Under the Skin

I am a little tired of seeing the people on facebook constantly lambasting Monsanto.  It is indicative that we haven't moved past our initial fear of the early 1800s when Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein."  Those who are afraid of genetically modified foods, pesticides and irradiation, quite frankly, do not understand the science behind it.  Monsanto has invented things that have not been great.  But if you've been a chemical/pharmaceutical/agricultural company since 1901, it's inevitable that at some point, you're going to make something that shouldn't have been made.  Some of them were great ideas, but had something unknown.  Like DDT.  Some of them were great ideas, but were used in not great ways. Like Agent Orange, which was a pesticide, and not approved or intended for use on people. But, Monsanto has given us lots. And after seeing the 20th list of "Five Reasons Monsanto is from Below,"  I made my own version. 5 Ways Monsanto ha...

This week has been quite crazy for everyone in my major.  I kept on telling myself that I needed to get through Friday, and then I would be fine.  The problem is that I didn't think about the fact that weekend wouldn't actually end it in this situation.  Maybe I just need to get through this and the next month and then I'll have some breathing room. But this isn't a bad thing.  In some ways, it is a great accomplishment that I have done all the things that I have this week.  It is just my last semester, and that's how it is. 

Tonight I realized something about myself that the rest of the world probably noticed years ago.  I am not normal.  I came to this conclusion when I was studying for blood banking class.  I was looking at some of the notes and noticed that in African Americans, B is A LOT more common than it is in whites.  However, I would think that this would make AB also more common, but it isn't.  This didn't make sense to me.  So, I did something very nerdy.  I calculated Hardy-Weinberg. A little bit of an explanation.  ABs come about when an A and a B have a baby and the baby gets both an A and a B.  Since only 11% of whites are B, and most As and Bs are actually AO and BOs, ABs are really, really, rare. Only 4% of the population. Even when an A and a B have a baby together, only 25% of their children even come out AB.  But, in African Americans, the B frequency jumps to 20%.  You would think that this would result in more ABs, but it doesn'...

This Saturday, I woke up at about 4:30.  This is because I went to Pocatello!  Why would I do that you ask?  Well, I went to the Intermountain Branch Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.  I was presenting some research up there. It was fun, but you could tell a couple of things: 1) The Intermountain Branch doesn't have a lot of research-based universities.  Westminster presented just a couple, Weber State presented a few, Dixie State presented one, Idaho State presented the same thing about 10 times, and then everything else was BYU. 2) The Intermountain Branch has a perhaps unhealthy obsession with halophiles.  These are bacteria that like salt--a lot of salt.  I would hypothesize that this is because of the huge and convenient halophile breeding-ground known as the Great Salt Lake.  3) At Microbiology Conferences, they raffle off pipeters and protein gels.  'Nuff said. 4) Idaho state researches nothing but Blastomycoses...

This Friday night, my roommates and I had a movie night.  One of my roommates got a Redbox of The Perks of Being a Wallflower , and we watched it.  It was a well-done movie.  Of course, another roommate didn't like how I jokingly described it as "angsty Percy Jackson makes out with rebellious Hermione Granger." It was just a comment on casting.  After it was done, one of my roommates decided she wanted to read the book.  I have read the book, and I liked the book, but felt that I needed to tell her, "Just so you know, the book is more explicit and illicit than the movie.  They toned it down in the movie.  If they followed the book exactly, that movie would not have been PG-13."  In fact, the book is one of the most commonly "challenged" books, meaning most commonly suggested for censorship.  This doesn't necessarily mean much, because To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men are also on that list, but it is.  This started a discussi...

Yesterday, I got to have my very first migraine!  It almost seems like I should think of this as some kind of an inauguration, but I don't.  Saturday morning, I woke up, and went to the grocery store.  Normal Saturday.  I had a couple more bacteria that needed to be processed up in the lab, so I headed up onto campus to take care of that.  I was interpreting and running biochemicals when a couple other people from my major showed up.  Yes, I have one of those majors where there are more people than you can count on one hand working up in the lab on a Saturday morning.  Anyways, I was working with Paige and Eric, two people in my major, when I started to get a kind of hazy glaze over my right eye. For a few moments, I just rubbed it and blinked it away, thinking that it was just going out of focus for a moment.  When I was younger, I had a big problem with my pupils not focusing on the same place and actually had prisms in my glasses to fix it....

Evidence that those fun-engines are not consistent:  I was curious what my blog was rated.  The first time, I was rated G. Then, I got a PG-13 for saying "dead."  I honestly don't know in what universe dead is a bad word.  But apparently, it is.  Later, I was R-rated.  Why?  I said "suck."  And I think that that was a time I was using it as when you put your lips around a straw and SUCK. But at least we now know that I'm intended for all ages.