(Hat tip to my Lady-Love)

Apparently, Honey has found its place in Olympic gymnastics, but not as some sort of sugar energy-booster as you might think from all the honey-based candy energy bars you find in sport shops. Nope, Honey is being prized for its stickiness - Olympiads are using it to keep their hands stuck to their swing bars. Have a read.

On Monday, the 11th of August, I will be teaching a class on bees and beekeeping at the community center where I live on the UW-Madison campus. If anyone in Madison is reading, stop on by and learn about bees!

Class blurb:

Catch the Buzz About Honeybees!

Find out all you ever wanted to know about those busy little insects that pollinate our crops and turn nectar into Honey. Hobby Beekeeper and science enthusiast Karl J. Mogel will be teaching a class on all the fascinating little things we know about bees: Queens and workers, the “Bee Dance”, swarms, stingers, and the fun and challenges of beekeeping. And of course the best part, come spin some honey yourself and take it home in a jar!

This class is free and open to the public. It runs from 7-8 pm at the Eagle Heights Community Center on the UW-Madison campus. For information on how to get there, visit this map link.

Ariela and I just pulled a whole medium-depth honey super and four full-depth frames out of our hives today… time to wipe down the centrifuge - it’s honey extracting time!

This story caught my attention, “New DNA Technique Led Authorities to ‘Anthrax Killer’,” and I wanted to find out what this new technique was. When I read the story, however, they didn’t say anything about what it was.

The identification was made from those samples, with DNA samples taken from the victims to confirm.

A government scientist told the Associated Press Sunday that investigators started with DNA from some of those victims and matched specific DNA patterns to anthrax cultures that the suspect, Army scientist Bruce Ivins, 62, was responsible for in the lab.

This scientific technique took years to develop.

That sounds like standard run-of-the mill PCR to me. Take some unique sequences in the anthrax samples that can be used to differentiate it from all other samples, then create PCR primers to make copies of, and sequence those sequences in each sample. The victims, anthrax from letters, and the suspected anthrax lab. If the sequences match, you have a winner. (or loser) I could do it.

So I don’t see what is so new about this mystery DNA technique… must’ve been new to Fox News or something.

Still, it is nice to know that we know the source of those anthrax letters, although the suspect committed suicide, this means that if it ever happens again, we can always call on this secret technique involving this “DNA’ thing!

Anytime there’s an exodus of talent from a major player like Disney (Pixar, Dreamworks), or in this case, Google, it gets a lot of attention because it usually means someone’s going to make something good. The internet story du jour (and discussed during a picnic at work today, too) is the new search engine Cuil, pronounced cool. After checking it out, I have decided that although it has a few nifty features, it seems almost useless compared to the Big G. Read More…