Just keep swimming.

I'm currently swimming in a sea of papers about Martian meteorites and GC-MS characterization of carbohydrates. Those things might not seem directly related at first, but what if I told you that no one's been able to figure out how ribose could have formed under the same conditions that formed the *rest* of RNA on Earth, and what if I reminded you that meteorites have been going back and forth between Earth and Mars for as long as Earth and Mars have existed? And what if I told you that no one's bothered to look for sugars specifically in the Martian meteorites that we have found?

This is a whole different paper from the previous assignment I was talking about, even though they both have to do with Mars. This one is much more massive. It isn't due until the week after next, but my weekends are filling up pretty quickly with dancing and other events that are supposed to be keeping me sane, but I have a feeling will leave me more stressed out in the end (in particular if I don't get going on this paper).

I don't really mind swimming in this particular sea of papers; after all, I chose the topic, and I think it's interesting stuff, and this will be a good exercise in writing a proposal. You could say that the water's just fine. But like real swimming, I do get tired after a while. Hopefully, I won't drown.

I had a chocolate Easter egg for breakfast today. Is that bad?

All this work would be less daunting if I were not already under a lot of pressure with my research. I was just accepted to give a talk at a conference in May (!), so M wants me to try to get our paper submitted before then. I don't know how serious he is about that deadline, but it's going to be *difficult*, to say the least, to meet it. It would be less difficult if:
a) The weather wasn't ridiculously gross outside. We're talking rain, then snow, then rain, until it's just a complete slushy mess. I don't mean to be a wuss but I just can't bring myself to walk a mile (each way) through that this weekend. And forget biking.
b) I wasn't training an undergrad. When M asked me if I'd be willing to be in charge of an undergrad in the lab, I didn't hesitate, because I remember how important that experience was for me. He's doing a good job, but it just takes him a long time to do everything, because he's just learning. And then it takes longer for me to do my stuff.
c) I didn't have this week-long training session coming up in May, which I have to do for this "leadership" job I'll be doing next year. The job itself shouldn't be too much work, but the training is absolutely required. I told M about it a while ago (I think), but I'm not looking forward to reminding him of it.

So I'm going to be ridiculously busy until...June. But usually I function best this way.

Easter procrastination

I'm supposed to be doing my homework right now. But it's not due until Tuesday, so technically I don't have to do it tonight...

But I always have a hard time concentrating when I'm in the lab, and I have my orchestra dress rehearsal tomorrow night. So it would probably be better to do it now.

Wait, I know -- if I do it in blog format, maybe I can trick my brain into thinking I'm not actually working!

Also, I'm not going to make any effort to make it sound good...

Okay, here goes:
1. Where on Mars should we look for extant life?

I'm just throwing this out there, but...how about underneath where they found all that methane in the atmosphere? It's probably not biogenic, but you won't know unless you look.

How would you look for it?

Uh...well it would have to be in the subsurface. So I guess we could drill down and take out a soil sample.

Then what?

Uh...look...for...life...in...it.

That's not very specific.

No kidding. Okay, well you could look for morphological stuff. This would probably involve sample return. And/or you could analyze the carbon content using mass spec.

Which would tell you what?

Well they would need to make some kind of biomass, right? Even methanogens need higher order carbon molecules.

So does thermal decomposition of rocks.

Fine. But maybe you could also look for enrichment in light carbon. Most of the carbon on Mars should be heavy due to escape.

2. Where on Mars would you look for extinct life?

Somewhere that clearly had water.

That's a lot of places.

Yup. Maybe Meridiani Planum then, since we talked about that in class. I need to read that paper to see if one place there is better than another (it's a bigass planum). We should probably go somewhere with hematite, which is a pretty good indicator of water.

Okay, well assuming you figure out where specifically to go, how do you look for life there?

Well this would not necessarily be in the subsurface, but it would probably have been covered by dust (which could then become rock), so you'd probably still have to dig a little bit. Then I guess you could do the same stuff that you did for the extant life. You'd probably be looking more for stromatolites than intact cells.

Well this makes your first approach seem kind of dumb. Shouldn't there be a difference between the treatment of things that are living and things that are dead?

Probably. And now I'm not sure that living organisms would survive the trip back to Earth.

How do you know that Earth life is alive?

Well, you can try to grow it. You can stain it for ATP production.

You can look for its DNA. You can look for RNA, or any number of proteins. But actually the presence of these things doesn't mean it's alive, but that it was probably alive once. Also, these things might not be a factor in Mars life.

I kind of like the idea of checking for a decrease in things the org eats, and an increase in the thing it produces. If you put methanogens in an environment with labeled CO2, and then see labeled CH4, that might mean something.

I don't think it would be very easy to confirm that something is living at the time from a remote location -- you have to either send an astrobiologist or somehow get the thing back to Earth alive. But maybe it will be sufficient to start by going somewhere where extant life is thought to be, show that is was at least alive at one point, and then go back later and do these more difficult procedures. Yeah, I think that's probably the way to go.

And now to make this coherent...

Addendum: Are there photosynthetic methanogens? Should we look for green stuff? Or purple stuff?

Showdown at the toystore, and Radical Christians Dreams

I was in a mall. Actually, this one started out like Back to the Future 2, but was every bit as confusing as that movie, so I'm just going to skip to the mall. I was either a police officer, or watching one. There were a lot of police officers in this particular mall. And it's a good thing, because there was a man with a gun, and he started freaking out, waving it around and (possibly) shooting at people.

I remember hitting the ground behind one of those big potted plants to avoid being hit. I remember thinking, "less surface area, less chance of being hit." I didn't leave, though (all the shoppers were out of there pretty quick) because I was either a police officer, or watching one.

The crazy guy ended up in the toy store (I think it was Kay-Bee). The other police officers and I followed him in. Someone pulled down the little gate thingie (that they put down when the store closes) so the guy wouldn't be able to get out. But then I thought, "That's kind of dumb. Now if he really goes crazy, we can't get out, either." So someone put in the key and opened the gate back up.

I went to the back of the room to see if the guy was hiding there. All I found was this girl; she reminded me of a bunch of different people, but mostly Eliza Dushku (sp?). She motioned to me that the guy was hiding there. But she was just talking to him, since he didn't know we were there, keeping him calm. And then I guess the other police officers went in and got him.

The whole thing was kind of scary, but not as much as you might think.

***

I was watching a special on TV, and then ended up being inside it (which often happens). It was about one of those radical Christian families, you know the kind with like 15 kids who are all home-schooled and not really allowed to interact with society (I'm going to attribute this one to the fact that I saw a clip of Oprah talking to the mothers from one of those cults in Texas or wherever; also, the mom looked like the mom from 15 Kids and Counting, which I've seen a lot of commercials for while I watch What Not to Wear).

So I was suddenly visiting the family. One of the sons was only allowed to eat pomegranate seeds (?!) because they were supposed to keep him away from the Devil.

Some of the kids were playing football in the yard, but they had to imagine they were receiving the ball from someone else because they didn't have anyone else to play with.

I went for a ride with one of the boys and his dad in their truck. We were driving through the forest. We saw all kinds of animals, and they were all really big. Specifically, I remember seeing some coyotes and a giant anteater.

I went back to the house and one of the sons offered me some cookies (they weren't allowed to eat Cheetos, but they were allowed to eat chocolate cookies). I think I took about 3 cookies. The mom seemed kind of shocked by this, but I told her it was okay, because I don't have cookies that often. Then the son took one of my cookies and fed it to his dog. I told him that chocolate isn't good for dogs, and also it isn't very polite to offer someone a cookie and then take it away.

Then they started doing a TV interview. One of my professors (N) called in to the show and was clearly very disturbed by the way these people lived (I don't know N's thoughts on religion, but I would not be surprised if he acted like this in real life). He was trying to explain to them the merits of science, to show them that all the things they explain by religion can be explained by science. But I think he got kind of carried away (he was mad) and wasn't that effective in communicating with them. So I decided to take a different approach.

I sat down with the mom and tried to talk to her. First I asked her what evidence she had that the things she believed were true, but she managed to side step that question. All I got from her was that she had been "lost," and then she met (I wasn't sure if it was her husband or God) and wasn't lost anymore. I noticed that she and I were wearing similar nail polish.

My friend J was there suddenly, and he asked them if they thought they were going to all get on a spaceship and fly away. I told him that these people weren't like that; that was a whole other cult thing.

I explained to the mom that my family was doing just fine, despite the fact that we were allowed to eat Cheetos. I told her how all 3 of the kids in my family had gone to college, how we are all doing really well. She seemed pretty amenable to what I was saying. Then I woke up.

Robot Dream

I dream a lot. Most of the time my dreams are a little odd, and often they're hilarious. I can usually figure out why I had them (I can relate them to something I was recently thinking about), but sometimes they are pretty random. I really like it when I dream about something I had completely forgotten about, or when I sometimes dream up solutions to problems in the lab (this has actually happened a couple of times!) So, at the risk of revealing the inner workings of my subconscious to everyone, I'm going to start recording some of my dreams here, mostly for entertainment value. And, since it's hard to remember what order things occurred in, I might have to put some of it in bullet format.

The first dream is one I had last night. It had something to do with the fact that I recently saw the movie Wall-E, and yesterday rated it 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix.

***

I had my own robot. It was named Wall-E and was, well, pretty much the same as the Wall-E from the movie. No eyes or facial movements, though. And I doubt it had the capacity to fall in love like the one in the movie, but I got the feeling that it was more like a dog/master relationship, where it constantly wanted to make me happy.

For example: One time I turned it on and it was low on batteries. I know this because the words on its view screen were red (instead of green), and it said that it was low on batteries. I told it (it was voice-commanded, how cool!) that I would change its batteries, and it said something to the effect of "No, I can still work." (I don't think it talked -- I probably read this on the view screen) Now that's loyalty for you. I changed the batteries anyway. They were the shape and size of camera batteries, maybe a little smaller.

Wall-E had some kind of infrared imaging system to enable it to see and maneuver around objects. Once it ran into my music stand and had a bit of a hard time figuring out how to get around it. At first I thought this was because the stem of the music stand is small, and it might be hard for it to sense the 3D nature of it. But now I'm wondering if it would be hard to get an infrared image of something that is metal (I actually have no idea what I'm talking about here).

So, what did Wall-E do? From what I can gather, it was mostly filled with information -- basically a rolling, voice-commanded Internet. With a couple little arms (maybe it could help out around the house?) and speakers. The only real task I can remember assigning it is as follows:

My mom was asked to sing at her church. She was not happy about this at all because she doesn't particularly like singing in front of people. But I think they were going to pay her for it, which made it slightly more appealing. For some reason we were in the living room at our old house (the one we lived in when I was in first grade). I wanted to help her, and I think the idea was that I would get Wall-E to play the music for the songs she needed to sing, so she could practice without anyone else around. I don't remember if she actually did it or not, but I still think it was a good idea.

Then a bunch of other stuff happened, and the plot changed to one involving a high school drama class. I don't remember much about this one, but I think this is the second time I've had a dream in reference to Hamlet 2 in as many days. And that's kind of weird, since I saw that movie a couple months ago and haven't thought about it much since (though it was pretty entertaining).

***

So, there you have it: my subconscious' relatively unimaginative vision of robots in the future.