"A quick one while he's away"

The title is an homage to The Who, who it turns out have just released a new single after all these years, but refers more to the state of my brain while writing this post. And this has just reminded me of an article I skimmed over in (an old) Nature today describing how new neurons in adult brains only become established if they are stimulated. Thus, our everyday activities and thoughts get hardwired to a certain extent by selecting for neuronal pathways that contribute to or fit with our brain processes that day - budding new neurons that aren't stimulated die off. So Cliff Claven was right that there is selection for neurons in our brain, though not as he imagined it (ie. beer kills slower and weaker neurons, thus making the remaining herd of neurons faster and the brain smarter... I think he explains it with an analogy of lions killing sick and old wildebeest).

This weekend I had hoped to repeat some old experiments conducted by a former grad student in the lab, however there are no freezer stocks of the strains he made, and worse yet, used. In other words, he used up the last of some older strains in the lab. I bow my head in sorrow at the extinction of some unique and special bacterial species. Oh well, I'll just have to make them again. Also this weekend, I almost wrapped up my NSERC application - that will easily be done tomorrow. On the dock this week: review a manuscript, measure some sxy mRNA, start to put together a manuscript on CRP binding to CRP-S sites, make some strains and repeat the old experiments to test whether PurR regulates rec2 expression, and probably all sorts of other odds and ends (or, "Odds and Sods" as The Who would say)...