Nerdy Science Blog

When I saw this news from Yahoo! News saying that scientist develops caffeinated doughnuts, I was stunned.

I was stunned not because the product is so incredible, but it is so dumb. Imagine when the product is out of the market, and I’d order, “give me a cup of coffee and a doughnuts without caffein” or “give me the caffeinated doughnuts and a cup of coffee without caffein”.

How dumb it sounds. I have no idea what’s the better way he meant, but sure he loves baked food and want to be waken by them, A LOT!

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In blogazine, tunasing listed out his biotech wishlist, the first item is “Tongkat ali lubricant (water based to work with condoms)”.

You might be asking, “What on earth is Tongkat Ali?” Tongkat Ali is a plant which is famed for its treat on sexual dysfunctional.

Scientific America:

Kiser and his colleagues developed a polymer mixture that is liquid at room temperature, but thickens into a gellike coating at body temperature and a pH of 4 to 5, which occurs in the vagina. The researchers designed the gel to liquefy again at neutral PH, because semen neutralizes vaginal PH. Kiser says it can then mix with semen and deliver a desired antiviral payload, perhaps a small molecule or a polymer microbicide (microbe-killing compound).

In the future, “Tongkat Ali Ginseng Coffee” is not what you need, but “The Tongkat Ali Molecular Condom”.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Proteins are one of the major components that build up the bodies of organisms, they are important, they are perform many function such as enzymes, bodies structural elements and etc as you know it.

In our body, proteins assemble themselves, or “fold”. The process of protein folding is crucial; if proteins fold in place, you should praise ‘hallelujah’ every morning when you wake up. Other wise, when proteins misfold, there’s how famous disease like Mad Cow and etc happen. Consequences of the misfold can be deadly. Knowing how proteins fold is thus important, they might help in solving problems related to proteins folding, included Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and etc. However, in many ways, the process remains mystery.

That’s why scientists are keen to find out how proteins fold in molecular level.

This particular website, Fold@home is aimed to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related disease. It is quite interesting. Fold@home is actually a distributed computing project, they provide software for peoples all over the world to download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. At current, the are working on Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, huntington’s disease, osteogenesis imperfecta and etc.

We might not proteins expert, and we might not being able to understand what are they doing, but we can always take a peep how are those fellow scientists are working.

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Beginner’s Guide to Molecular Biology is an online resource that provides useful information on molecular biology for beginner like student level. It contains information such as definition of life, cell biology, mitosis and meiosis, DNA structure and etc, which you can easily find in any pre-university of 6^th Form biology text books.

Enjoy learning.

Links: Beginner’s Guide to Molecular Biology.

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