Cool stuff

So you ran any number of 5K charity races yesterday or went on the Piedmont Farm Tour. But it's a rainy Sunday in the Southeast and you're wondering what to do with a house full of cooped-up kids, especially if it's too soggy to do day two of the farm tour. Let me suggest that you get to Durham, NC, to MakerFaire:NC. Maker Faire is an annual event organized by the people who bring us MAKE Magazine. Maker Faire:NC is a fully sanctioned event but is being planned and coordinated by Raleigh/Durham locals. Our goal is to bring together Makers, Crafters, Inventors, Evil Geniuses, Scientists,…

The other day, author pal and PharmFamily friend Rebecca Skloot sent out a Twitter request for iPhone app suggestions for her new gadget, particularly those that might be of greatest use on her upcoming, self-supported book tour for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Let me first congratulate Ms. Skloot on ditching that CrapBerry and adopting a technology that is as superior as her book. Rebecca got me looking at my iPhone and made me realize that, well, it sort of has that not-so-fresh feeling. I've got a few tried-and-true apps that I've shared with our Twitter followers but I even feel…

At the recent U2 Academic Conference, I had the opportunity to be at the local premiere of It Might Get Loud, a much-more-than documentary of the electric guitar as told through the careers of Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, U2's The Edge, and Jack White of The White Stripes and Raconteurs. For the record, I thought that White was going to be totally out of his league - while I wouldn't call him a "legend" as billed by the producers, I left being incredibly impressed with his background and breadth of abilities. Related to the movie trailer below, I had an exchange with Toaster Sunshine, a…

While working on a science-rich post and writing an exam, something came across Twitter that is, well, too good to just be seen only on Twitter. Fullsteam is the name of the plow-to-pint Southern microbrewery in Durham, NC, no-longer-in-planning-but-not-quite-done and I have written about the tweeter several times. The imagination behind brewing a beer with sweet potatoes (it's awesome, btw) or kudzu comes from the very same mind that burped into his iPhone for the benefit of shared education with his daughters. The result: I use Google voice search all the time and have been very…

If you follow me on Twitter (@abelpharmboy) or looked at this post Thursday, you'd know that I was going to a meetup of area Twitter users. I honestly had no idea what to expect and have to say that it was a rather enriching experience. It gave me a chance to press the flesh with a crowd very different and higher energy than some (but not all) scientific gatherings. The group was different because the people I met were more in the tech and communications biz and the higher energy might have come from that I was probably one standard deviation away from the mean age. Click through the photo…

I just learned of this great post from Southern Fried Science via a tweet from Southern Fried Scientist that was retweeted from Rick MacPherson (Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets). I mention this because my RSS reader is so full of unread posts that Twitter is serving me far better these days by quickly pointing me in the direction of blog posts and articles that would most likely interest me. The blog is written by Andrew and David - both Southern, both fried, and both smelling of a combination of smoked pork and spiced Low Country shrimp. The blog is characterized as, "The new look…

Even though it's Saturday morning, drinking coffee while getting ready to take the PharmKid to ballet class, I'm not usually one to throw up YouTube videos as blog posts without any context. However, my dear friend, frequent commenter, and devoted traffic-driver, anjou, passed this along to me. I've never really gotten into the whole spoken-word / poetry slam movement but maybe it's because I haven't been paying attention. We also don't have HBO so I've never seen Def Poetry, where these Vanessa Hidary performances aired. Even if you aren't Jewish or a woman, these two are worth every…

Okay people, these students in Miss Stacy Baker's biology classes and Extreme Biology blog have been rocking my world for quite some time. They've now burst onto the national media and were all the buzz of the recent ScienceOnline'09 conference. For those not familiar with the story, Stacy Baker is a biology teacher at the Calverton School in Huntingtown, Maryland, who began a website for student activities and class notes back in 2006. With the boundless enthusiasm of ninth-graders and more seasoned AP biology students, the site has become interactive: a blog, Extreme Biology, with videos…

The recent passing of Studs Terkel and my conversations with African American colleagues after the Obama victory has given me pause to think about our life stories, especially the life stories of our elders. For example, I lost all of my grandparents before I could get their life stories on videotape, digital recorder, or writing - I also said I was going to do it during some visit home. My grandparents had some incredible stories about The Great Depression, the World Wars, even the history of my hometown that was farmland in the middle of factories only a dozen miles from one of the…

The statin class of cholesterol-lowering agents is rich with history and lessons in the power of natural products, the potential of the prepared mind, and just how precarious the path of drug development can be. American Scientist, the official publication of the scientific research society Sigma Xi, hosts this issue an absolutely lovely article entitled, "Statins: From Fungus to Pharma." Expertly and engagingly written by University of Pennsylvania biology professor Dr Philip A Rea, the article launches with the story of a then-young Japanese biochemist, Akira Endo. (Evidence of my…

Now here's a wreath that won't create controversy or get the homeowner's association after you! If you're agonizing over what to get for that hard-to-figure relative, how about a personalized gift wreath for the holidays? The idea: create your own memorWreath (PDF here). A nicely personalized holiday gift: supply up to 10 digital photo images and a theme (family vacation at the beach, new baby, etc.). A commercial graphic designer mounts the photos and theme on a lovely 16" wreath from Maine...all for $45 (plus $10 UPS ground shipping in the US). I saw something like this last year for…