Cal Day: Berkeley's Open House

"Cal" Day, the annual Open House at Berkeley on Saturday, was superb, and is now scheduled as a recurring annual event on my calendar. The day-long series of faculty lectures on all topics are free and open to the public. We learned, for example:

• How Polimerase Chain Reactions (PCRs) that speedily make billions of copies of genes and thus enable all kinds of research, genetic testing, and production processes was invented by Cetus Corporation's Kary Mullis in 1983 and led to his winning the Chemistry Nobel Prize in 1993. PCR makes use of the enzyme Taq polymerase, discovered in 1965 by Thomas Brock in Yellowstone hot springs, that can perform even at the high temperatures required to successively separate and copy genes. For more on this in a lighter vein, see the PCR and GTCA songs:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD3faDLEvmY
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID6KY1QBR5s.

• Yes, the brain is pliable: The part of breeding canaries' brains dealing with learning songs doubles in size during the spring mating season, then contracts to its original size. This same neurogenesis is now believed to apply to human brains as well. The hippocampi (part of the brains) of London taxi drivers, who have to learn all the streets in London and the best way to get between any two city locations, are larger than normal. Use it or lose it :-)

• Black holes are the most energetic phenomena in the universe. Every galaxy has a black hole at its center, and our Milky Way galaxy also has millions of smaller black holes throughout, the remains of collapsed stars. The black holes at the center of every galaxy emit so much radiation and eject so much matter that they profoundly affect the formation of the galaxy.

• The latest advances in evolutionary theory show that the Cambrian "explosion" of life forms between 490-542 million years ago, as evidenced by fossils in the famous Burgess Shale, was not so weird as Steven Jay Gould believed in Incredible Life. Rather, the explosion follows from several factors: growing levels of Oxygen in earth's atmosphere (the result of life) that enabled increasing complexity of genes; the principle of "frustration" selection (what is optimal for an organism overall is sub-optimal for any specific function); and interactions among species, i.e., ecology.

• Saturn's moon Enceladus, only 500 km across, has geysers spewing ice crystals and creating one of Saturn's rings. Amazing that such a small moon could be so volcanically active. Pluto is now known to have at least three moons: moonlets Nix and Hydra in addition to Charon.