Around the Blogs

In this week’s around the blogs: How to talk to your professor, fragrant E.coli and chromatography-inspired poetry.

Short and Schweeeeet. The Female Science Professor gives some hilarious advice to students on the etiquette of talking to their professors.

Flash DNA sequencing. This post at Discovering Biology In a Digital World flags up some neat flash animations of Sanger DNA sequencing that are worth taking a look at.

…and even more movies. Andre at Biocurious highlights some amazing movies and illustrations of RNA and fatty acid dynamics on the website of Janet Iwasa, scientist-turned-graphic designer and animator. Janet publishes her work under a Creative Commons license that allows the movies to be used for non-commercial purposes, like teaching.

What we don’t know, Part I and Part 2. Alex at The Daily Transcript weighs in with two excellent posts that he promises the first in a series concentrating on topics where our understanding is less than complete. Part I is on organellar shape and part 2 on glycosylation.

Minty fresh E. coli. Aminopop picked up on a story about a group of MIT students who engineered an E. coli strain that smells like mint. This strain is a must for fermentation scientists everywhere!

They’re not E. coli anymore! More on E. coli, this time at Nobel Intent, where John Timmer reports on the work of Richard Lenski who has made some startling observations on the evolved metabolic changes in E.coli that have been grown under poor growth conditions since 1988 (!). Lenski’s work has recently earned him election to the (US) National Academy of Science.

Philosophies on Open Access. Cortunix draws out an expert from an article written by Peter Suber on the benefits of Open Journal Access.

Poetry in Motion. David at The World’s Fair tells us about the world’s largest [or only??] collection of chromatography-inspired poems.