We need a cool science forum.

[QuickSilver]

In absence of that, I give you: Beer bottle tapping physics.

Which links to an even cooler cavitation explanation, in near zero gravity.

Dinner prep is done and I’m killin’ time with coffee and the interwebs.

[deltasigma]

How to copy and read the genome of a single cell.

You might wonder why you need to read the DNA from a single cell. Why not just collect more cells? Well, not all cells are created equal. In fact, the harder you look, the more individual differences you find. Take bacteria. There are many instances where researchers may only have one specimen of a bacterium in a complicated mix, and they need to figure out its identity. That’s now more important than ever, because many unknown bacteria from the gut and skin that influence health and disease, for example, can’t be cultivated in the lab. For these specimens, it would be invaluable to read the DNA from a single cell. Now we can, far more accurately than ever before.

So how exactly did researchers make this fancy, highly accurate, DNA copier? They worked with materials engineers to create a silicone slide with tiny compartments that are barely more than pinprick size indentations, or wells. Arrays of these tiny wells serve as microscopic test tubes. The new technique—Microwell Displacement Amplification System, nicknamed MIDAS—drops a single cell into one of these tiny wells, where a series of chemical reactions replicate the DNA. This replicated DNA is then read by sequencing machines.
The team tested MIDAS on an individual bacterium and showed that it enabled them to read significantly more of the genome sequence than they could when using the single cell sequencing methods currently available. Furthermore, when they used MIDAS to examine the genomes of individual nerve cells from human brains, they detected significant differences between cells—even between neurons in an individual, healthy brain. This is consistent with a string of surprising findings that suggests that genomes in our body may vary from cell to cell, because of changes that occur as DNA is copied during cell division.