Jellyfish and plastic pieces from the Pacific Ocean.

Crabs, Algae, and Flying Fish Eggs on Ocean Plastic.

Barnacles living on plastic bottles in ocean.

A research ship recently docked back home after weeks out at sea studying plastic in the ocean. You can read about the fascinating trip and see amazing photos on their blog. Or check out the official website.

Their destination was a location in the Pacific Ocean, far off the coast of California, where sea currents converge and cause a mass gathering of plastic. The plastic gathering isn’t a floating raft; but small pieces suspended at varying depths.

These plastic pieces probably leech chemicals into the water but they also act like magnets attracting hydrophobic industrial and agricultural chemicals – which are suspected to be consumed by small fish and work up the food chain to top-level-consumers like us.

Interestingly, larger pieces of ocean plastics become homes to pelagic creatures like crabs, algae, flying fish eggs. They anticipate needing six months (or more) to analyze all the data – should be some interesting results!

Foldit Protein Game

Foldit is super addictive game you can feel good about playing. The purpose of the game is to help scientists discover all the possible ways a proteins can fold-up. The way a protein folds up determines its function.

Here are some of the rules:

“Your score on each protein is based on how well you do with these three things.

1. Pack the protein

The smaller the protein, the better. More precisely, you want to avoid empty spaces (voids) in the structure of the protein where water molecules can get inside. So you want the atoms in the protein to be as close together as possible. Certain structures, such as sheets, will even connect together with hydrogen bonds if you line them up right and get them close together. This is also good. Key word: Compact.

2. Hide the hydrophobics

Hydrophobics are the sidechains that don’t want to be touching water, just like oil or wax. Since most proteins float around in water, you want to keep the hydrophobics (orange sidechains) surrounded by as many atoms as possible so the water won’t get to them. The other side of this rule is that hydrophilics (blue sidechains) do want to be touching water, so they should be exposed as much as possible. Key word: Buried.

3. Clear the clashes

Two atoms can’t occupy the same space at the same time. If you’ve folded a protein so two sidechains are too close together, your score will go down a lot. This is represented by a red spiky ball (clash) where the two sidechains are intersecting. If there are clashes, you know something is wrong with your protein. So make sure everything is far enough apart. Key word: Apart.”

I haven’t yet tried the game yet because I here its really hard to stop once you start – and I’ve committed to being productive today. If you try it, let me know what you think!