Okay, these cracked up my proverbial shit. Over at I Love This World, René got these knockoff puffy E.T The Extra Terrestrial stickers for just $2 on eBay. $2! That’s what I call value. I mean, let’s take a look at these for a moment:

It all starts off as you might expect, with E.T. bopping merrily along in his glowy spaceship, apparently rocking out to some groovy tuneage on his totally boss headphones (with two antennae!).

Then, we learn that E.T. is a lefty, as he veges out in front of his favorite video game, with his unused right hand to his lips in pensive thought. But he doesn’t have the look of your standard tensed-up, video game-obsessed teen… no, his look is almost wistful, as if this game reminds him of a summer spent on the far side of his home planet… and he’s inspired to softly whistle a merry tune. I like this softer side of E.T.

Why, here’s another side of E.T. I like! It’s Get-Down Disco E.T.! He has got all the moves, and he wants you to come shake it with him! Come on, there’s a party in E.T.’s bathroom, and you’re invited! It’s BYOBathrobe, baby!

Whew! That’s quite a sweat we worked up, so now it’s time to get tidy. E.T. knows that all the good little boys & girls & whatevers need to scrub down, especially under their armpits.

Awwww… E.T. wants to show you his favorite panda. Hello, E.T.’s favorite panda! What a lucky panda you are to have such a friend.

HOLY CRAP. I’m sorry, I did not see this coming. The knockoff puffy sticker people killed E.T.! Or, at least hooked him up to some serious Muppet Labs-caliber equipment, so you know the best case scenario is that his head is going to explode.

Poor E.T. Such a fun-loving guy. Why couldn’t we just let him be? Why must we humans always kill what we do not understand? Thank you, knockoff puffy stickers, for showing me that sometimes an alien can be the better human. I am changed.

And now, I’m really, really wishing that I still had my E.T. latchwork pillow kit from when I was 8. Why-oh-why didn’t I find the wherewithal to finish it? I could be an eBay HUNDREDAIRE!

… I’m more of an electric pickle girl, myself. How long ’til we see it on MythBusters? My money’s on Busted.

[via TUAW]

The little red rectangle represents the area of part of the image that fits on my laptop’s monitor

[via John Nack]

We saw this freaky little bird shake his groove thing this past Sunday, while we were watching the start of Discovery’s new series, Planet Earth. The 11-part series is pretty much a commercial for their Discovery HD channel, but dang if it isn’t effective — about halfway through, we were almost ready to succumb to their siren song. Almost. Thanks largely to Hanford’s line of work, we’re knee-deep in various electronic equipment as it is; we’re a little loath to add one more box to the pile.

However, the series has some truly stunning footage, both in terms of beauty and in uniqueness, and it felt like a disservice to not be watching it in HD. I wouldn’t have guessed that there was so much room for improvement in the old nature television game, but this new series is truly breathtaking — it’s a world away from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Hell, it’s a world away from Shark Week. It was like a really good IMAX film in our living room.

There’s more at the Planet Earth website (you’ll have to enable pop-ups, I’m afraid). The first three parts aired this past Sunday, and the remaining parts will be aired over the next few Sundays.

Protein folding on the PS3

Now comes another really cool advance in distributed computing: the use of video game consoles! The latest generation of video game consoles couple some pretty impressive computing power with an internet connection… that makes it a perfect resource to tap into. Stanford’s Folding@Home project has announced a client for the new Sony PlayStation 3. Since the PS3 has such great graphics capabilities, that means you can also watch Folding@Home in action in real time, and can see the 3D dimensions of the protein being folded. [via Kotaku]

After the jump, I’ll offer up my grossly oversimplified explanation of why protein folding is so important. Read on, if you’d like to know more…

Proteins are what make things happen in your body. They are the critical cogs in the machine that is your body. Proteins are created by following instructions in your DNA (read my A Molecular Happening post to learn more about how that happens). Each protein is made of a chain of molecules, called amino acids. There are 21 different amino acids. When these amino acids are linked together, the chain they form doesn’t just stay in a line — it tangles up into a sort of knot. The way it tangles & collapses into a small knot is identical each and every time — and that’s the key to how proteins work. Your body is essentially creating many identical copies of a self-assembling, 3-dimensional puzzle piece. It’s pretty fascinating, and very cool. These proteins, once they’re finished forming and collapse into their functional shape, then go and find other proteins and bits and pieces that fit, perfectly, into their shape. A dance of proteins combining and releasing like dance partners at a square dance, is how things get done in your body. (Keep in mind — this is just my grossly oversimplified version of how it works.)

Now, sometimes, things go wacky. If there’s a mutation in the DNA, for example, then the wrong amino acid might enter the chain, and the final protein won’t collapse exactly right. And then, it can be like a clumsy elephant is trying to take part in the square dance, and everything goes kerplooie. Now, things go wrong all the time, and your body is fascinatingly good at keeping the square dance running along just fine, but sometimes these sorts of things can be the root of disease. We need a much better understanding of how proteins do their thing if we’re going to get serious about treating and preventing disease — everything from cancers, Alzheimers, multiple sclerosis, diabetes; the way we treat these diseases today is going to look like leeches from the not too distant future.

With advances in genomics and genetics over the past couple of decades, there has been an explosion of data around what the sequence of amino acids are in proteins. But knowing how that particular sequence actually folds — ah, now that’s a slippery fish. These proteins, you see, are damned small. And some of them are terrifically rare. It’s not like you can catch them in action in a petri dish.

But what we can do is take what we do know about how proteins generally fold, and what we know about the sequences of proteins, to start predicting the folding patterns of proteins that are implicated in disease — and get a look at how variations in the protein might affect folding. It’s possible, but boy howdy, does it take some massive computers. Or — it takes a massive amount of small computers. And that’s where you and your little old Dell desktop come in.

If you’d like to put your computer to use, take a look at the World Community Grid (my former co-worker and Twister buddy Rich Bonneau has worked with the World Community Grid on protein folding) and Folding@Home projects.

p.s. — I’ve just created a new team on the World Community Grid for Junkyard Clubhouse — if you choose to run the World Community Grid software, please join the Junkyard Clubhouse team (you can do a search when you sign up, or click this link after registering)!

I was working at the Institute for Systems Biology when the 50th anniversary of Watson & Crick‘s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA rolled around. I had the great luck of working right next to Rich Bonneau, a brilliant scientist who made sure to interject into every — every — talk or meeting that we should really be focusing more on putting kangaroo tails on humans. Rich was, and I assume still is, all kinds of awesome.

DNA Twister mat

Anyway, to mark the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA’s structure, Rich and I got a Twister mat and marked each of the four colors on it as one of the four bases that make up the structure of DNA: Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine. We used the spinner to assign which hand or foot was in play, but we used an actual bit of DNA to tell the players where to stick it. I don’t remember what the DNA sequence was from — I think it was one of the genes on human chromosome 14. The ISB faculty joined in, and it was so! funny! when we hit a repeat sequence! HA HA HA HA! HA HA HA HA!

I guess you had to be there.

The wonderful Disney Blog 2719 Hyperion has a great piece on the Man In Space episode of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World Of Color, (the episode turned 52 just a few days ago). The episode is a peek into what the 1950s envisioned the future of space travel to be like. It features both live action lectures by Disney animator Ward Kimball and rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, as well as some animated futurist visuals that are not to be missed. 2719 Hyperion does a better job than I do at really coveying the impact of this midcentury science film:

Perhaps the most interesting footnote about Man in Space is the largely unnoticed impact it had on the development of the U.S. space program. President Eisenhower was so impressed with the program, he requested a print of the film to screen for high-ranking Pentagon officials, which was evidently instrumental in kick starting the country’s space initiatives.

Check out 2719 Hyperion’s post on Man In Space. If you’re nuts about it like I am, be sure to pick up the Tomorrowland DVD, which contains Man In Space along with a few other not-to-be-missed Space Age edutainment shorts from Disney’s timeless TV show.

I got this from Penn & Teller’s very fun 1992 book, “How to Play With Your Food“. I picked up all kinds of neat tricks from that book, but this is far and away my favorite: the glowing pickle trick. I’ve done this dozens of times. It’s pretty simple really: you just plug a pickle into the wall. You’re probably saying to yourself “that sounds dangerous,” and you’re right — it is. As a matter of fact, Penn & Teller’s book doesn’t actually tell you how to do it — they just point out that it’s possible, without giving instructions. I like you better than Pell & Teller do, though, so I’m going to tell you the particulars. But still — this involves exposed wires, which makes it dangerous, so don’t do it. Now that I have that disclaimer out of the way, here’s how to do it:

1. Buy pickles — dill pickles. You want ‘em nice & salty.
2. Get an electrical cord. You can cut one off of an old appliance (buy one on the cheap at Goodwill), or just buy an extension cord. It doesn’t need to be very long, a few feet will do.
3. Split the cord down the middle into its two halves, to about a foot and a half down the cord.
4. Carefully remove the plastic sheathing around the copper wiring inside, a good couple inches down.
5. Twist the copper wires into a point. From here, you’ve got a few options:
   • Try spiking the copper wires directly into the pickle. This can be a bit tricky if your wires are… flaccid.
   • Wrap the copper wires around the loop end of a metal spike. The spikes they sell for lacing turkeys work pretty well, or you can use a fork, or a nail.
   • I spike the cord into opposite ends of the pickle, but I’ve also seen configurations where the spikes both come into one end of the pickle, and are spaced a bit apart.
6. Make sure your pickle is on a safe surface (i.e., one that won’t conduct electricity) and stand back.
7. Turn out the lights and plug the sucker in.

You caught that bit where I said to not do this, right? Good.

Here’s a truncated version of how & why it works: the electricity is conducted across the pickle by the pickle’s moisture, and the yellow light is emitted when the sodium ions in the pickle become excited. The smoke & charred pickle smell are because you’re electrocuting a pickle, yo!

Penn and Teller’s How to Play with Your Food [Amazon.com]

“Protein Synthesis: an Epic on the Cellular Level” is a short film created in 1971 at Stanford University. The intro features Dr. Paul Berg, who would go on 9 years later to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. As much as I enjoy Dr. Berg’s intro, things really start to get running a bit past minute 3, when the hippies show up, demonstrating protein synthesis “using the dance idiom.” And balloons. And smoke. And a drum circle. It’s actually a very good demonstration of how protein synthesis works, and apparently it’s still shown in classrooms today. I first saw this film a bit over a decade ago, when I was working at ZymoGenetics.