Marijuana vs. MRSA
Marijuana, the wonder plant, has once again made its way into the scientific literature by helping people, not with cancer, AIDS, or glaucoma, but MRSA type resistant bacterial infections! (It helps everything!) Before we get too far into this, it’s worth noting that smoking marijuana does not actually help the treatment of lung infections, even though the cannabinoids appear to be potent antibiotics. Research has done the concept of smoked marijuana no good. Be that as it may, Giovanni Appendino and Simon Gibbons, present a compelling case that canabanoids may well be effective antibiotics, in particular they are still effective toward “superbugs” or MRSA. In their recent publication (DOI: 10.1021/np8002673) in the Journal of Natural Products, they detail the ass kickity powers of cannabinoids as well as their derivatives against some of the world’s most naughty bacteria.
This is all very good news since it appears that most cannabinoids aren’t toxic at even high doses and injecting people with marijuana could make for some fun hospital shennanigans. The bad(ish) news is that they’re still around an order of magnitude (or thereabouts) worse than antibiotics like erythromycin against regular old pooie bacteria. Nevertheless, the dearth of new antibiotic discoveries makes this a rather welcome one. Now, if people could get over their crippling fear of the REEFER MADDNESS, maybe we can get some serious research done on it.
Taking pictures of slides is gay
Recently, as mentioned by Klug in the comments, the “take a picture of every slide” game has caught on fervently amongst some people. They also wonder around and take pictures of posters. I think most of them are Chinese, I dunno, I haven’t seen too many Honkey-assed Crackers doing it, but I imagine that once the Chinese start, white people everywhere will start.
Well, this is gay. It’s incredibly fucking annoying to be sitting in an audience and have three flashes go off every time a slide is put up. It’s also invasive to have your poster’s picture taken. This is cheating, I feel, because intellectual property theft should be done with rote memorization - not digitalization. Now the contents of an entire talk can be digitized and transmitted back to the mother ship by the end of the day and the next morning, an entire lab can be mobilized to start pirating your fresh results.
To this, I say, no photography should be allowed at ACS events! Or any event. If it is, I don’t see the point in showing unpublished data. If there’s no point to showing unpublished data, there’s hardly a point in going to a conference.
UPDATE: A good and reflective post by a Chinese colleague of ours can be found here. Also, my spam gobbler is eating some legit comments from new posters. Don’t be alarmed if your post doesn’t appear immediately.
I appreciate your concerns
I have always been a huge fan of the Demotivators. My dad loves their evil counterpart, the actual “motivator” poster. I never quite understood how people could be motivated by a picture, no matter how well framed, with a few words reminding them not to fuck up all the time. It’s like that Jesus poem “footprints” that someone hung up in my room when I was a kid. I recall seeing it on the wall and wondering how anyone found comfort in something so deliberately campy. Happiness is great and everything but it doesn’t come from wall plaques and posters. Happiness is generally caused by drugs or success, the latter being far harder to obtain.
I finished writing the first draft of my chapter. That was a marathon event. If it’s any sort of prelude to a thesis, that fucker’s gunna be a bitch. It’s like I was writing the same goddamn thing page after page after page. Once I got the outline hammered out, it was a bunch of moving words around until I was just nauseated by it. For instance, how many times did I come back after taking a break and see that I had eight sentences in a row that started out with “Recently, Blah and coworkers have…?” Probably one quadrillion, if not slightly more.
And the figures! OH MY GOD. Assembling them for an 8 page manuscript is hard but for a 30 page chapter! That is cockslappingly gay. Anyway. Forgive my kvetching. You can print that thing I made up there off and send it to me or to someone whose sandy vagina is causing them to be an irritating douche bag. (It may be good or bad for lab morale. I don’t know yet. Obviously, men have a 10% higher chance of having sand in their vagina than women. Shocking ’cause dudes don’t have vages, in general.)
ATP (and ADP) detector
Soooo… here’s something interesting. As we all know ATP is the mother’s milk of cells, being the so-called “fuel” that drives cellular processes along by creating, in general, really good leaving groups as well as producing loads of energy when it is broken down. Because ATP is so important, so must molecules that detect its presence be. Itaru Hamachi has made a living off “detecting” ATP for a while and in his recent JACS (DOI: 10.1021/ja803262w) he has announced the discovery of a very novel binding model to create a fluorescent “turn on” event. And by that, of course, I mean when ATP binds to his little molecule, it begins to fluoresce.
The molecule works like this:
Call me loony, but that’s a pretty awesome way to control fluorescence. The Zinc modulates (or activates, in the parlance of organic chemistry) nucleophilic addition by water to the 9 (?) position of the xanthene unit. 
You can clearly see the resulting compound’s new unconjugated buttfuckery no longer lights up. Notice, if you will, the reverse arrows in that reaction diagram. This process is an equilibrium process! Toss in something that binds to the zincs to get it over it’s love of that oxygen and the oxygen pops off as water and you get fluorescence back.
Nifty plus fifty. They show it has strong micromolar binding with ATP and ADP and some other phosphates (but not all of them) and it’s all to the g o o d. Then they take it into cells, where it shows binding efficacy to cytoplasmic particulates with high ATP concentrations. Hooray for science. I have some questions, I suppose, about some of their cell work, but I’m not much of an expert with cells, so I’ll leave those questions out for now. Don’t let my sarcastic montage put the work down, it’s really good stuff.
I encourage you to read the paper, of course, since it is interesting and it will probably make you richer for the experience.
Image clouds! (this can be an open thread if you have something to bitch about)
Soooo… I’ve been writing this book chapter, you see, for about two weeks. The way the labor is divided (I do the text, another guy does the figures and formats the references and the boss rewrites it and asks for new figures) I should be done with my part in a few days. At least until it has to be rewritten. So, I’m utterly distracted and, while I would love to blog about all the literature I’ve been reading but you’ll have to just enjoy a picture of it instead. If you want to blog about all that shit, go for it. I’ll even send you an email notice when the chapter comes out so you can find all the references and write all the posts.
In other news, I’ve fallen in love with word clouds. For instance, I took the first 200 posts of my blog and generated a word cloud using Wordle to see what it is I love the most about life:
Grad School and NMR and polls! Wow. I didn’t realize I loved NMR so much. Or grad school. Here are some others I made. Make your own and post them in the comments!
(you need to follow these instructions to paste your wordle into the comments. Here is a screen shot of the URL you need to paste. Due to heightened security, your image will not show up if you try to use the HTML code provided. Also, due to heightened security, I am allowed to look through your bags and steal your Percocet if you fly on my airline.)
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