If only I could do this on demand

Uploaded by jenny downing

Over on my other blog I have a little piece on how sometimes impassable writing problems can be solved neatly and easily while one sleeps.

Bug be gone bedding

Based on this eighty thousand year old idea, I think they should consider marketing bedbug-repellent mattresses for those concerned about such pests. The sedges and rushes could be harvested sustainably and could be affixed to the mattress using some kind of mesh.

Kids like mountaineering, right?

Monk Hands,
originally uploaded by Braden Gunem.

I had a Butter Rum flavored Life Saver today and it made me think about whether a Butter Tea could be popular among fans of Himalayan mountain climbing. Pop one of these onto your tongue and you can experience the Everest Base Camp sensation, especially if you refrain from breathing.

Breakfast craft

Floating Through my Dreams,
originally uploaded by EJP Photo.

Someone should invent a small hot-air balloon that would make your toast and deliver it to your plate in the morning.

Mirror, mirror

Day 294,
originally uploaded by JimmyMac210.

When I heard a while ago that a team of researchers had expanded the genetic code by altering the subcellular machinery used to synthesize proteins I thought this would be big all over the mainstream media. I was wrong, however, and I have heard nary a peep on how this could lead to all sorts of interesting mutant enzymes and bizarre polypeptides by substituting other things in place of the twenty-two amino acids that naturally occur on Earth.

I would like to propose a slightly different hack made possible with the expanded vocabulary: mirror image proteins. We could designate twenty-two of the four base pair sequences with mirror-reversed optical isomers of the standard amino acids, generate the appropriate mRNA sequence to assemble them in exactly the same way as proteins we already know, and have the ribosomes and tRNA machinery start to produce these backward polypeptides. I would guess that these would fold in exactly the same way as the conventional proteins, only reversed, with the left-handed alpha helices and other structural elements matching up just as they should. Going further, we could take the entire genome of an organism and rewrite it using our new four base pair language, provide it with the wrong-handed nutrients needed, and have it generate all the proteins making up that creature but completely reversed. It would take a little bit of work to engineer the mirror cells needed to house this machinery, but given enough time I am sure it could be done. We would start with microbes and work our way up to larger animals and plants once we had everything in place.

In the end, we would have a completely mirror-reversed organism relying on the alternate coding in order to grow and reproduce. If we were to eat that organism, we would not be able to digest it very well at all and so would be inherently low in calories. But just maybe it might taste wonderful.