Elad’s blog

There’s this very common measurement equiptment, found in almost any electronics lab, used to measure voltage. Sometimes it is called a potentiometer, sometimes fluke, sometimes otherwise; the idea, in all cases, is to know the potential difference between two points. The question is, what potential?

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I have to fix an error I wrote in the previous post. The single-atom difference between human and bacteria ribosome does not refer to the entire structure, but only to the protein exit channel (which is the part important to antibiotics). There are some other differences, though all the active sites are amazingly identical, presumably universal in all life forms as we know them. Prof. Ada Yonath corrected my understanding over dinner, in the evening of the last day of ISBIE.

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The beak of a squid is a very special organ. Though extremely hard, it contains no minerals and no metals. In fact, it is one of nature’s special examples for crystallized biopolymers - a class of materials with unique features that may find very interesting applications pretty soon. It was mentioned as an anecdote at one of the lectures I heard yesterday, at the first day of the ISBIE 2007 conference.

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Here is the amazing things that the state’s critics found about wedding gardens:

State Critics

You are also welcomed to read the entire, very amusing, report, which is officially available here. Above is just an extract (from page 454 on) of this report.

Naturally, we found out about it the hard way.

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