studyblring

For anyone who doesn’t grow, grafting is a trick you can do with many plant species. Because plants have no immune system, you can cut a branch from one tree and attach it to another tree, and that branch will continue to grow. Bind the two plants at the join for long enough, and the two will grow together, giving you, basically, a Frankentree. Sometimes the plant tissues will even grow into each other, so you end up with single branches that have living tissue from both plants in them, like some kind of chimeratree.

They don’t even need to be the same species (though they do need to be compatible). A lot of plants you can buy from professional growers are actually grafted. It’s quite common to take a plant with a strong root system and graft the top half of another plant to it – this can let you grow plants in environments which wouldn’t normally support them. If you ever see chilli plants on sale, it’s quite common for them to be grafted. Look for the join, low down the stem, a few centimetres above the soil.

You can be audacious with this kind of thing, and grow fruit branches on trees that wouldn’t normally bear fruit, or you can even grow one tree with multiple types of fruit.

Being able to identify microbes in real-time aboard the International Space Station, without having to send them back to Earth for identification first, would be totally amazing for the world of microbiology and space exploration.

The Genes in Space 3 team turned that possibility into a reality this year, when it completed the first-ever sample-to-sequence process entirely aboard the space station.

The ability to identify microbes in space could aid in the ability to diagnose and treat astronauts in real time, as well as assisting in the identification of life on other planets. It could also benefit other experiments aboard the space station.

HELPFUL SCIENCE HINT: Identifying microbes involves isolating the DNA of samples, and then amplifying – or making lots and lots (and LOTS) of copies - of that DNA that can then be sequenced, or identified.  

As part of regular monitoring, petri plates were touched to various surfaces of the space station. NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson transferred cells from growing bacterial colonies on those plates into miniature test tubes, something that had never been done before in space (first OMG moment!).

Once the cells were successfully collected, it was time to isolate the DNA and prepare it for sequencing, enabling the identification of the unknown organisms – another first for space microbiology.

Enter Hurricane Harvey. *thunder booms*

“We started hearing the reports of Hurricane Harvey the week in between Peggy performing the first part of collecting the sample and gearing up for the actual sequencing,” said Sarah Wallace, the project’s primary investigator.

When our Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston became inaccessible due hurricane conditions, Marshall Space Flight Center’s Payload Operations Integration Center in Huntsville, Alabama worked to connect Wallace to Whitson using Wallace’s personal cell phone.

With a hurricane wreaking havoc outside, Wallace and Whitson set out to make history.

The data were downlinked to the team in Houston for analysis and identification.

“Once we actually got the data on the ground we were able to turn it around and start analyzing it,” said Aaron Burton, the project’s co-investigator. “You get all these squiggle plots and you have to turn that into As, Gs, Cs and Ts.”

Those As, Gs, Cs and Ts are more than just a nerdy alphabet – they are Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine and Thymine – the four bases that make up each strand of DNA and can tell you what organism the strand of DNA came from. 

“Right away, we saw one microorganism pop up, and then a second one, and they were things that we find all the time on the space station,” said Wallace. “The validation of these results would be when we got the sample back to test on Earth.”

Soon after, the samples returned to Earth aboard the Soyuz spacecraft, along with Whitson.

With the samples now in the team’s JSC lab, tests were completed in ground labs to confirm the findings from the space station. They ran the tests again and again, and then once more, to confirm accuracy. Each time, the results were exactly the same on the ground as in orbit. (second OMG moment!)

“We did it. Everything worked perfectly,” said Sarah Stahl, microbiologist.

This capability could change future space exploration.

“As a microbiologist,” said Wallace, “My goal is really so that when we go and we move beyond ISS and we’re headed towards Mars or the moon or wherever we are headed to, we have a process that the crew can have that great understanding of the environment, based on molecular technology.”

For more information, follow @ISS_Research. 

An audience member stopped World Science Festival host Jim Holt from speaking over physics professor Veronika Hubeny

So, after thinking about this over night, I’ve decided to share something that happened at the WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL yesterday afternoon in NYC that changed me. Or rather made me step into who I am in a larger way.

As some on my feed have seen, I was live-feeding the beginning of the panel discussion on FB. That panel was made up of some of the greatest and most famous minds in the world in Inflationary Cosmology, String Theory, Cosmology and Physics based Philosophy. The panel was made up of 5 men and 1 woman. And the moderator was a science writer and journalist for The New Yorker.

In the first hour of the panel discussion you can see clearly, if watching the video, that Veronika Hubeny, the only woman on the panel is barely given any opportunity to speak. And the Moderator, Jim Holt even acknowledges this.

In the last 20-30 minutes of the 90 minute discussion Jim Holt finally pushes the conversation to Hubeny’s field of expertise, string theory, and this is what ensued:

He asked her to describe her two theories of string theory that seem to contradict one another.

And THEN, without letting her answer, proceeded to answer for her and describe HER theories in detail without letting her speak for herself.

We could clearly see that she was trying to speak up. But he continued to talk over her and dominate the space for several minutes.

I should say that this panel was taking place in a large auditorium as it is an extremely high-profile and always sold-out event. And the panel discussion was being live-streamed across the world and they say that millions of people watch these videos after they are made public. (Which they already are).

So at this point, after seeing very clearly that she was not going to be given space to speak and in fact having her own theories described to the audience by the moderator, I am in full outrage. My body is actually beginning to shake. The sexism is beyond blatant. It is happening on stage and NO ONE, not a single other physicist or panelist is stepping in to say anything about it. And I can hear other audience members around me, both men and women becoming more and more agitated with what is happening. Jim Holt, even at one point, asks Veronica a question and she laughs because he has been answering his own questions about her work…and he makes fun of her for ‘giggling’.

So at some point while he is Still talking about Her theories, I just can’t handle it any longer.

With my hands shaking,

I finally say from my seat in the 2nd row of the audience, as clearly, directly and loudly as possible;

“Let. Her. Speak. Please!”

The moderator stops.

They all stop.

The auditorium drops into silence.

You could hear a pin drop.

And then the audience explodes with applause and screams.

Jim Holt eventually sat back, only after saying I was heckling him And he let her speak. And of course, she was brilliant.

———————–

So, the panel discussion ends.

My hands are still shaking. I’m still upset by the incredible sexism that has been demonstrated this afternoon. But I also realize that I just spoke up in an auditorium full of people that are listening to people that are considered gods in the international science world. I was just overwhelmed by it all

We get up to leave.

And then it happens.

Person after person come up to me. Both men and women.

The first woman, right behind me, reaches over and embraces me and says, “Oh my god. what you said was the most important thing that was said all day. Thank you. Thank you.”

And then people start filing out of their aisles and wind their way over to me:

“Was that you? Thank you so much for speaking up. Thank you.”

“Was that you? Oh god, what he was doing was horrific. Thank you. I wanted to do something but didn’t know how”

“Was that you? I wish I had the courage to say something, thank you! Thank you so much”

“Was that you? You said what everyone here was thinking. Look I had even been writing in my notebook what you eventually said (shows me his notebook with ‘let her speak’ written over and over.) But you said it. You said it. Thank you.”

“Was that you? Thank you! I felt so powerless to do anything.”

And on.

So we were all thinking this.

—- So I walked out. And my friend who was sitting about 8 rows behind me, came up to me with a huge grin and said “That was you, wasn’t it? Of course it was. YES!!!!! I will be telling this story for years.”

And the whole time, my hands are still shaking. And I’m felling light-headed. And I just want to scream out into the lobby “WHY IS THIS SEXISM STILL HAPPENING? WHY, does someone like me, with No status in that room, have to be so extraordinarily bold and speak up? And why was it so frightening to do so?”

And I’m thinking. “God, please god let this be an opening for those that were here today and the tens of thousands that watched the live-streaming of the panel yesterday and the hundreds of thousands that will watch the video this year- to speak up when we see this happening. And please let me not be afraid to do this again …and again …and again” Because it was scary.

The three Americans won “for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm,” the Nobel Foundation says.

From the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, which announced the prize early Monday morning:

“Using fruit flies as a model organism, this year’s Nobel laureates isolated a gene that controls the normal daily biological rhythm. They showed that this gene encodes a protein that accumulates in the cell during the night, and is then degraded during the day. Subsequently, they identified additional protein components of this machinery, exposing the mechanism governing the self-sustaining clockwork inside the cell. We now recognize that biological clocks function by the same principles in cells of other multicellular organisms, including humans.

Why Do We Fall Asleep When We’re Bored?

University of Tsukuba researcher discovers why we have the tendency to fall asleep in the absence of motivating stimuli.

A GUIDE TO MAKING EFFECTIVE SLIDES aka how to create presentation slides that actually improve your presentation

By Eintsein