The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' --Isaac Asimov
That's Funny… random header image

How many bacteria are in the ocean? And how far is it between bacteria in the ocean?

August 25th, 2009 4 Comments

There are about 1,000,000 bacteria per milliliter (1/5 of a teaspoon) of water in the coastal ocean. (!!) A lot of these bacteria degrade dead plant and algae material and turn them into useful nutrients which can allow further growth of plants and algae and animals. Without bacteria in the oceans to regenerate these nutrients, […]

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Enrichment of microorganisms into sea ice brine

July 20th, 2009 1 Comment

As seawater freezes into sea ice, all of the dissolved constituents of the water become concentrated within the solid ice matrix that forms. Because it is more dense than seawater due to the high salt content, a lot of this ‘brine’ will drain from the ice by gravity. However, some brine remains in the ice […]

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Predicting the height of a saturated peak on an electropherogram

May 6th, 2009 No Comments

One way to assess the microbial community structure in an environment is to use a ‘fingerprinting’ technique, like T-RFLP or ARISA, to interrogate the ‘species’ living there as determined from their 16S rRNA genes or some functional gene like amoA. Here’s an example of a T-RFLP electropherogram from sea ice: You can see that most […]

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Using Bazaar version control system for my Ph.D. Thesis

April 30th, 2009 1 Comment

I wrote my last paper in LaTeX and the submitted file was named ‘paper_v26’. Various other files with similar names are floating around and it is a chore to keep up with which is the latest version when they are split between two computers and three operating systems. For my thesis I decided to make […]

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Generic Ubuntu/Kubuntu problem resolution post

April 15th, 2009 No Comments

Fixed “current dist not found in meta-release file” on upgrade to Kubuntu Jaunty 9.04″ The first time it ran I was within the university wifi network and the upgrade script downloaded the login page rather than the meta-release file. I corrected it by removing the incorrect file and trying it again: rm ~/.update-manager-core/meta-release Fixed Audigy […]

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