Comments LeighAnn Likes

Last weekend was the first time I curled all my daughter's hair. She is Asian, with very thick dense hair, so we turned it to the highest level and kept each curl in 45 seconds. She kept telling me to use smaller locks of hair! It took an hour to curl, and only stayed that way due to hair spray. I had no idea that curling irons were so much hotter than they were when I used them decades ago.
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I've got to say my favorite isn't on this list because its in the original ponies from the eighties. The new ones are cute but they don't really look like ponies. They look like deer. That's just an opinion of an eighties kid talking though.

A little off topic, I like the voting posts!
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...and while I was baking, my husband selected some television show for us to watch off Netflix, called 'Once Upon A Time', where one of the leads is Robert Carlyle, playing Rumpelstiltskin. The writers for that show did a good job of making the central themes in fairy tales relatable. I see the show was renewed.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1843230/
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I'm glad to see I'm not the only one with serious qualms about The Giving Tree. I like a lot of Shel Silverstein's work, but I despise that book. Mary Ann Glendon's quote sums it up perfectly.
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I went to the Link and like others I found the top comment to be more interesting than the actual article there.

I am copying said comment, authored by A_Lee here:
"Not to be a downer, but while you are indeed looking at DNA, you aren't looking at a single strand of DNA. Whoever told you that is mistaken.

If any one is interested in the details, the first image (which looks more like a photograph), is a scanning-electron micrograph (SEM) image. The second, which looks more 2D and grainy, is a transmission-electron micrograph (TEM) image.

First, a description of what you are looking at. You are looking a a bundle of DNA fibers. Their are seven DNA strands, six in a hexagonal wrapping around one core. The reason we know this is because (a) the paper says so, and (b) the strand is far too thick to be one single strand. It's about 20 nanometers thick, which is too thick to be single-strand DNA.

Now, the images.

The SEM image shows the DNA strand suspended over two pillars. It's almost certainly coated with some metal, probably gold-palladium. It's taken at a fairly low resolution, the scale bar is probably in the 1-10 micron range, and the electron beam energy is very low, probably around 1-5keV. At this magnification and this energy level, you cannot actually "see" the DNA strand, anymore than we can "see" stars in the sky. We simply perceive a bright object against a dark background, but we don't have the resolution to distinguish between one star and two stars right next to each other.

The second image is a TEM image. TEM works like a slide projector, shining electrons through the object, and projecting them on the other side. It works with interference patterns (remember, quantum effects dominate here). So it is very good at finding tight periodic structures. In this case, the aligned "curls" of the DNA. What you are seeing is the change in atomic density along the DNA bundle. Imagine a super-long gummy worm that alternates between very short red and green segments. Now put seven of them together in a bundle, making sure that each colored segment matches up. Then step away, and you'll perceive a single, thick, gummy worm with alternating red and green lines. That's what you're seeing here.

Still, imaging organic molecules is always difficult with electron beams, because they tend to fry them. So this is still quite an achievement."
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Kingdom Plantae – Plants
Subkingdom Tracheobionta – Vascular plants
Superdivision Spermatophyta – Seed plants
Division Magnoliophyta – Flowering plants
Class Magnoliopsida – Dicotyledons
Subclass Asteridae
Order Scrophulariales
Family Orobanchaceae – Broom-rape family
Genus Orobanche L. – broomrape

It's a noxious weed. And invasive to many states. We've been fighting broomrape for many decades, but as usual, broomrape is beating our... Uh... Broomrape is winning. Ouch. That's not good.
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Profile for LeighAnn

  • Member Since 1969/12/31


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