Tango

Well, yeah, I have a new addiction. The thing is that I always liked to watch people dancing tango and found it a very sensual dance.

Browsing through the net I found this tango school in London about a month and a half ago. It is not really the first time I try this; two years ago I had a lesson, but that was far from didactic. The experience was nice, but not because of the dancing (we'll leave that story for some other time), it turned to be hard to follow and I soon forgot all what I learned.

The system at this school is much better; you start by knowing where to put your weight when you dance, how to keep your posture and, more importantly, that you have to establish a connection and "communication without words" with your partner. As a "follower", you have to learn how to feel the lead and this can be very complex as the movements are subtle.

During the first few lessons, it looked a lot like weird waltzing. Now, after my 7th lesson it is starting to look like tango and I manage to go around the dancefloor for a full song doing more than front-back-sideways... I have passed the stage of the open embrace (a bit like "dirty-dancing-this-is-my-space-that-is-yours" kind of thing) and went into the close one (very much like hugging your partner) and now I cannot wait to learn how to do fancy stuff with my feet!.

Great stuff this dance!. By the way, if you browse for "tango" in "youtube" it sends you to some really nice routines by experienced dancers.

Guess how was this image drawn!.

Right, I think I am allowed to be a little geeky sometimes.

This nice image of a beach in fluorescent colours is not drawn with some of those japanese markers: it is actually bacteria growing on a Petri dish. How come they fluoresce, and in different colours?. Well, it is because they are genetically modified.

The green fluorescent protein (GFP) is a protein found in a bioluminescent jellyfish that, as the name says, produces green light when stimulated. GFP is not a very fuzzy protein, so you can isolate its gene (DNA sequence) from the jellyfish, put it into another organism (under suitable regulation) and make the organism fluoresce.

In that way, scientist have generated not only fluorescent bacteria, but also fluorescent mice, rats, pigs and even monkeys.

If you make some changes in the structure of the protein, you can generate variants that produce blue, yellow, cyan or red light.

Then, if you have bacteria expressing all these varieties in your lab and you happen to be bored waiting during an incubation period, you can create images such as the one shown here.

(Taken from Wikipedia, artwork by Nathan Shaner and photography by Paul Steinbach).