Friday Fragments (7/22/11)

HPLC Instrument...looks like fun, right?

I have to keep it short this week but here are a few fragments to get you through the day.  Also, I have been working on a few new ideas and thought I'd give a quick preview...

Under the Hood: High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) - I'll be using this a lot in the near future so writing about it not only relates to my work but also serves as a good refresher course for myself!

New post coming soon - "So you're gonna be a pharmacist? Not exactly."

Reboot of my original series "Behind the Bench."  I am revitalizing this idea to be a little more Q and A and a little less cheesy.  Also, it will hopefully feature both future researchers and pharmacists (so if you are interested let me know).

New post coming soon - "My Top 5 Medical Breakthroughs and How They Can Change The World!"

Alright now to this weeks fragments;

-At a convention in Europe a grad student from Berlin gave a presentation of the shape-shifting cell phone.  Watch the video (about 5 min) but it you are short on time fast forward towards the end and watch the part about bringing your cell phone to "life."  It is particularly entertaining!

PEG can be modified and made in
variable lengths depending on the
task at hand.  

-A team of researchers from Harvard and MIT have developed new synthetic vocal cords from a polymer.  Cool thing is that they used Polyethylene Glycol (or PEG for short) which is already approved for multiple health medical technologies and drug formulations.  Again the video is actually quite neat!

-Completely unrelated to science, Rick Reilly wrote an article on ESPN.com about welcoming Nebraska to the Big Ten.  Unfortunately Reilly used very few actual facts and just proceeded to belittle everyone associated with the Big Ten.  Read his article here, but for a more entertaining (and Boilermaker bias) read this breakdown of his article on HammerandRails.com.

-Rock-paper-scissors statistics. Yeah, it's that important that we do research on it!

Have a great weekend!