"As rats do not vomit, a better model for vomiting was sought."

And the follow-up -
"The house musk shrew (Suncus murinus) was found to be a suitable model, as it both vomits and expresses nausea."

I was having an all-around crappy morning today; then I googled how to calculate a coeffient of variation (CV), and found this gem: Don't be caught in your skivvies when you talk about CV's, or confuse STD's with SD's.

Aside from the gross misuse of apostrophes, that's kind of hilarious. Who knew statisticians had a sense of humor??

I'm doing three things this week: 1) Learning a time-intensive cell-based calcium assay; 2) preparing info on 5-HT2A receptor glycosylation for a meeting Friday morning (still not entirely clear on the purpose of this...antibody validation? I think?); 3) working on responses to reviewers' comments on a manuscript from my last lab, which includes a ( Read more... )

I've been researching (i.e. Wikipedia-ing and Googling) atmospheric sciences and figured out a way to explain how the moon and stars, but not the sun, can be blocked from view, as well as how the ground could lose communication between satellites and the space station, but not affect radio communication, weather, or commercial flights ( Read more... )

Maybe it's because it's Monday morning, but this line in a paper struck me as almost hilarious: "The power of co-affinity purification has been enhanced by the strategy of TAP ( Read more... )

I just read that on the Malaysian flight that was shot down over Ukraine/Russia there were over 100 AIDS researchers on their way to an international conference in Melbourne, including a couple of real leaders in the field. Which just...wow. I'm not saying that any one person is more important than another, because I don't believe that at all - it ( Read more... )

Speaking of horrible scientific myths, this article popped up in my facebook feed this afternoon: Common Science Myths Most People Believe. Check out myth #1 ( Read more... )

I'm watching So You Think You Can Dance, and I just saw a commercial for the new Scarlet Johansson movie Lucy - Morgan Freeman says in a voice-over that we only use 10% of our brains ( Read more... )

The best part about working in science (well, one of the best parts) is that all my co-workers are just as nerdy as I am. We had a training session today on a new western blotting system, and the rep used a keyboard shortcut to format some cells in Excel. Immediately all of us leaned forward, and N said "Whoa, what did you just do?" The rep ( Read more... )

Yesterday, boss sent the lab 10 papers to read. This morning, she sent us all 7 more. "Cheers, and happy 4th!" I don't have to read them all this weekend, but still - that's a lot of papers ( Read more... )