7 Kinds of Awesome Busy

I have been 7 different kinds of awesome busy lately, although at the moment exhaustion is chipping away at the thick layer of exuberance I've been smearing across my forehead lately. Please do not expect this post to be in chronological order.

Last Tuesday the flow cytometer I needed to get data was broken. So instead I went to Chicago and Milwaukee and drove back in the same night for the Two Hands Project. I also went to Boston for a week at the beginning of the month with absolutely no hotel reservations, just friends of my brotherfriend to stay with. There I met Prime*, who is awesome in 17-8,597 different ways and I'm 97% certain that I'm in love with her now and I can't help it and don't care except that there's a rather inconveniently large physical space between us (1Mm, too big for catapults!). We're trying to figure out how to fold the space between us into technical nothingness, so if you live between Michigan and Boston please be aware that there may soon be a sudden extreme change in the topography of your region. I'm sorry, Cleveland, but Prime sends me cookies and cookies > Cleveland, although it should be noted that I can be bribed with plane tickets now.

I did many other things in Boston, some of them rather unbloggable** now that I know my boss reads this site, but they include surviving biking through downtown Boston traffic with several kgs of computing and goggles and letting complete strangers surprise-dye my hair however they wanted to. They're not strangers anymore and my hair was a very lovely bright pink for about a week when it faded to a strawberry blonde. However, the purple sides did not fade nearly so quickly and now, even after buzzing away the unruly mop that needed trimming anyway, I have a subtle bright yellow blotch on one side of my head.

Regarding blog-reading bosses, I changed laboratories shortly before going to Boston and am quite pleased with the change. In Immunolab, I read papers to actually apply them to the science I'm doing and planning instead of just reading because I'm bored, and doing so matters(!) and this is also awesome even though it has also resulted in a drastic cut in how many PLoS Computational Biology articles I have time to read. I expect to find an equilibrium again sometime as I climb the learning curve.

But as for equilibria, that's been thrown even further off balance by trying to organize a local hackerspace. And that brings me back to the Two Hands Project, but only in a moment. A hackerspace is a place where creative awesome people can come to build their ideas, talk technical shop, imagine, invent, innovate, destroy and re-create whatever they want to. It's essentially a community in a common shared working space with shared tools and parts, and maybe even eventually club-like membership to buy those parts, that fosters creative productivity by pitting like-minded people of completely different backgrounds into their own creative passions. These emerging spaces have the potential to remodel the entire American economy by shifting innovation from closed-source company driven patents to fast and flexible open-source crowdsourced invention. So far we have computer programmers, musicians, roboticists, artists, biotechnologists, cooks, textilers, and other crazily awesome people coming to meetings and generating large numbers of incredible project ideas. However, forming this group involves a lot of email management, community outreach, calender planning, part sourcing, charter writing, agenda creating, etc etc etc and I for that I am grateful that I can rely on most of my friendfamily, who're also all embroiled in this.

And yes, I have a friendfamily that has coalesced. Sister Doom, Brother Discord, Brother Deliverance, and myself, Brother Destruction. These are people whom I can completely count upon to have my back, whom I can trust and who know that they can depend upon me as needed. Sometimes I want to kick Brother Discord in the face, but that's probably because he's also my roommate. Sister Doom and I drove to Chicago and back last Friday to pick up a stranded Brother Deliverance.

But The Two Hands Project is also awesome. As I understand it, Brother Deliverance first came up with the project when he found out that JetBlue was offering a $600 ticket that lets you fly as much as you want from September 8th to October 8th. So he put out a call for donations at http://www.twohandsproject.com and raised enough money for a ticket and people donated equipment, and 2 have even joined him on his bad dash from coast to coast. It was with him and his crew that I (politely and enthusiastically) stormed Pumping Station One in Chicago, went on to interview James Carlson (director of Bucketworks in Milwaukee), and then drove from Milwaukee back to Ann Arbor so I could be back in lab by 10am. Because Brother Deliverance et al are too busy recording footage, flying, and meeting awesome people across the country to keep up the blog at Two Hands Project, they've enlisted me to do it for them remotely. I posted the first semi-polished video from San Francisco's Noisebridge and The Internet Archive*** today here and will be posting a string of profiles of hackers/makers soon.

There're some sweet experiments coming up that I am very excited about, and I just realized that I forgot the slip of paper that has the part name of the low-voltage audio amplifier I wanted to buy from RadioShack tomorrow on my desk in the lab.

I'm not quite sure what to do with Atomic Pudding. On the one hand, I could just use it like I've used this venue and let my awesome shine through, but on the other hand I liked what I was doing with open-access research and interviews, but it was just getting absolute crap page views and as such I'm not sure I was doing very well with it. Thoughts?

I also went out to visit i3 Detroit recently (Wednesday night, I think?) and had mjaddra before that (I think?) after a local maker/hackerspace meeting that Brother Deliverance recorded for the Two Hands Project (I had a lapel-mic, but was probably still unintelligible) and invited them to the free Drupal Web Development class that our as-yet-unnamed space**** is holding this coming Wednesday. And somewhere in here I know I made some really awesome live music with a fellow maker/hacker at a meeting sometime that may have been last night but I can't be certain. Wasn't I in Boston last night?

*Whose intellectual and physical hotness are mutually inclusive and inseparable properties! In testiment to her awesomeness, note that she was the first person to ever convince me of the functional utility of buying clothes that don't need to be modded to fit and has even inspired me to replace the whiskey in my burritos-cookies-and-whiskey diet with vegetables!
**Get your mind out of the gutter!
***Technically not a maker/hackerspace.
****We're working on it!

P.S. - I don't recommend prying all the keys up off your keyboard and rearranging them from QWERTY to DVORAK before you know DVORAK very well. Makes passwords very difficult.

Luciferase Shampoo

I just attended a departmental seminar where the guest lecturer presented data showing that transcutaneous vaccination works from DNA vaccines. Apparently, if you abrade the skin to remove the stratum corneum and rub on a transfection plasmid with your desired DNA (best to use a fusion protein, methinks) that has been stuck inside liposomes, the hair follicles will take up the DNA and use it. This apparently produces antigens inside the body and activates dendritic cells to take it up, process it, and go activate T cells to start a humoral immunity response. This has been demonstrated in mice.

Previously I had had no idea that mouse hair follicles are much smaller than human hair follicles. Nor did I know that ~80-90% of hair follicles on a human scalp are usually in growth phase at any given point. DNA vaccines have so far been shown to work best when they're applied to skin in which the hair follicles are in anagen (growth) phase. Therefore, it stands to reason that the human scalp would be a convenient portal for localized transfection.

As such, I need volunteers for 2 experiments.

1) Balding. There are demonstrated links between testosterone and alopecia. It is thought that testosterone is somehow acting upon hair follicles in middle age to cause them to somehow stop growing. But if we could make a fusion gene for the testosterone receptor coupled to nonfunctionality, we could theoretically block that signal and prevent testosterone-associated baldness at the scalp. However, in the interest of transparency, it should be acknowledged that there is a small chance that the testosterone knockout genetic construct will get into more places than just one's scalp, but also possibly other rapidly dividing cells. Other rapidly dividing cells include those in the skin and gut epithelium, where a loss of testosterone receptivity wouldn't do much, but also Sertoli cells, which could indeed cause infertility. However, as Leydig cells produce testosterone itself in response to luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone, systemic testosterone shouldn't be affected and no loss of virilization should occur.

2) Luciferase Shampoo. I don't know about you, but I think I'd look quite nice with glowing bright red hair. If adding the luciferase gene to a liposome and getting that to hair follicles could result in expression of luciferase, then great, we'd be able to get glowy hair! However, there is a very real possibility that doing this would only result in glowy hair follicles, which could still be kind of cool (light tends to shine through and off of my blonde hair, so in effect it might look like a translucent pink cloud, like fiber optics).

Formula:
1. Luciferase transfection vector inside liposomes.
2. CaCl2
3. HEPES buffer
4. Glycerin (might as well make functioning shampoo whilst we're at it, no?)
5. Fragrance (anyone know how to synthesize the scent of melting lemon drops?)

But first, I need volunteers! Mad Science Law #9 may be waived if I get volunteers. Or maybe I should just get the DIY-Bio people to do this for me.