Skip to main content

A quick intro:



As a chem major, I get way too excited about talking to random people about chemistry. Today for example, I had a field day explaining to my barista why her chemistry teacher sometimes says hydrogen has a +1 charge and sometimes says all the elements on the periodic table are neutral.  When I talk to non-chemists about chemistry, it makes me feel all tingly inside. Does this mean that I am meant to be a pre-school teacher? Is it because I have a power complex and enjoy feeling like I know more than everyone else? Do all pre-school teachers have power complexes? 

I prefer to think that my excitement is born from my strong belief in the power of critical thinking, reasoning, and of course, the scientific method. Communicating the importance of these tools to non-believers, skeptics or those that just can’t be bothered seems to me to be a noble endeavor. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good skeptic. In fact, skepticism is one of the qualities I think all good scientists possess.

In my short 2 decades on this earth, I have come to the conclusion that there is a lack of clear, open, and non-elitist communication between us sciency-types and those that are spending their time thinking about other important things—like whether Shakespeare’s stuff was stolen, how we can improve the economy, or who the hell let the dogs out. 

Before I scrap my plans to attend grad-school for neuroscience research to pursue a science writing career, I thought I’d try my hand at this open, non-elitist communication thing. I hope with this blog I can summarize and cite some sciency tidbits that I find interesting in a way that will make all of you interested in them too. The point is, I don’t think science is just for scientists, and whether you slept through your high school chemistry class or read your physics textbook from cover to cover, I think you’ll enjoy this blog.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AlphaFold2 Part 2: The ion channel challenge

Last month I wrote about the wonders and perils of the artificial intelligence program that predicts 3D protein structures, AlphaFold2. As an ion channel enthusiast , I naturally wanted to know how AlphaFold2 performs at predicting the structures of proteins embedded in cell membranes. When I search PubMed for articles that mention both "AlphaFold" and "ion channel" I only get 34 hits. This surprised me, given the hype and the general paranoia around AI replacing humanity. If we use these search results as a proxy for the state of the ion channel protein structure prediction field, I'd say the juice is still in the coconut. I wanted to know how well AF2 would do at predicting an ion channel protein structure, so I asked it to generate the structure of Kv2.1, a voltage-gated potassium ion channel that I studied during graduate school. Kv2.1 is a pretty important protein. It regulates neuron firing throughout the brain and body where it helps us learn new stuff, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Precision murder -- wait, no -- medicine

A non-zero amount of what we call ‘medicine’ could be described as just controlled cell murder.  This was my revelation after researching a new treatment for certain cardiac arrhythmias called Pulsed Electric Field Ablation, which I became interested in when my father-in-law asked me how it worked during our Christmas visit. “How can it kill the heart cells and leave the nerves and blood vessels intact?” I had no idea. I know next-to-nothing about medical treatments for cardiac patients, much less how this Pulsed Field Ablation technique could have fewer side effects than the standard-of-care ablation techniques. A quick Google search piqued my curiosity when I learned that PFA is also sometimes called “high frequency irreversible electroporation”. While less catchy, that name revealed a bit more about the mechanism of action behind PFA - electroporation - which happens to be something I actually do know something about. Electroporation refers to the formation of holes (pores) in c...
Post a Comment
Read more

iPSCs, the new model organism?

Induced pluripotent stem cells. The name doesn't exactly roll off the tongue and it certainly doesn't conjure images of mice, fruit flies, monkeys, or any of the other classic model organisms used for basic biomedical research. These so called "model organisms" are just that; animals that help scientists model the way that the most promising human therapeutics in the collective pipeline will behave in humans. And now induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, are becoming an increasingly popular tool used for developing and testing novel drugs way before we expose any real human patients to them. The upside to using model organisms is pretty obvious -- we minimize exposure of humans to potentially unsafe molecules. The downsides are many, but one big one is that sometimes potential new drug molecules look really promising when they are given to a mouse with a human-like disease, but then that same molecule does nothing (or worse, is toxic!) when it goes into human clin...
Post a Comment
Read more