saturday morning cartoons
One of the advantages to my new home is that the sun peeks in through my window as it rises, and very little will keep its persistant determination from lifting the lids of my eyes for very long. As a result, I was up at what might normally be considered an unnaturally early hour of the morning for myself - especially on the weekend. Lacking anything better to do with my time, or failing to want to do anything more than get some breakfast and go back to sleep, I watched my version of Saturday morning cartoons on Google Video.
I put a bagel in the toaster, spread some peanut butter on it, and sat down to watch Craig Mello give a talk at Google corporate headquarters on his Nobel-winning research on RNAi as part of their continuing seminar series on emerging technologies. The tech talks are interesting because they give you a look into what the almighty Google is thinking about buying and turning into their next cash-cow. Dr. Mello's talk is interesting because he is a good speaker and does an excellent job of translating highly technical jargon into plain english that the layperson might understand and appreciate without feeling condescended to. That, and he is talking about RNA interference, one of the single most interesting and important topics to hop along through molecular biology in the last ten years. To say that I am excited by its potential application in various subfields of biology and chemistry would be something of an understatement.
If you have an hour and ten minutes to kill, I highly recommend that you check it out...