我看, 我做, 我生活: 研究在台北: And Now We Know I Suck at 50-50

Viva L’Italia it is, then.

I almost pulled off something spectacular last night. In my frantic attempts to find livestreaming for the final, I came across an article in the Taipei Times describing an immense World Cup party beginning at 10 pm at the Taipei Arena, followed by a live showing of the game at 2 am on a big screen. I was extremely close to going but then the survivalist, responsible, common sense part of me kicked in. I looked up the operating hours of the MRT, which were only 6 am-midnight. The game would be over around 4 am, and I didn’t particularly want to trapse around the middle of the city in a place I had never been for 2 hours in the middle of the night. I quickly thought about buses, but realized I also didn’t know those hours of operation, and if indeed they did operate 24/7, I didn’t know the lines or the connections. While it would have been memorable, I can assure you getting lost in Taipei at 4 in the morning also would have been, but for the wrong reasons. From the post-game commentary, it sounds like the game was more of a bloodfest than brilliant playmaking, so that eases the pain a little.

Now on to the crazy weather. As I was sitting at my desk today, I looked out the window and kept having to remind myself it is the middle of July. This was my first experience of a Taiwan summer storm, and I have to say I was slightly uneasy. Not that I expected the walls would come crashing in or anything, but this ‘typical’ storm is comparable to one of the more formidable storms back home. I kept looking up after the roaring thunder to discover a millisecond, ultrabright flash of light and then the tremendous downpour of water. And I haven’t even seen a typhoon yet, many of which should be arriving in the coming days.

Today I took my 'project' one step further with more photographs. This probably seems completely lame, but here are the pictures of my cells below. They are the closest things I have to baby photos, so tread softly. Every blue dot represents the nucleus of a cell, so in other words, there is a cell where every blue dot is located. The green represents an eGFP gene, which is coupled with our transfected gene, so if our cell successfully takes up the desired protein, it will also by definition take up the eGFP, making it fluouresce green. (In case you care, this is what is known as a 'marker.') Lastly, the two pictures are overlapped to examine what percenatage of cells actually took up the gene, or are green. Mine? Not very many. My grad student friends think it is due to the length of time the cells have been alive, and perhaps because I went a little slowly and some died off in the process.