Cool Science

So I haven't written in a while and Jenn's making me look bad with this nablopomo business. And it's embarrassing that in my last post I was stressing over the Red Sox... I'm a lousy baseball fan, actually. but it was huge fun to watch them in the postseason. Anyway, I'm fighting off some sort of wicked fever/cold thing going on like 10 days now so this should be a good distraction:

C&EN news reported some pretty exciting news in structural biology. Stanford researchs have published two structures of G-protein-coupled receptors, which are the most popular drug targets out there, but which are very poorly understood. This brings the total of GPCR structures to 3. To try describe how rare and prized GPCR structures are, this is the scientific equivalent to waiting 86 years for the Sox to win a world series.

I can always count on the Ig Nobel prizes to lighten my day. My fave this year might be the Ig Nobel Economics prize given to the inventor of a real-life net and pulley for bank robbers. The demonstration video is priceless (caution : explicit).

I've decided to become more opinionated about random things in science. To begin, I think every high school graduate should memorize pi to 25 decimal places to earn their degree. Now I know that science is not memorization, but knowing pi is like being able to quote Shakespeare. I had to memorize soliloquys in high school (to be or not to be, etc. etc. etc.), so I think you should have to memorize pi too.