Cheshire

It’s Thanksgiving break!

That means that I get to spend time with the family, the kid, and some family members who come in from out of town.

Yay!!!!

And all I have to work on is two presentations, a paper and about three dozen insects to sort through.

Seriously…I love insects, I really do. They were my first introduction to science and they have some of THE coolest adaptations to life on earth.

Did you know that some Chironomids can actually survive being freeze-dried?

Did you know that some male parasitoid wasps need to develop as parasitoids inside female wasps…eventually killing them?

Did you know that the viruses which disable the immune systems of caterpillars infested by braconid and ichneumonid wasps actually do this by forcing the caterpillar to produce proteins which mimic proteins used in innate immunity and downregulate the immune system by tricking it into thinking nothing at all’s happening?

They’re the most incredible animals on earth!

But, honestly…taking 17 hours at a time sucks. It SUUUUCKS! I can’t say that enough.

Still, though…it’s really rewarding. Like when you look over your grades from one of your classes and realize that you’ve only missed one point in the whole damn lab. Or when you bring up a random subject like codon bias and make one of your professors think of something they never realized before.

Or when a girl in class is waiting for a moth to hatch from her pupa and gets an ichneumonid wasp instead, and you turn dissapointment into wonder by explaining what exactly just happened (from oviposition to eclosion, no less).

Or when you become the life of a party by explaining malaria’s role in maintaining sickle-cell anemia through the heterozygote advantage after drinking half a bottle of Jager.

Then, you realize exactly how incredible everything is all over again.

This semester’s been a lot of fun, but it’s been a lot of work. I’ve been religiously observing no-sleep Tuesdays and Three-Hour Nap Wednesdays. I have absolutely no idea how I’ve kept going, but I have…and it’s been working (kind of).

After this week, I have three weeks of school. Then I start my last semester at Iowa State. I don’t know what I’m going to do after I graduate yet…I’m either going to graduate school or applying for vector biology jobs in Florida.

We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, check out this post about Wolbachia at The Butterfly Diaries! It links back to one of my older posts at my old blogspot blog. Probably not my best science writing, as it was mainly a practice blog…but that’s not necessarily for me to decide. Read it, see what you think.

Oh…and something I never explained in the post they link to: The Toll proteins.

The Toll proteins are proteins which float around in the cytoplasm of a cell bound to each other. When they hit something like bacterial lipopolysaccharide, they separate and move to the nucleus and act as transcription factors for genes involved in various immune system pathways. Insects actually have very similar systems and this part of the immune system is very highly conserved.

Anyways, there’s your weekly smattering of my brainpan onto the interwebs. Enjoy!

Oh…and for the record, I am actually working on something awesome.