Hack your sleep

What initially attracted me to this article was the blog’s title: Four Hour Work Week – what a fantasy!!! Anyway, the post is a list of 5 simple steps that you can take to improve your sleeping habits.

I found this a few weeks back, and it struck a chord. The author is clearly very knowledgeable about the neurochemistry of sleep. Too many folks out there offer advice which is baseless or wishful…

And then yesterday I found another article along the same lines: this one is less scientific, but has some useful info nonetheless.

So I thought it would be valuable to spread this info; I’ve seen my fair share of students whose capacity to concentrate during the school day is being wrecked by inadequate sleep.

Bacterial arms race

Microbiologists have managed to ‘force’ bacteria to create a new antibiotic in a test-tube-based arms race.

Genetic studies of a bacteria species called Rhodococcus, normally found in soil, revealed large amounts of latent (or potential) proteins coded for in its genome. Some of these sequences displayed an intriguing similarity to existing chemicals, including pigments and toxins. However, the bacteria weren’t expressing these products…

So they were put into a hostile situation – a petri dish with a competing bacterial species. The rhodococcus responded by expressing a latent antibiotic and wiping out the competition!

An excellent example of the scientific method: careful observation and creative testing which achieves a serendipitous outcome.

Moon shot

The search for water (in the form of ice) under the surface of the moon is moving into a new stage.

NASA plans to crash two probes into the southern polar regions of the moon in an effort to find ice underground. A previous probe detected hydrogen in those craters, and scientists now want to see if that hydrogen is bound up as water.

For a long time, there has been a hope that water, discovered on the moon, would remove one of the main problems with establishing a long-term settlement there. Transporting water from Earth to a colony on the moon would be a prohibitively expensive. Much better to get it once you are there.