Pauls, Plugs and the Periodic Table (or the 3 P’s)

I’ve been busily toying around in the Lab and following up with different SciFoo lead, so haven’t been posting much.

The first plug is literally a plug, or a bunch of plugs. A couple of years a go I went in on half a batch of Mushrooms with Paul Silber : spiral dowels infused with mushroom mycelium. We split the loot in 1/2, each taking a hundred or so mycelium infused dowels of Shiitake, Chicken of the Woods and Oyster Mushrooms. I spent the better part of two days drilling holes and plugging logs and nothing happened. But I got some advice from Paul Stamets at SciFoo and decided to plop a couple of logs in the creek for a couple days, now the Shiitakes are in bloom!

I have one Open Science Project we’re working, which involves the development of a “cheap” “inexpensive” hand-held, battery operated PCR device. If anyone reading would like to contribute, you may do so through the DIYbio Google group or just give me a call.

I also wanted to mentioned that our friends around the corner in the Omega Center, ImQuest, have won an NIH grant in the tune of $6.5MM over the next five years. The grant is “to support the development of a long lasting, safe, and acceptable combination topical microbicide product” for the prevention of HIV transmission. I had the chance, briefly, to meet Robert Buckheit when he was in FITCI last week. He’s been reading the blog and promised to make the next BioBeers (not scheduled yet, but probably in November or December).

And today, trying to come up with something to post about, I read this little write up on The Periodic Table of Videos in Genome Technology. There is a video of almost every element in the periodic table, narrated by some whacky chap from Nottingham with hair standing straight up in the air. This one about Na (sodium for you Biology majors) is particularly amusing: