The benefits of no classes

No classes in the summer means that, in between experiments, I get to read papers that are only relevant to my research and read news / magazines I've been meaning to follow up on. Earlier today I was thinking "I love summer". Shortly afterwards I realized that I will be done with all the classes after fall quarter and this is what I have to look forward to! No more grading or reading about scale mutations in carp. This cheered me considerably.

Meanwhile, I'm going to share a few things that caught my attention, one of which is the attempt at driver-free driving on solar power, from Italy to Shanghai (random added comment: I want to go to a World Expo some day) (another comment, since I'm talking about the Expo, the official preview for the Shanghai one makes me think of something out of Second Life. Except with motion-matched music). Although there some people who are skeptical at this point about the usefulness of this technology, given that there are trucks that can just hook on various additional loads to the manned head portion, I can see some plausible advantages. For instance, in any route that will go over mountains, the larger / longer the truck, the lousier the maneuverability around the bendy roads. Having separate cars that can follow the track of the car in font of them means smaller turn radius for all. Another advantage might be that for a multi-load truck, all that cargo cart is still dependent on one engine. This means that the length of the cargo cart addition is limited by the amount of horsepower that the engine can generate, which is a very real physical limit. In contrast, for each driverless car that just follow the car in front of it, there is theoretically no limit on how long that chain can go. Another one-engine disadvantage is that there is literally one engine. If it dies, you are stuck, with all of the cargo. Each of the driverless cars have the additional manual override. So if one car breaks, the car behind can be moved up, and the broken car can be left by the side of the road for the engineer to come along with the next round of commute and the rest of the chain can continue, because each link in that chain will have its own engine. Sure the recharge thing is a minus and the first run is probably going to be full of problems, but just think of the first computer ever build and where we are today in terms of computational sciences.

Anyway, I think it's really cool and I'm looking forward to seeing the route they planned.

The other thing I found is an article about how , basically, if you are bored and if you have internet access, how about helping some astronomers classify galaxies at Galaxy Zoo? And while we're talking about stars, go see the pretty pictures from the WISE satellite. (This is probably another sign that biology ate my brain, but the little blue stars everywhere makes me think of DAPI -- 4',6-diamidino-2-phenylindole -- the blue fluorescent stain that stains cell nuclei by conjugating to the DNA.)

Lastly, a really well-written article from Seed about the identity of the modern scientist. The merging of the public and private, the research for the sake of research with applicability, is something that is understood in the field of biomedical science (since entering the field, I've always just taken it for granted and never tried to understood how the public sees us before, and so this is eye-opening for me as well) and that article describes the current state of things really well. (And yes, if anyone's wondering, we do get ethics lecture every quarter. I'm not sure if it's just this field or if it's for all fields of biology or all fields, period, but we do, with different speakers each time.)

I also noticed that Lucy's updated her class blog, which also does have some pretty well-written stuff as well. (Hope you don't mind the linking, Lucy.) Okay, so there are only two entries, but it's interesting to read thinky, non-news articles that aren't totally mired in science once in a while. Biology may have taken over my brain, but some more breadth is probably good.