Science involves all the fun activities!

"Science involves all of the fun activities--sitting still, being quiet, paying attention, writing down numbers--yes, science has it all!"
--Principal Skinner, “The Simpsons”

I’m a scientist. Actually, I’m a post-doctoral fellow in the field of cellular and molecular biology, but that’s rather a mouthful, so I usually just say I’m a scientist. I work in a research lab, conducting experiments, collecting data, writing results. And if you were to follow me around on any given day, what you’d see is a lot of the following: looking through a microscope, typing numbers into my computer, reading papers about other people’s experiments, and sitting at my desk, thinking about what experiments I’m going to do to repeat the whole process the next day. Sounds like Principal Skinner was right – I do a lot of sitting still, being quiet, paying attention, and writing down numbers!

But I’m here to tell you, all this notwithstanding, that science is fun.

That’s right, science is fun. It’s exciting. It’s cool. It’s got a lot of gee-whiz-ness to it. There’s always something new, something unexpected, something that’s, quite frankly, downright unbelievable. Granted, the things I find fascinating do not all come directly from my lab bench – or my department, or even my institution. But it comes from scientists out there just like me. Let me give you a few examples of some of the latest science tidbits I’ve learned recently that make me sit up say “wow.” Did you know…
…that if the nerves in your skin were stretched out end-to-end, they would reach an average of 45 miles - almost the same distance as from the northern to southern edge of Rhode Island.
…that the average human cell contains enough DNA to wrap around the outside of the cell 15,000 times – yet it is packaged tightly enough to fit with no trouble.
…that bats have a ridiculously long life span for being such a small mammal. They can live up to 20 or 30 years– even though other mammals of comparable size, such as mice and rats, typically only live a few years.
…that there are places in the Atacama desert in Chile, sandwiched between the Andes mountains and the Pacific ocean, that do not see any rain for hundreds of years at a time. Some spots have been rainless for 400 years! Still, some plants, animals, and even humans live there – sustained by tiny pockets of fog that come in from the ocean.
…that the magnetic field of the earth wanders – and sometimes the poles even completely reverse themselves! This happens fairly infrequently, though – reversals happen sometime between every 5000 to 1 million years.

With this blog, I plan on discussing these and other wonders of the scientific world. I plan on writing about a variety of topics, including life sciences, medicine, astronomy and geology. Some of my topics will be brand new discoveries, and others will be long-known items that I find particularly intriguing. My hope is that you will come away from everything that I write knowing something that you didn’t know before. And I hope that it tickles your interest. Let the wonders begin!