Fuck Yeah Bio Major Planarian

[Picture: Background — an eight piece pie style colour split, alternating yellow and baby blue. Foreground — a picture of a planarian. Top text: “[classmates: I wish i could just learn this by osmosis]” Bottom text: “[*Face Palm*]”]

[Picture: Background — an eight piece pie style colour split, alternating yellow and baby blue. Foreground — a picture of a planarian. Top text: “Transformed bacteria finally in log phase” Bottom text: “Spill contents of flask”]

Submitted by touba

Or sometimes, somebody comes in to talk to you at the worst possible time and you have to either be super rude and just ignore them or listen to them and have to start all over again >_<

{Picture: Background — an eight piece pie style colour split, alternating yellow and baby blue. Foreground — a picture of a planarian. Top text: “Show up to first day of new research job” Bottom text: “Everyone away for the week at a conference.”}

Soooo typical. Gotta love absent-minded PIs.

[Picture: Background — an eight piece pie style colour split, alternating yellow and baby blue. Foreground — a picture of a planarian. Top text: “If two twin girls marry two twin boys, will their children be identical?” Bottom text: “Face palm.”]

Submitted by never-endingsummer

[Picture: Background — an eight piece pie style colour split, alternating yellow and baby blue. Foreground — a picture of a planarian. Top text: “King Phillip came over for great” Bottom text: “Sax”]

Not a typo, as in saxophone. Embarrassed high school teachers FTW.

Submitted by C

Mod sez: Lolol, mine used to say “great steak” :D

{Picture: Background — an eight piece pie style colour split, alternating yellow and baby blue. Foreground — a picture of a planarian. Top text: “RNA extraction” Bottom text: “Get paranoid about RNase contamination” Under bottom text: “-they’re EVERYWHERE!!-“}

I hate how the second you put on your sterile gloves your nose gets itchy and you have to scratch it.

openthemoondoor asked: Science fiction for BIOLOGISTS, you ask? I point you gently towards Peter Watts, a marine biologist who is my favorite hard science fiction author. The "Rifters" trilogy is pretty good--about sociopaths who are... "reformed" to work in the deep sea--but my absolute favorite is _Blindsight_. If you're not afraid of deep, hard questions about humanity and a tough but satisfying read, I can't recommend it enough!

"Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts." -- James Nicoll, SF critic.

Oooh, sounds like a tasty read! Marine biology and pondering life-the-universe-and-everything, sounds like my kind of thing :)

Thanks for the suggestion!

{Picture: Background — an eight piece pie style colour split, alternating yellow and baby blue. Foreground — a picture of a planarian. Top text: “Read science fiction” Bottom text: “Where are all the biologists?”}

I know, right? It’s always “warp speed this” and “wormhole that.” Well, I guess we always have Jurassic Park and other things where they go and discover some improbable alien lifeform and butcher the biology (“this 10-helix DNA holds 12000x more information than human DNA,” or alternatively “radiation gives you superpowers,” or even “Vulcans have an inner eyelid!”). I guess what’s missing is scifi with *proper* biology, although if we held all scifi to that standard there wouldn’t be any and the magnificence that is Leonard Nimoy spouting technobabble would have never seen the light of day (and despite significant flaws in the science, Jurassic Park is actually a *really* good book). Sigh :/

[Picture: Background — an eight piece pie style colour split, alternating yellow and baby blue. Foreground — a picture of a planarian. Top text: “Why can vegans eat mushrooms?” Bottom text: “Am I being punked right now?”]

Submitted by Maren

Interrupting our regularly scheduled procrastinating studying for finals to say this:

WOLFRAM|ALPHA IS THE BOMB.

I used it religiously when I was taking Ochem and had to fill out pages of info about various compounds for my lab reports, but I just read over some of the new stuff they added and boy, is it good:

-oligonucleotide melting temperatures: don’t bother looking up papers, just chuck in your primer sequence and get all the info you need!

-metabolic pathways: it doesn’t show the actual reactions, but it gives you all reagents, their structures, and even the enzymes if you click “more detail” enough times (ex: pyrimidine biosynthesis or citric acid cycle)

-also, everything you wanted to know about (mostly human) genomics in general

-species characteristics: want to know the size of a vampire bat eyeball? (Well, actually you can’t do that ‘cause they don’t have enough data, but you can totally look up blue whale eyeballs or the speed of grass growing)

-for all of the premeds out there: compute various things about the human body, drug interactions, healthy parameters for a certain size and weight, lens prescriptions and other cool stuff

-the calories in a metric lightyear of rich chocolate ice cream (or, you know, actually useful nutrition facts)

-basically whatever you can think of that involves numbers. It’s pretty nifty to play around with and every once in a while I come up with legitimate uses for it like calculating the number of sheep per capita in New Zealand (golly, we’re on the decline!) or looking for easter eggs.

Okay, go have fun.

And for the love of all that is biological, please submit stuff! I having trouble thinking about anything besides the microbial loop and comparative adaptations to dive stress in marine mammals.

xoxo,

Bio Major Planarian

Fuck Yeah Bio Major Planarian

Fine Folk