Baby in hospital

My computer's been sent back to HP to have the speakers and the monitor repaired, so no blog entries for the next week or so.

For the past week, I hadn't been blogging cos I'd been working on a presentation on fowlpox virus. I'll upload the PowerPoint when it's over...you all can learn about the wonderful world of avian poxviruses =) It'll be my first presentation in a couple of years, so hopefully I won't fluff it.

In the meantime, here are two short movies you should watch:

• The Laboratory Rat: a Natural History. Fifty Wistar (white) and Lister-Hooded lab rats were released into a fenced lot to see if they still had enough instincts to survive in the wild after 200+ generations of domesticatiion. It's a really cute series of short clips (total 27 mins) if you like little furry animals. It's enormously fascinating to see lab rats raised in "shoebox" cages on pellets learn to forage, socialize, hide from predators (one of the filmmakers' cats), and mate and raise pups. After a few months:

  "By now, the rats have learned to exploit food in the more remote places, and climb on small branches with great agility. [Rat falls off branch] Well, most of the time."

  
• Inner Life of the Cell. A collaboration between Harvard and Studio Daily, this is an absolutely beautiful short movie that departs from the typical biochem/cell bio/molecular bio "animations" of proteins represented by ovals and DNA represented by ladders. In the spirit of Fantastic Voyage, you feel like if you shrank down to the nanoscale and entered a living body, this is what you would see. The version with a musical soundtrack is here and the narrative version with labels is here.