Cloning, Missy Higgins, Coffee, and Blue Planet

I spent a large chunk of yesterday afternoon running RT PCR gels for DNA purification. Only to find out in the end that the PCR hadn't worked and we had no DNA. There are several possibilities why, the most likely being that Steve decided on too few cycles for the PCR. So we'll have to do it again, which is a bit of a pain, but that's life in the lab since you can't tell whether or not it worked until you've run the gel. And next week is our last week at Westmead. I'm torn as to whether or not I'm happy about that. If I could instantly teleport myself to Westmead for free, I'd want to keep going there. And we're doing some cloning now (and "cloning" in science very rarely refers to making Dolly - this is small scale gene inserts). Which is really cool. I'd go into detail but it would mean nothing to most of the people reading this, unless I could draw pictures and explain it.

I was just getting ready to leave the lab when I got a text from Ching reminding me about the Missy Higgins concert that evening. So I ended up going straight from the lab to Manning Bar on campus. I have to say I was rather thankful that for some explicable reason I'd pulled on a nice top that morning and made a bit of an effort to look decent. Normally I don't really care what I look like for Devo because it's all the same ~15 people every week for lectures, and they've already seen me on bad days, and then I'm wearing a labcoat for the afternoon. Not much of a point in dressing up, unless you happen to end up at the campus bar for a free Verge Arts Festival concert and don't have time to go home and change.

The concert was amazing. She has an incredible voice. And great songs. The lyrics are a nice mix of straightforward, metaphorical and silly fun. Sometimes all at the same time. I can definately see why us international students seemed to be the only people in the place who didn't know who she was. Although Katie (from Vancouver) apparently really likes her and obviously knows who she is. I know Missy Higgins isn't just limited to Australia, but being from Melbourne, her following is understandably greater here. Nobody wanted the concert to end, and we managed to get her to come back out for not just one but three encore songs. I love artists who don't scorn performing for free in a campus bar even though almost everyone there would have been more than willing to pay to see them. You can tell how passionate she is about her songs. I went to her homepage when I got home and listened to some recordings. Still amazing, but doesn't even begin to approach the way she sounds live. It just lacks that little extra punch that comes with being in front of an audience that's loving every minute of it. And you can't see the way she gets into the songs. Even so, I'm definately buying the album. Missy Higgin's Official Home Page is quite good and you can listen to quite a few entire songs. I recommend checking it out. And then buying the album.

My coffee plunger has a crack in it. This is not good. I'm hoping it ends high enough that I can still make enough to fill my travel mug. Otherwise I'm going to have to buy a new one because that will still be cheaper and faster than buying coffee. The lack of brewed coffee here makes for an incredibly inefficient system. I'm used to being able to dash into the coffee house two minutes before class, grab a thermos from the counter, dump the coffee into my mug, toss a meal card at the cashier, and still be seated in the lecture hall before the prof starts talking. Here, I stand in line for several minutes because everyone has to place an actual order, order my flat white, pay with cash and wait for change, then stand in line AGAIN while the guy works the espresso machine and steams milk, and can't make any more than two coffees at once and we certainly can't help ourselves because every coffee has to be made individually. I guess this is just indicative of the laid back Aussie attitude. There's no need to be in a huge rush.

Who's watched the Blue Planet? I've actually missed it every time it's been on, although I think my mom taped it and it's hanging around in the basement somewhere but I haven't found time to watch it... But that's not my point. My point is that I have now seen pieces of original footage that was sold to the BBC I think and then used in Blue Planet. This morning Adele brought in videos taken on submersible dives she was involved in. Unedited. Not nearly so spiffy looking as the Blue Planet, but much, much more interesting. Adele was actually the one TAKING the video in several cases. It makes things much more real. I always find that Discovery Channel specials have a very surreal quality to them. They edit out everything but the organisms, put some enchanting music in background, and add a calm, collected voiceover with dramatic pauses. It's pretty to look at, and for the general public I guess it's enough information about the deep sea. But I think it's much more fun to listen to the scientist and the pilot squabbling over what to do next, and to understand why they're actually down there in the first place (the goal is never "to take pretty pictures for TV", that's just a nice perk), and to watch while the claw moves painfully slowly to pick up the camera, and see the collecting bins along the side of the submersible. And to get an idea of just how much goes into getting that footage. In a day, they do two dives of four hours each. After the first dive (while the submersible recharges), all the scientists on the ship get together, review what they have, and decide what the next person who goes down in the submersible is going to do. The goal for my class today was to watch the video clips and then decide what we would do if we were on the next dive. It was funny. One of the videos was taken at a salt pool at about 700m depth. Basically, a giant super-saturated salt lake at the bottom of the ocean, with a shoreline of mostly mussels. And it really did look like they were wandering around a terrestrial lake, until the eels swam by. Adele laughed and commented how everyone is always so interested in this lake and wants to suck up samples of the water and always ignores all these mussels that could vary depending on their location in the mussel bed. Meanwhile, I'm sitting there with my plan to scoop up mussels and stuff at different distances from the shoreline and different locations in the mussel bed and compare their biology. Honestly, is ANYONE in that class a biologist? (That wasn't supposed to sound like the start of a rant, just a question)

Eep! I was supposed to meet Ching to go grocery shopping 2 minutes ago!