The Lighter Side of Science

Useful or Useless: Weird Things Packed in Our Evolutionary Suitcase

Posted on by Natalie Larsen

Genetics are a curious thing. Don’t get me wrong, on paper and in theory, the study and science behind our inheritance completely checks out. However, in practice, it can still be a bit disconcerting to look in the mirror one day and recognize your father’s nose and eyebrows in your own face, or to realize you gesticulate in the same animated fashion as your mother, and sometimes hear her laugh come bubbling out of your own mouth.

More curious still are the structures and behaviors that have been carried throughout evolution to the modern era of humanity, though we are considerably distinguishable from our more primitive ancestors.

And perhaps most curious of all, are the structures we continue to pack along with us, as that have little to no known useful function in the contemporary human body. These features are better known as vestigial structures, and are classically defined as features and behaviors that no longer serve the function and purpose they were designed to perform (in comparison to other creatures with the same parts).

Currently, as I recover from the aftermath of a painful encounter with one of my own vestigial organs, I find myself considering if my late appendix ever did anything much for me, or if it’s only purpose was to lie in wait as a metaphorical ticking time-bomb. Prior to my surprise appendectomy, I hadn’t spared much thought for my appendix, and decided I wanted to honor it’s memory by learning more about it, in addition to several of our other human evolutionary leftovers. Man, I wish I would’ve asked the doctors to hang on to that bad boy for me!

The Evolutionary Junk in Our Trunk

Appendix

The appendix is perhaps the most widely known vestigial organ in the human body of today. If you’ve never seen one, the appendix is a small, pouch-like tube of tissue that juts off the large intestine where the small and large intestines connect. By comparison, in herbivorous vertebrates the appendix is much larger, and functions primarily to aid in the breakdown of cellulose in consumed plants. Today, the appendix is considered a small leftover from one of our plant-eating ancestors. As our diets have changed over time, the role our appendix plays in digestion has declined, leaving plenty of room for speculation regarding what purpose it serves now.

Continue reading “Useful or Useless: Weird Things Packed in Our Evolutionary Suitcase”

There’s Something About Trees: Arbor Day 2019

Posted on by Michele Arduengo

two girls climbing a tree
Climbing The Old Willow Tree is best with a friend

My daughter has a favorite tree, The Old Willow Tree, at Aldo Leopold Nature Center in Madison. I don’t know exactly how much time she has spent in that tree, but I suspect it is significant.

Trees have served as the source of inspiration for scientists’ careers, writers’ metaphors, and musicians’ nostaglia.

One of our science writers at Promega tells this story about an early “botanical” experiment he and his grandmother performed:

“When I was four, my grandma helped me plant a ‘helicopter’ in a butter dish. It slowly graduated to a Cool Whip container, then a family-sized takeout tub from a spaghetti joint. It’s now the largest tree on my parents’ property.” –Jordan Villanueva

When I was in college, the campus quad was lined with ancient Ginkgo trees that filled my morning walks to my fall classes with shimmering gold leaf. I remember those trees with such fondness that the first tree I planted when I moved to Wisconsin was a Ginkgo tree.

There’s something about trees…we wax poetic and become nostalgic; we include them in our literature and art as important symbols and teachers of life lessons. Continue reading “There’s Something About Trees: Arbor Day 2019”

Cardboard Couture: From Conception to Runway Debut

Posted on by Sara Klink

The five-member team at the Read(y) To Wear event.

What do fashion, paperboard product packaging and literacy have in common? Answer: The Read(y) to Wear submission from a team of Promega employees for an event put on by the Madison Reading Project. With a challenge that stated teams need to make a garment mostly of paper, the resulting creations would be displayed on a runway as part of a charitable evening for an organization dedicated to bringing books to children.

Volunteering to be part of what became a five-person team to create a wearable garment from paper was the easy part. Our first few meetings we were experimenting with ideas and techniques using paper we could access on campus: Print catalogs, discarded books and our prototype product kit boxes. It was the kit boxes with the David Goodsell imagery that inspired our ideas to create a suit of armor. The paperboard boxes protect the products we ship to customers like a suit of armor protects warriors in battle. Continue reading “Cardboard Couture: From Conception to Runway Debut”

The Secret Fluorescent Life of Flying Squirrels

Posted on by Mariel Mohns

flying squirrel specimen
A flying squirrel museum specimen under normal light versus ultraviolet light. Photo courtesy of AM Kohler, et al.

In May 2017, a surprising discovery was made in the woods of Bayfield County, Wisconsin, just about a 5-hour drive north of Promega headquarters. Jonathan Martin, Associate Professor of Forestry at Northland College, was exploring the forest with an ultraviolet (UV) light in search of fluorescent lichen or plant life. What he found instead was a bright pink glow coming from a most unexpected source—a flying squirrel.

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It’s Almost iGEM Season—Help Is On The Way!

Posted on by Darcia Schweitzer

The 2019 iGEM Competition is on the horizon and team registration opens this month. We’re excited to partner with the iGEM Foundation again this year and offer our support to the young scientists who participate. If you’re starting an iGEM project, there are going to be things you need along the way. We are pleased to share a number of different ways we can help your iGEM team from now until the Giant Jamboree.

Grant Sponsorship

Tell us about your iGEM project and your team could win a 2019 Promega iGEM Grant Sponsorship. Ten winning teams will each receive $2000 in free Promega products to use for their iGEM projects. Tell us about your project—What problem are you addressing? What is your proposed solution? What challenges does your team face? Last year’s winning teams selected from a wide range of reagents and supplies, including master mix, restriction enzymes, ligase, DNA purification kits, expression systems, DNA ladders and markers, buffers and agarose. Click here to apply! Continue reading “It’s Almost iGEM Season—Help Is On The Way!”

Extra extra: Read All About Tautonyms

Posted on by Julia Nepper

If you’re active on #sciencetwitter, you may have seen a thread recently about tautonyms. “Tautonym” is a cool word for scientific names where the genus and species are the same word, For example, Vulpes vulpes is the scientific name for the red fox.

I have taken great delight in sharing these tautonyms with friends, colleagues, and random strangers on the bus. However, the problem that I keep having is that people want more details about something than the name. If you’ve had that problem, too, then this blog is for you. Continue reading “Extra extra: Read All About Tautonyms”

5 of Our Favorite Blogs from 2018

Posted on by Julia Nepper

We have published 130 blogs here at Promega this year (not including this one). I diligently reviewed every single one and compiled a list of the best 8.5%, then asked my coworkers to vote on the top 5 out of that subset. Here are their picks:

1. The Amazing, Indestructible—and Cuddly—Tardigrade

No surprises here, everyone loves water bears. Kelly Grooms knows what the people want.

The face of a creature that is nigh un-killable.

Continue reading “5 of Our Favorite Blogs from 2018”

A Healthier Kind of Blues

Posted on by Kari Kenefick

We are in the midst of a very intense time of the year, with holidays and seasonal celebrations like Thanksgiving (recently past), Hanukkah this week and Christmas a mere two-plus weeks away.

Wrap that up with a New Year’s celebration and “Wham”—more friends, family and food/alcohol than one normally enjoys in a three-month period.

Yet it can also be the season of SAD—seasonal affective disorder when the amount of daylight decreases daily, and for those of us in the northern latitudes, cold weather intensifies. We’re eating more, getting less sunshine and quite probably less exercise. Hibernation is great for bears, not so good for humans.

It’s the wintertime blues. For myself and many, once the solstice passes and day length starts to increase, mood improves. But noticeable day-length increases don’t really occur here until mid-February. That’s a long time to feel the blues.

Continue reading “A Healthier Kind of Blues”

Fun with Science for the Holidays: An “Actor’s” Perspective

Posted on by Julia Nepper

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to be a part of “Once Upon a Christmas Cheery in the Lab of Shakhashiri”. Bassam Z. Shakhashiri is a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who is well-known for his fun science demonstrations and a fervent dedication to public science communication. Once Upon a Christmas Cheery started in 1970 as an end-of-semester treat for Dr. Shakhashiri’s freshman chemistry class; by 1973, the Christmas lecture had become so popular that Wisconsin Public Television offered to broadcast it during Christmas week, and this collaboration has continued uninterrupted ever since.

That’s 49 years of Christmas lectures, commemorated by making indium, the 49th element, the Sesame Street-esque “sponsor” of the show. It helps that indium burns bright violet, the name of Dr. Shakhashiri’s granddaughter and hence his favorite color. The color purple made a firm foundation for many aspects of the show: The chrysanthemums frozen in liquid nitrogen were purple, as was the balloon I inflated during my spiel on air movement. Most of the set was various shades of purple, too.

Bassam Shakhashiri and J. Nepper on the set of Once Upon a Christmas Cheery
The set was whimsical and very purple. Photo by Eric Baillies.
Continue reading “Fun with Science for the Holidays: An “Actor’s” Perspective”

How To Make Medicine on Mars

Posted on by Darcia Schweitzer

Today NASA’s InSight lander will touch down on Mars. InSight, which launched on May 5, is NASA’s first Mars landing since the Curiosity rover in 2012. The lander will begin a two-year mission to study Mars’ deep interior, gathering data that will help scientists understand the formation of rocky planets, including Earth.

NASA's InSight lander approaching Mars.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

While every spacecraft that reaches Mars offers more knowledge of the Red Planet, a lot of the excitement is fueled by hopes that someday these missions will bring humans to Mars and enable us to start colonies there. While this goal seems very distant, tremendous progress is being made. Scientists around the globe are making incremental discoveries that will lead to the advances necessary to make colonization of Mars a reality.

I had the pleasure of meeting one team of scientists doing just this—eight high school students from iGEM Team Navarra BG. I met the team and their advisors at the 2018 iGEM Giant Jamboree, where they presented their synthetic biology project, BioGalaxy, as part of the iGEM competition. The problem they aimed to solve is key to helping humans stay on Mars for an extended period of time—how do you take everything you need when there isn’t enough room on the spacecraft? Continue reading “How To Make Medicine on Mars”