Iz in your pirate bag, absorbing your skillz.

Why? Why not sleep on a couch or a pillow or something? Of all the places in the house, why would a cat pick a gym bag to sleep in? Is she afraid that mutant space rats are trying to steal our Tae Kwon Do uniforms while we sleep? Or maybe she just wants to pick up mad martial arts skills by osmosis. Now there's an idea for a very bad martial arts B movie... 

Gotta love teaching...

Running Update:

Number of lab sections taught today (so far): 1
Number of people using dirty equipment and contaminanting entire plates of bacteria: 1.5 (I caught the second one before any more damage could be done).
Number of fires started by students: 1

[Edit: the girl set an entire jar of ethanol on fire. Fwoosh!]

There you have it, people. Students: the hope for the future. 

By popular (ok, one person) demand...

You asked for it! Create your own Political Interference Story! Actually, this is just about the level of coding I could probably manage. I should sell an application suite for the newspapers: create your own political/celebrity/science news/gossip/latest and greatest breakthrough. I'd be rich! Except, actually, I suspect they already use such a product...

Ok, so I normally avoid internet jokes, but...

Create your own scandal...

Obviously, since I'm in the biomedical research field, I hear about a lot of the drug company scandals that occur on a regular basis. Imagine, then, my excitement when I learned that I no longer have to actually read the news to find scandals...now I can create my own, thanks to the lovely people at Nature. What a time saver!

Dream job...

You know you're a strange duck when you decide that your dream job would be to be a microbiological history professor... teaching impressionable young college students about how the plague changed western civilization. How cool would that be?

How Ironic...

In the same family: 

Sam I. Am: has autoimmune disorder causing dangerously low platelet levels (can potentially lead to severe bleeding).

One of Sam I. Am's siblings: hospitalized for pulmonary embolism (although in the end they couldn't find one). Platelets: way above normal. Clotting factors: sky high.

How, how do genetics explain this? (I know, I know...8 years of Microbiology training and all that, I do know the answer, but still...)