women are not actually experiencing active prejudice in this job, but sometimes the perceived discrimination you think you will come up against is enough to make you want out. Sure, I know that plenty of women do make it and I don’t want this to sound like a feminist whinge about how female scientists have it so bad. But, I don’t believe you truly can have it all, and that goes for both men and women. Something will always have to give.

Germ Stories by Arthur Kornberg

Published
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ilovebacteria
on October 26, 2008
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Germ Stories

I have just posted a review of Germ Stories by Arthur Kornberg. It is a great book, all about bacteria, fungi and viruses, complete with amusing poems on microbes and some amazing illustrations!

Here is an extract from the review:

“Hurry, hurry to the parade of the strangest creatures ever made.”

So starts Nobel prize winner Arthur Kornberg’s ‘Germ Stories’, a collection of rhyming stories about the “little beasties” responsible for diseases such as AIDs, food poisoning and pneumonia. Mixed in with these nasties are some good guys, including the mold that brought us Penicillin, and also yeast, much loved by bread and beer enthusiasts!

For me, the most exciting thing about this book are the beautiful illustrations. Every poem is decorated with the smiling faces of hand drawn germs and full page illustrations that bring the world of microbes to life. Salmonella Typhi of typhoid fever fame is featured on the front cover, but it is the brightly coloured germ parade, complete with fireworks and microbe-balloons that I enjoyed the most.

 

Bacteria Stuff

Published
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ilovebacteria
on June 13, 2008
. 1 Comment

I have been trying to finally get around to updating all the bacteria pages to include photos of the little microbes as well as the (possibly a little strange) cartoons. This proved easier than I thought as good old Wikipedia has loads of public domain images that can be reproduced as long as the author is referenced. The Escherichia coli electron micrograph below is my favourite.

I’ve also begun adding in some general bacteria info, like the pages on bacterial morphology and inside the bacterial cell.

Escherichia coli cluster

Guestbook

Published
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ilovebacteria
on May 28, 2008
. 1 Comment

I added a guestbook to ilovebacteria.com a while back, although the anti-spam graphics were more efficient than I anticipated and prevented anyone from posting (thanks for the heads up Sarah!). Hopefully the problem has been solved now…I went with a free PHP script called GBook if anyone is interested. Having been through a number of free guestbook providers in the past and always had spam issues, I’m interested to see how this one turns out.

Back when Ratlab was still going strong, I could always tell what messages were spam as they generally contained a string of web addresses and lots of references to Viagra. Nowadays, spammers seem to have evolved into something much worse and leave messages such as ‘Hmmm, not sure I agree with your point. Can you provide references?’. Of course, when you click on their seemingly innocuous homepage, your innocence is assaulted by whatever horrors lie within.

But no matter how complex the spam filters in operation in my shiny new guestbook are, the world still waits for a way to prevent school kids from posting half a dozen messages informing me how ‘poo’ I am, or letting everyone know what they think of poor Kevin in their class. What ever happened to the days when kids just chased each other round with sticks?

Evolution isn’t perfect…

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ilovebacteria
on May 6, 2008
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Interesting question from a visitor to the site:

Apparently the comedian Dara O’Briain said something like “If the theory of evolution is really true and we’ve undergone millions of years of evolution, why do we still sometimes bite the inside of our mouths?” Perhaps this could be one of the silly questions answered on your site.

Think about this for a second. It is undoubtedly painful and annoying to accidentally nip the inside of your cheek while, slightly over-enthusiastically, munching on a piece of delicious steak. However, you would have to be pretty unfortunate to die of such an injury. And that’s the problem with evolution – it deals in the currency of life and death, not degrees of irritation. So, if some particular trait or ability doesn’t kill you and/or make you infinitely less/more attractive to the opposite sex, good old evolution is pretty much going to ignore it.

I often hear people talk of how, in several million years, humans will have evolved to all be 6 foot tall, or blonde and beautiful, or to have one eye in the middle of their forehead as we no longer need two. But these folk are missing one vital point, and that point is the male nipple. Let’s face it guys, there really is no purpose to your little chest appendages. But they are still there, right? That’s because evolution really has no interest in removing something that does you absolutely no harm – it’s really got better things to do. Just so long as you survive long enough to have babies, evolution is perfectly happy. You can bite the hell out of your mouth or be in possession of pointless nipples or have a massive nose, and, just so long as you can find one person out of 6.5 billion who is willing to procreate with you, then evolution just isn’t going to take the blindest bit of notice of whatever physical defect you possess.

This is one of my favourite arguments against that whole creationist nonsense. Surely if someone was going to design a human, they would have made us, sort of, better? I mean, wisdom teeth? I can’t talk for the rest of the planet, but I can say that my own cause me no end of pain and annoyance. And what about child birth – surely no other animal finds the whole experience quite as dangerous and traumatic as a human? Could it be that evolution has selected for those physical traits that, while allowing us to walk upright and have big brains (i.e. massive baby heads), also result in lots of women finding their pelvises not really all that great during the process of giving birth? In the toss up between being able to run around on two legs and pain-free childbirth, evolution obviously found the ability to walk on two legs more useful to the survival of the human race, and the ‘wonder’ of childbirth was the trade-off.

A perfect human wouldn’t bite the inside of their lips, experience difficulty in giving birth without help, possess pointless male nipples, endure chronic back pain or develop impacted wisdom teeth. But we’re not perfect. All those little annoyances we have to put up with simply because we’re human are the product of all those years of evolution choosing the traits that help us survive long enough to have healthy kids and ignoring everything else.

XDR-TB

Published
by
ilovebacteria
on March 21, 2008
. 3 Comments

I probably shouldn’t get quite so excited about this sort of thing…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7308364.stm

This is apparently the first case of XDR-TB in the UK. Scary stuff.

National Science Week

Published
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ilovebacteria
on March 17, 2008
. 1 Comment

Last week was National Science Week and, to celebrate this momentous occasion, I took part in a day of science experiments with a bunch of GCSE and ‘A’ level students. Thanks to the lovely English tabloids, I cannot help feel a mild sense of trepidation when faced with a load of 16-18 year olds. Are they going to shout abuse when I ask them to fill in a worksheet? In short, no.

Can you believe that there are people out there who find the prospect of using a Gilson to load a DNA gel exciting? Or can come up with questions like ‘Do GFP-expressing pigs see in shades of green?’ It turned out to be a lot of fun and I ended up giving my email address to one science teacher, who wants someone to come into her classes to talk about scientific research and help out with some experiments. So I began trying to come up with fun bacteria-related practical demonstrations that will make microbiology exciting to people who aren’t quite as geeky as I am.

Bacteria doesn’t exactly have the best image among the general public. When it isn’t viciously murdering the helpless in hospitals, it is contaminating your kitchen surfaces and putting our kids at risk. Thankfully, we have all these amazing cleaning products that kill 99.9% of bacteria or restore the balance of good bacteria in our guts. But, hang on, does anyone actually stop to question whether there is really any evidence to back up the claims of commercial organisations? Have we all been taken in by all those adverts that dress up their products with scientific sounding spin?

Maybe these products work, maybe they’re actually a pile of nonsense. But hands up how many of us have bought a probiotic drink without first attempting to hunt down the peer-reviewed literature to check out whether there has been any studies to suggest that ingesting milky drinks crammed full of lactobacillus really does do us some good? Does anyone stop to wonder if our guts really are so unbalanced that we need to stock up on ‘good bacteria’? And do these drinks even contain enough bacteria to stand a chance of competing with everything else that’s already living in our intestines?

So my idea for the ‘A’ level students is to get them to investigate the representation (or misrepresentation) of science in the media and adverts. How many products use science to sell them to the public? What do the claims made about these products really mean? How many have proven scientific principles behind them? Can we reproduce any of the supposed affects of these products in controlled experiments? Even if I put an entire class off a science career, hopefully I’ll make them start questioning all the supposed ‘science’ we’re all subjected to on a day to day basis.

Darwin

Published
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ilovebacteria
on March 12, 2008
. 0 Comments

I’ve posted about the Darwin Correspondance Project on a previous blog, but figured it was kind of cool:

Charles Darwin changed the way the world thinks about where we came from and where we are going when he laid the first foundations of the theory of evolution. His theory was based around the process of natural selection, whereby animals or plants best suited to their environment are the ones that are most likely to survive and reproduce. This results in a species gradually changing over time, becoming more and more adapted to the conditions they survive under.

Even today, his 1859 ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection’ presents some controversial arguments to many, with a suprising proportion of people still believing that God created the world in 7 days. The fact that Darwin developed his theories at a time when the bible was still taken at face value by the majority makes his work all the more amazing.

What you may not have known is that Darwin was, in a way, the Victorian equivalent of a science blogger, exchanging letters with nearly 2000 people during his lifetime and recording the development of his work in great detail.

In one of his earliest known letters, the 12-year-old Charles Darwin, said of his standards of personal hygiene:

I only wash my fe[e]t once a month at school, which I confess is nasty, but I cannot help it, for we have nothing to do it with.

And of the voyage of the survey ship HMS Beagle, where he was to first begin to develop his theory of natural selection, he wrote:

The scheme is a most magnificent one. We spend about 2 years in S America, the rest of time larking round the world.

The ongoing Darwin Correspondance Project gives us a remarkable insight into his life and work, by providing details of around 14,500 of his letters.

DMOZ

Published
by
ilovebacteria
on March 7, 2008
. 2 Comments

I love DMOZ - the open directory project. They have real living, breathing human beings approving every site that gets listed, meaning that you don’t have to wade through all the rubbish out there on the net to find what you’re looking for.

And for web developers, it is a godsend which can propel your meagre little web site from its lonely pit of despair in the deepest, darkest bowels of the web, to a position of greatness with daily visitor numbers well into the double figures! See, there are all those mirror sites that just publish the DMOZ directory on their own pages. Sure, this is annoying when you type your search query into Google and the first 69,877,566 hits returned are all pretty much the same, but it’s even more annoying if you own the website which is hit number 69,877,567.

If it hadn’t been for the nice editors deciding to list my first attempt at a web site, I don’t think anyone would have happened upon poor old ratlab.co.uk, and what a joy would have missed out on by so many. So much of a fan of DMOZ was I, that I decided to become an editor for this vast collection of over 4 million web sites and, for a few months at least, I happily logged on to the site and approved or denied the huge numbers of sites (4 or 5) being suggested by eager little web developers. Perhaps my standards were a little bit high as my decisions were often over-ruled by my superior editor. But all the same, I was doing my bit for the small but significant Kids_and_Teens/School_Time/Science/Experiments corner of the web. Us Kids_and_Teens editors were the coolest of the cool, we even had our own message boards and a pretty coloured link on the front page of the main site, while all the other dull categories had to make do with plain blue. But I digress. In the end, this editor-lark, like many of my projects, soon fizzled out, as did the original web site that had first led me to DMOZ.

But now that I have returned with a vengeance, I am somewhat miffed that I can’t seem to get my replacement at DMOZ to approve ilovebacteria.com. My own editor account has sadly been removed through inactivity, not that I was planning to log in and just add my site myself of course (my solemn editor’s oath to uphold the principles the Kids_and_Teens category would mean I would immediately go to hell should I commit this ultimate of crimes). So what am I to do? Does this mean I might actually have to do all that SEO nonsense all on my lonesome?