By: Joseph Maa Date: June 10, 2017 Hi everyone! Just a weird thought about blood pressure for today. The common numbers that everyone knows is 120/80 mmHg mercury for normal blood pressure. The mmHg just means the pressure to push a column of mercury 120 mm at sea level. I was really confused today after […]
Read more "A Weird Thought about Blood Pressure"Article by: Joseph Maa Date: 6/8/2017 “Death is not the worst thing in the world, and to help a man to a happy and useful career may be more of a service than the saving of life.” In 1927, Francis Peabody delivered a timeless message to physicians addressing the relationship of the patient and physician. […]
Read more "A Review of “The Care of the Patient” by Francis Peabody"By: Joseph Maa Date: 6/5/2017 Hi everyone, Joseph here: Today I wanted to talk about something near and dear to my heart: finding and isolating bacteria. Now, the process of isolating single pure colonies (all the same species) of bacteria is important for a couple reasons. For one, having a lot of colonies is amenable to […]
Read more "Finding Waldo: A Systematic Approach to Isolating and Identifying Bacteria"By: Joseph Maa Date: 6/2/2017 A couple of readers have asked about why the blog’s title is: It Began With Potatoes. A few more are on their way to starting their own blog, (I’m cheering you guys on wholeheartedly!) or already have an established blog. (Leslie’s blog here: [1]) So, this article aims to explain my […]
Read more "A Retrospection: Why Did It Begin With Potatoes?"fBy Joseph Maa: Date: 6/1/2017 Hi everyone just a short post today: I was recently reading a book and it came up that the human diploid genetic code has 6 billion base pairs. [1] Back in high school and middle school, memorizing the numbers really seemed to be more of a fun fact than pragmatic information. […]
Read more "Why Magnitudes Matter"By: Joseph Maa I’ve recently had the opportunity to sit down with Gordon Pherribo, a current graduate student in the Taga Lab at Berkeley studying vitamin B12 in bacterial communities.[1] Throughout history, bacterial communities have constantly been scrutinized under researchers’ microscopes, but as microscope resolution has improved, researchers increasingly are only limited by their technical knowledge and the […]
Read more "Fake Nuclei, Microbial Communities, and Graduate School: A Conversation with Gordon Pherribo (Taga Lab)"Hi everyone, I’m back! I’ve been on hiatus from writing for about a month, but I’m back at it again. These past few days have been particularly difficult for me, but I’ve found my motivation to write once again. Five days ago, at 11:10 pm, I received multiple frantic missed call messages on my phone. […]
Read more "A Year in Retrospection: Realizing My Grandpa’s Legacy and Looking Forward"