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It Isn’t Spring Until the Birds Arrive

Posted on by Sara Klink

With spring finally gaining a foothold in the upper Midwest as temperatures rose above 60 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend, everyone including myself has been spending more time outdoors. Like my fellow blogger Karen, I am a gardener and have been digging and planting everything from raspberries to currants to apple and peach trees.

However, one of my favorite parts of spring is hearing and seeing all the birds that flit around my property. Ironically, I was outside in a hat, gloves and coat when I heard my first redwing blackbirds of the season but since then, robins have taken up residence, and the house sparrows have returned, stealing the grass seed I scattered on my rather thin lawn. Nuthatchers are entertaining to watch as they peck at tree bark upside down while they hunt for food. An eastern bluebird has taken up residence nearby, and I enjoy spotting him every day, sitting in a tree or resting on my shepherd’s hook. The chickadees are fun to spot as they switch branches on a tree. Crows occasionally stop by especially if I have left out some pizza crusts for them. Turkeys have even hung around my front lawn, and I startled them (and they, me) as I opened my front door and they quickly flew away. I was up early one morning before most birds were active and all I could hear was “gobble, gobble, gobble”.

I’m still learning about all the different birds that stop over on my property as I expect there are more I have not identified. Which birds do you enjoy spotting in the spring?

Vegetable Gardening for Beginners

Posted on by Karen Reece

raised bedYou may have read several posts on this blog relating to the non-spring-like weather we have been experiencing here in the Midwest. Well, it’s still cold, but the weather has to break sooner or later and that concept has me so excited to get my garden going! Have you ever considered gardening? Are you new to gardening? You may have considered it and gotten overwhelmed by the details- What class should I take? What books should I read? What do I do?

I am here to tell you to Just Do It! There is nothing like watching your own food grow and then eating it. Things have been growing in the dirt since the beginning of time with no help from humans, so if you approach your garden project with this in mind and just aim to take it lightly, gardening can be really fun! I got started about four years ago only because someone at work left a flat full of different seedlings and a sign that said help yourself. I waited until the end of the day and only a few disappeared, so I carried the whole flat home on the bus and got started with just a 4´ × 4´ plot. Here are some beginner tips; just things I’ve learned over the last few years, that may help you get started. All these tips will be from a Madison, WI, perspective, but should be applicable anywhere in the midwest. Continue reading “Vegetable Gardening for Beginners”

Science Confirms What We’ve Always Suspected: Potato Chips are Irresistible

Posted on by Terri Sundquist

RatI love potato chips. There’s something very satisfying about the crunch of a good chip. The problem with chips, other than the obvious effect they have on my waistline, is that I can’t eat just one. Neither can my husband, who loves to open a bag of potato chips while I’m preparing dinner! To explain the disappearance of the potato chips, we joke that the chip-eating culprit in our house is not my husband but a giant mouse that has developed a taste for salty snacks.

Recent research presented by Tobias Hoch at a meeting of the American Chemical Society shows that not only do rodents love potato chips but that this attraction may not be due solely to the high ratio of fats and carbohydrates, which is one proposed explanation for the “bet you can’t eat just one” phenomenon. There is something else that makes potato chips irresistible. Continue reading “Science Confirms What We’ve Always Suspected: Potato Chips are Irresistible”

Rats to the Rescue! From Landmines to Tuberculosis, These Rats Have a Nose to Help

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

treat3A little over a year ago, I wrote about many of the characteristics of the domestic rat that made them an unexpectedly good choice for a family pet. Since I wrote that blog, my family has welcomed three very personable rats into our home.

To my family, rats are funny, playful, treat-stealing companions. However, in other areas of the world, some distant cousins to our mischievous threesome have become real-world heroes. These rats help clear fields of landmines and, as if that were not heroic enough, significantly increase the number of diagnosed tuberculosis infections. Continue reading “Rats to the Rescue! From Landmines to Tuberculosis, These Rats Have a Nose to Help”

Spring! Well, It’s Almost Here….

Posted on by Sarah Dewbre

Spring Cleaning ProductsIt’s Spring! Well, if you’re here in the Midwest, you might think I have lost my mind with temps in the 30’s and low 40’s, but it will be here before we know it! I know that I have Spring on my mind, and with that, I need to clean my house. I don’t know about you, but this winter has been horrible on my family for sicknesses—we can’t seem to get rid of these germs. That’s enough! I’m cleaning the house from top to bottom!

I don’t know about you, but the task of getting it all done seems quite daunting. I live in a average sized home, so it’s not the size, but it still seems like I have a lot of ground to cover. Especially because I want it done in one day.

So, I wanted to share some tips that I have used in the past, and some that I have received from friends and relatives, particularly this year with the amount of illness we have had in our home lately. Continue reading “Spring! Well, It’s Almost Here….”

Protein:protein Interactions: GST Pulldowns

Posted on by Gary Kobs

trypsinGST pull-downs

Pull-down assays probe interactions between a protein of interest that is expressed as a fusion protein (e.g., bait) and the potential interacting partners (prey). In a pull-down assay one protein partner is expressed as a fusion protein (e.g., bait protein) in E. coli and then immobilized using an affinity ligand specific for the fusion tag. The immobilized bait protein can then be incubated with the prey protein. The source of the prey protein can be either from a cell-based or cell-free expression system. After a series of wash steps the entire complex can be eluted from the affinity support using SDS-PAGE loading buffer or by competitive analyte elution, then evaluated by SDS-PAGE.

Continue reading “Protein:protein Interactions: GST Pulldowns”

Sonnets in DNA

Posted on by Isobel Maciver

William ShakespeareFor sixty years now, scientists have studied the role of DNA as a vehicle for the storage and transmission of genetic information from generation to generation. We have marveled at the capacity of DNA to store all the information required to describe a human being using only a 4-letter code, and to pack that information into a space the size of the nucleus of a single cell. A letter published last week in Nature exploits this phenomenal storage capacity of DNA to archive a quite different kind of information. Forget CDs, hard drives and chips, the sum of human knowledge can now be stored in synthetic DNA strands. The Nature letter, authored by scientists from the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK, and Agilent Technologies in California, describes a proof-of-concept experiment where synthetic DNA was used to encode Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a picture of the Bioinformatics Institute, and the original Crick and Watson paper on the double-helical nature of DNA. Continue reading “Sonnets in DNA”

Copper Containing Surfaces and Their Potential for Reducing the Spread of Infection and Antibiotic Resistant Gene Transfer

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

As a scientist and a jewelry artist, there are not that many occasions when my two passions overlap. As a geneticist, I find the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistant microbes to be fascinating in a “this is really cool and utterly terrifying” sort of way. As a jewelry artist, I love experimenting with new and different metals. Some of my current favorites are stainless steel, copper and bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin. So you might be able to imagine my excitement when I came across an article in mBio discussing the public health implications of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of antibiotic resistance genes on clinical and public touch surfaces made from copper alloys compared to those made of stainless steel (1).

Stainless steel: The unexpected, gene-transferring truth

Polishing stainless steelStainless steel is often used in clinical and public settings as work surfaces as well as other surfaces that are touched and cleaned often. Stainless steel is used in these applications for many of the same reasons I like it for jewelry: it is strong, resilient, relatively inexpensive, stain- and corrosion-resistant and will weather regular cleaning/exposure to moisture well. There is something about a gleaming stainless steel work surface that looks, well, sterile. But is it? Continue reading “Copper Containing Surfaces and Their Potential for Reducing the Spread of Infection and Antibiotic Resistant Gene Transfer”

Promega Connections: The Year in Review

Posted on by Promega

Your Promega Connections bloggers had a great time bringing you cool science stories, technical tips and assorted other reading material this year, and we want to say a big “Thank you!”  to all of our readers for your time, your comments, and your reblogs.

Here are some of the highlights from 2012.

I can doodle people!
I can doodle people!
In January Kelly blogged about The Making of a Science App, describing the work to create the Cell Signaling iPad app that we released last year. An update is forthcoming early in 2013 (GPCRs!), and we continue to improve our iPad, iPhone and Android apps as well as our web tools for scientists. If you haven’t played with them, check them out. They are all free. Cats, dogs and their humans have found Kari’s blog post about catnip intriguing as well. Continue reading “Promega Connections: The Year in Review”

Uniquely Buried in a Wisconsin

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

WinterIt is winter in Wisconsin, and it has arrived with a blizzardy vengeance. My family and I are snowed in for the second day, and as I write this I am trying not to think of the twelve plus inches of snow that covers my driveway. I am afraid to measure the height of the drifts.

The world outside my window is beautiful. Tree limbs and fence posts are frosted in white. There is a LOT of snow out there, and that made me stop and think, there is an awful lot of uniqueness out there. IF every snowflake is unique. And according to a local Wisconsin snowflake expert, University of Wisconsin, Madison, meteorology professor Pao Wang, they aren’t. Continue reading “Uniquely Buried in a Wisconsin”