Here's a pretty neat example of technological time travel: media preservation folks at Indiana University found gramophone records printed into books from the late 19th century. The records aren't solid media. They're just ink-based reproductions of the grooves found on records. From these grooves we can produce waveform images and from the images we can produce audio. The original authors of these reproduced records explicitly intended their work to be accessible in the future, though they clearly didn't foresee technology like scanners or audio editing software.

There are other, earlier examples of hand-engraved waveforms. Here's one from 1806, mentioned in the link above but looped by me just for fun:

I listened to this TED talk by Allan Savory today. TED talks are usually rich in big ideas and poor in specifics. This one is certainly no exception. Even so, it illustrates one potential example of an established phenomenon proving to be somewhat less than the absolute truth.

Savory explains how global climate change isn't just due to an overabundance of burning carbon sources. It's also due to rampant desertification. Many former grasslands have, over the course of the last century or so, lost most of their natural plant life and groundcover, exposing the soil to the elements and increasing water loss by evaporation. The area no longer serves as carbon storage. Savory proposes that the only solution (and here's where I start to get skeptical, at least due to his claims of the "only solution") is to mimic the effects of natural animal movement patterns with livestock. Large herds of cattle usually don't stay in one place for long: they graze for a while and move on to the proverbial greener pastures. Some success has been had in planning the grazing patterns of domestic livestock such that they keep moving through arid areas and stimulate plant growth rather than just consuming it all. The improved plant growth should prevent or even reverse large swaths of desert and allow for enough carbon storage to reduce atmospheric carbon to pre-industrial levels.

It would be nice to think that reversing carbon-based climate change is as easy as shuffling around livestock. I worry about how well the theory scales up; what assumptions are being made about how much desert land can really be reverted to grassland? Do these plans require more livestock than we currently have? What's the potential impact on methane levels? Allan Savory has been talking about holistic resource management for decades, but some actual models of its potential impact on climate change would be nice to see. I presume they exist somewhere. (There's plenty of climate-bloggery about Savory's hypotheses out there but much of it looks less than open-minded.)

It's a lovely shade of orange.

I found this in a lab cleanout today: SDS Tris-Glycine Butter. Not the best thing to put on a baked potato, even if it wasn't more than a decade old.

Guess who's BCKDK (this is BCKDK, or at least its structure). Image by Wikipedia user Emw.

Speaking of awkward acronyms: BCKDK.
It's branched-chain alpha-ketoacid dehydrogenase kinase, an enzyme critical to amino acid metabolism in humans. Defects in BCKDK are linked with some forms of autism.

A single residue change appears to confer the disease phenotype.

Creating new methods is great for three reasons:

1. It allows old phenomena to be explored in new ways.
2. It provides other researchers with more options.
3. It permits creation of ludicrous acronyms.

A recent paper by Moreno et al. in Molecular Systems Biology is an example of cases 1 and 3. Perhaps it will someday be useful to researchers studying protein-protein interactions, but for now, SPLIFF looks like a good way to visualize interactions found by other assays (i.e., yeast two-hybrid).

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This is a method called SPLIFF. It's about lighting up cells. Somebody got a little carried away with that acronym.

SPLIFF is a Split-Ubiquitin method and indicates protein-protein interactions within cells though the ratio fluorescence produced by two auto-fluorescent reporter proteins. Assays for protein-protein interactions usually use a growth phenotype or a colorimetric reporter to indicate interactions, so SPLIFF may offer more clearly quantifiable, temporally-sensitive results. The authors also show how SPLIFF, like other fluorescence-based methods, can localize interactions within cells. The protein interactions are reportedly detected instantaneously.  Hopefully this method can weed out some of the false-positives in two-hybrid interaction screens.

Citation:
Moreno, D., Neller, J., Kestler, H., Kraus, J., Dünkler, A., & Johnsson, N. (2013). A fluorescent reporter for mapping cellular protein-protein interactions in time and space Molecular Systems Biology, 9 DOI: 10.1038/msb.2013.3