Not directly related to biochemistry, but it’s definitely worth thinking about how van der Waals interactions may affect these Newtonian fluids. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/04/29/306911004/whats-the-secret-to-pouring-ketchup-know-your-physics
After all the computational modeling that we learned about this week, I was curious which other ways chemists use modeling. One important development is modeling the interactions of complex chemical systems, and Levitt and Warshel were awarded the Nobel prize in … Continue reading
With all the snow this week, I’ve been thinking about how hydrogen bonding effects the visual properties of snow. For example, snowflakes are six sided because as water freezes it forms six membered rings. This is also why snowflakes are … Continue reading
The other week as we were discussing the biochemical mechanisms of poison ivy and how that works got me thinking about other unpleasant encounters in nature, namely jellyfish stings! How does a poison work to a) bring about pain and … Continue reading
Preparing for my midterm this week and also working on my final project I’ve been fascinated by how much biochemical interactions both covalent and non covalent are at the heart of life and how disease can arise when bacteria and … Continue reading
In honor of our future work on membrane proteins, I thought I’d share a little bit about cystic fibrosis, an autosomal recessive disease that affects 30,000 Americans. Most people are diagnosed by age 2 and life expectancy is typically in … Continue reading
This article even went into the chemistry of coconut oil! It pointed out how virgin coconut oil’s saturated fat is largely made up of lauric acid, “a medium-chain triglyceride that turns out to have a number of health-promoting properties, including … Continue reading
In Orgo II the other day, we discussed a super interesting biochemical application of beta-lactams moieties. Lactams are cyclic amides (also known as lactone amides) that are most often found as either six-membered rings, called delta-lactams, 5-membered rings, called gamma-lactams, … Continue reading
As a generic answer, I think the first think we think about when talking about skin color and distance to the equator is that skin pigmentation becomes darker closer to the equator to decrease the risk of skin cancers. But … Continue reading
Here is the link to an abstract about the research I did during summer 2012 at the University of Minnesota. http://www.mrsec.umn.edu/EHR/participants/2012Participants.php It was work that represents how collaborative research can be. I was working in an Engineering and Materials Science … Continue reading