And a spoonful of sugar, makes the medicine go down…
Nostrums: Tame a Child’s Cough With a Touch of Honey
A spoonful of honey might quiet a child’s cough more effectively and safely than the most common over-the-counter cough medicine.
Category: Fair Finds
FreeRice is a sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com.
FreeRice has two goals:
1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.[...]
Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide. Thank you.
So many others have already blogged about this site, but it really is a win-win situation; you get both the satisfaction of improving your word repertoire and the knowledge that you’re helping fight hunger. So, check it out.
In honor of World AIDS Day on December 1st, Bristol-Myers Squibb, the pharmaceutical monolith (that charges nearly $1000 for a 30 day supply of one of its HIV/AIDS medications), is donating $1 to the National AIDS Fund for each person who simply visits their website and “virtually
lights a candle.”
Please, please take a minute to “light a candle”:
https://www.lighttounite.org/
It’s completely free, quick, and painless. Then, after you light your candle, “pass it on” to your friends.
– Note: Shamelessly copied from a note by Janice Lin
Shortly after the end of my Spring semester this past May, I decided to help out with the National Science Olympiad which took place at my college, IU. I worked as a grader for Don’t Bug Me for most of one day, and learned a bit about insects that I’ve never realized I didn’t know, and afterwards promptly forgot most of it. A short while ago, I found myself needing something to obsess over during the summer (besides mass spectrometry, peptide purification, and organic synthesis, that is), and came up with several options. I’m already going to be obsessing over several programming languages and web scripting languages for my lab and position as webmaster of several student organizations here, so those topics were out. Also, I’m already obsessed with reading, chemistry, and Broadway musicals, so that didn’t really leave too much. Some options I thought up were birds, insects, calculus, and my sister suggested I try obsessing over girls. Mathematics is one of my majors, so obsessing over that is too easy; one of my friends Beth is already obsessed with birds, so that’s out to; and girls have the cooties (order anoplura, family pediculidae*). You can probably guess what I ended up choosing . . .
Anyways, I picked up a copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to Insects, which is a marvelous book, suggested to me by the head proctor/grader at Don’t Bug Me for the Middle School level at NSO, though mostly black and white, and ran with that; however, this evening I ran across a nice internet site that goes through a brief overview of the various insect orders. Just thought that it’d be a nice resource to any aspiring young amateur entomologists out there.
Pediculidae free Will
*Lice, for anyone who doesn’t know their insect families. Shame shame ^_^. Also sometimes classified as belonging to Mallophaga, although that’s usually just considered their suborder.
My labwork currently has quite a bit in common with various peptide/protein studies; in order to perform a lot of repetitive calculations, I had originally planned on writing a javascript peptide mass calculator, which I even started on. However, it seems that someone beat me to the punch, by upwards of 8 years. I might still write up my own because I need to hone my javascript skills, and my particular project requires something specific, but it’s both nice and sort of disappointing that it already exists. The calculator even calculates MH+ for those of you out there who like I do a lot of mass spec work. Check it out.
William
