The Big Room (and the little things in it)

“Nero” here seems to be the only thing I can find growing in the stuff I put the Lyreleaf Sage flowers into. Maybe some kind of Brettanomyces yeast? I’m going to have to autodidact myself into a better understanding of yeast ecology. Not to mention yeast physiology – am I seeing two cells undergoing postconjugational sporulation there in the middle of the image?

I’m a bit puzzled that I don’t see anything that looks much like bacteria in here. “Everything is everywhere” right? And yet, I’m not seeing any obvious acetic-acid bacterial growth here. Kind of a bummer, since that’s REALLY what I’m after here overall, but that’s okay. I can play with Nero in the meantime. Anybody know if you can make (palatable) leavened dough with Brettanomyces yeasts?…

I still need to go try the same cultivation on some “Texas Bluebonnets” and “Indian Paintbrush” flowers, since those are blooming around here now too. I figure there’s bound to be some Gluconobacter floating around out there somewhere. I suppose in the worst case, I can try cultivating some off of fallen fruit later in the summer when stuff starts getting ripe.

This unassuming little flower just happened to be conveniently near here. As far as I can tell, it’s a “Lyreleaf Sage” (Salvia lyrata). I plucked a flowering section and dropped it into a container of my special selective media a couple of days ago. It’s starting to get a little flocculant and there’s a faint “fermenting yeast” smell, so there’s something going on in there. I didn’t see much yet last night when I took a closer look, but I did see these, which I assume to be pollen grains from my bioprospecting sample.

See?

More to follow, but at least I think I’ve got thee blog software all updated and working properly again now.

I need to do some microbiology and cooking this weekend….

FINALLY – with this vowel movement I am finally over this recent bout of podstipation. Episode 3 of “Stir-Fried Stochasticity” is finally up. Today’s paper is:
Bowden G, Thatcher W, Stein RS, Hudnut KW, Peltzer G:”Tectonic Contraction across Los Angeles after Removal of Groundwater Pumping Effects”; Nature; 2001; vol412; pp812-815

You can download the audio or (if you are using a modern-enough web browser) listen to this episode directly here.

I would appreciate any constructive or at least mildly witty feedback – please post in the comments below…

Episode 3 of Stir-Fried Stochasticity should be recorded and posted soon. I had intended to already have it done, but there have been…delays.

Most recently, I had to drop everything to take care of the Minister of Chew Toys here at the Asylum for the Sufficiently Nerdy. Cornelia (our dog) came down with her yearly sudden, extremely messy and foul diarrhea problem. After getting everything cleaned up, and a minimally-sleepful night of getting up every few hours to let the dog out to emit foul-smelling material and disgusting noises, I got her to the vet this morning and came home with the usual prescription for Metronidazole and special food. If previous years are any indication, the symptoms should be over by tomorrow.

But, even as I cleaned up the foul mess that greeted me when I got home, I found myself wondering if the slimy material was being produced by the dog or by whatever bug was causing the problem. (Despite Episode 2 of Stir-Fried Stochasticity, I did NOT consider whether it could be turned into a food additive. Even I have my limits…) And, despite not wanting to be anywhere near the mess I was cleaning up, I found myself wishing I had a microscope.

And today, after the veterinarian took a look at a sample under the microscope (and let me look, too), and tentatively suggested infection by a Clostridium species, I found myself wondering if I could culture it, obtain a phage that infects the bacteria, generate and purify a huge sample of the phage, and then save it for next year and try to treat next year’s infection with it. And then I thought “Hey, if I also culture up the bacteria to produce a lot of that slimy stuff and purify it, I could make phage-containing bio-boogers (go back and listen to Episode 2 if you don’t know what I mean), which might be more effective!” on the assumption that the bacteria in question might also secrete enzymes to break down the slime that I’m assuming it produces, thus releasing the phage particles around the active bacteria…

And then I realized that if I had the equipment, supplies, and time right now (and was willing to deal with regulatory hassles involved in playing with Potentially Pathogenic Prokaryotes), I would probably actually follow through and try it…though I’d probably stop short of actually testing the treatment on my dog without some sort of approval and supervision by a real veterinarian. Even now I’m resisting a slight urge to save a small dried “sample” (which would be full of long-lasting spores that I would probably be able to culture later). Don’t worry, it’s not hard to resist…the point is just that the temptation is actually there.

I still insist I have very little interest in medical microbiology. Really.

At least I know that between potential digestive-tract phage therapy and probiotics, if we end up having to move back to where we came from for financial reasons, I might at least find a place for some graduate work in the “poop group” (sic) at my previous college institution if nothing else.

Meanwhile – Episode 3 is coming, honest! It’s a rather small but dense paper that explains how it’s hard to monitor the tectonic activity in the Los Angeles area because Los Angeles sucks. I’m hoping to get that recorded this weekend, along with the other mass of stuff I need to do.

Any words of encouragement and/or threats (or other useful or allegedly witty comments) may be posted below in the meantime.

After getting rave reviews from nearly four people for the pilot episode, I’m hopeful that Episode Two will be even better. (Seriously – I don’t think more than a handful of people even know this project is going on, but the few people who’ve listened and commented to me have been very encouraging so far.)

You can listen to and/or download the audio directly in either they shiny new spiffy Ogg Vorbis format or old-school .mp3 by clicking right here. As always, I’d very much appreciate comments, suggestions, questions, amusing limericks on the subject of the paper, etc. – feel free to post below, or you can email me at the usual location: epicanis+sf at bigroom.org.

This episode’s paper: Ding WK,Shah NP:”Effect of Various Encapsulating Materials on the Stability of Probiotic Bacteria”;2009;J. Food Sci.;vol.74 #2; pp M100-M107. Enjoy!

Oh, now this is interesting. I finally realized my RSS feed was Fupped Duck. Now that I have it fixed, the “Visual/HTML” mode switch on WordPress’ built-in post editor is working properly again, too. Most peculiar.

Seriously though – RSS throws a hissy-fit if there’s a single blank line at the beginning of the output? Really? Jeez.

Okay, enough whining from me for now. Let me know if everything still appears to be working and if the RSS feed is indeed fixed for all y’all. And listen to my podcast and let me know how it sounds, or either I’ll drive over to your house and kick your butt, or you’ll hurt my poor little feelings (pick whichever form of coercion works better for you.)

Thanks.

Now you, too, can feel right there with us as we brave the soul-sucking terrors!

I’ve been told more than once that I’ve got a good voice for radio. Or was that a good face for radio?

Last weekend we decided to go lake-spanking again, and this time I brought my little digital audio recorder… (more…)

Now the T-Mobile cell tower that we were previously using for dial-up internet seems to be offline as well, so for the moment we can only get internet access if we drive to College Station (which we have just done to pick up some more clean-up supplies).

The weather seems to be getting back to a milder theme. It’s even supposed to cool off and be less humid starting sometime tomorrow afternoon, so hopefully there’ll be some time to go paddle out and check out how Lake Conroe handled Hurricane Ike.

Meanwhile, this has royally screwed up the return to Idaho to get things taken care of at House v1.0 there. I’ve had to make some alternate arrangements through some kind folks who are friends of ours up there who are going to be able to keep an eye on the place for us (and for whom I’m very grateful!) until I/we can finally get some time off to get up there in person. I’ll probably get in touch with my employer-to-be and see if I can or should start later this week instead of next Monday as originally planned to leave time for the trip.

More pictures to be posted at some point. Stay tuned (and tell the power and internet companies to get their butts in gear!)

Power has been out since 2am, and the cable(TV|internet) is out as well. It’s times like this I’m glad I can “tether” my cellphone to the computer and get internet access that way. It’s painfully slow by modern standards (56k dial-up) but it works even when the power’s out.

The region of Ike’s eye just went by a little while ago. We were near the western edge of it, according to the weather radar. Winds died down somewhat and we were able to get the dogs to go outside and drain themselves. Now the wind is picking up again as it heads north.

Fortunately, our house (as far as we can tell without close examination) seems to be intact. At least, there are no streams of water leaking in or trees sticking through a wall or shards of glass all over the floor. The yard’s not so lucky though – large sections of trees are everywhere, and several sections of the useless “rustic” ranch fence that surrounds the back yard are crushed. Maybe the homeowner’s association will let us put up a real fence now.

We should now have another 6-8 hours of slowly diminishing strong winds to sit through, and then the worst of it should be over. Hopefully it won’t take too long after that for them to get power restored – it’s kinda hot in here. Meanwhile, we’ll just sit and watch the wind playfully ripping chunks of tree loose and flinging them to the ground.

There ought to be some interesting things to see around the lake once the wind dies down enough for it to be safe to go paddling around again.

And now I’m signing off for a bit while I’ve still got some battery power left. Probably more updates later…