ATP-Synthase Modeled in Glass

The Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen has this interesting sculpture of ATP-Synthase entirely in glass. Take a look at their site. Scroll down to the comments where the artist, Colin Rennie, shares some of his thoughts on the scuplture.  It's difficult to really see what it looks like from the photos. I would love to got there to see it myself.

ATP-Synthase is the enzyme responsible for making most of the ATP formed in cells - the main form of stored cellular "energy."  The sculpture is based on a crystal structure published in 1999 and available at the Protien Data Bank, PDB ID 1QO1.

By way of IO9.com

Tycho's Supernova

In 1572, the Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe observed a "new star" in the sky in the constellation Cassiopeia.  He published a small book on his observations of this new star called "De Nova Stella," and thus coined the term nova.  We now know that Tycho's star was actually a supernova and it is still being studied today. Both novae and supernovae involve explosions by stars that cause them to become much brighter than normal.

This is a composite image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope.  The green and yellow are from x-rays emitted by the expanding shell of gas from the original explosion more than 400 years ago.  The blue represents the shock wave from the explosion, also from x-ray emissions.  The red is dust observed in infrared wavelengths.

You can get this image and more from the Chandra Observatory's web site.  There are desktop patterns and wallpapers in several sizes, and a lot of other cool stuff.  Take a look at the photo album for more details about this image.

via IO9.com

Science Careers Booklet from AAAS

The Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), publishers of Science magazine, have put together a booklet of advice for people planning on a career in science.  There are chapters on graduate school, skills for scientists, resumes and networking, non-traditional careers, diversity issues and others.

The articles were originally written for their careers web site and have been collected into an 88-page booklet.  You can see the original articles, individual chapters, or download the whole booklet as a PDF file.  And it's FREE.

Career Basics Booklet - Biotech, Pharmaceutical, Faculty, Postdoc jobs on Science Careers

Musical Interlude from Venezuela

Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra

From this year's Ted conference.  These are high-school aged kids and absolutely incredible. 

Viewing 3D Structures at PubChem

PubChem is now providing 3D structures which you can view or download.  PubChem3D generates a single conformer for molecules which are not too large or too flexible.  You can view the results of this on the compound summary pages.  The Compound Summary page shows the structure of the compound with two tabs at the top: you can choose either the customary 2D view, or a 3D image by clicking the appropriate tab.

You also have the option of an interactive view by clicking either the tetrahedral molecule icon

or the image of the 3D molecule.  There are two options for viewing the molecule.

The first is a web-based viewer that opens a new window and generates an animated gif on the fly.  This web-based viewer takes a little getting used to, and strikes me as rather clumsy.  I don't understand why they did not use a java applet such as Jmol instead.  In fact, Rajarshi Guha's Pub3D site does just this.  Enter a PubChem cid and you can see the 3d structure using Jmol.

The second option for viewing the structure in 3D is to download and install the PubChem 3D Viewer. Windows, Linux and Mac versions are available.  The graphics are nice, but it is limited to the file formats used by PubChem: pc3d, asn,  and sdf for multiple molecule files.  You can load more than one molecule at a time by either opening a multi-molecule sdf file or using the Import option.  With more than one molecule loaded you can toggle between a panel-view which displays all the molecules in a table format, or an overlay mode.  Select which molecules to overlay in the Molecules tab in the right-hand panel.

In addition, the right-hand panel has controls for changing the way the molecule(s) are displayed. Oddly there is no Save function.  There might be no particular need to save the molecular data files from the viewer, but they seem to have gone to some trouble to give a lot of graphics display options.  It's too bad that you cannot save images from the PubChem 3D Viewer.

Kodo Drummers!

We saw Kodo last night in Ann Arbor. You really have experience Kodo in person, but this clip gives you a sense of their power and precision.

Create a Chemical-Free Dryer Satchel ... and Be Sure to Proofread Carefully

Lifehacker.com has a link to a Do It Yourself site for making a sachet you can put in the clothes dryer to make your clothes smell nice.  This one is fun to read just for the comments that other readers have left.  Several point out in amusing ways the absurdity of anything being "Chemical-Free." It's nice to know I'm not the only person out there who is annoyed by such willful ignorance.

Some of the other comments suggest that you probably want to make a "sachet," and not a "satchel" for this project as the Lifehacker title puts it.  This would probably make a big difference in terms of the cost and effectiveness of the project.

In response to the article's suggestion that minty-smelling sheets would be pleasant, one commenter says, "If my sheets smelled like mint, I would probably eat them in my sleep."

Take a look for yourself, and be sure to read the comments too.

DIY: Create a Chemical-Free Dryer Satchel