Monkeys, Bats, and HIV

Staying up late and dancing like a madman till the wee hours of the morning on Saturday left me with a fairly mild Sabbath and accordingly, an altogether absent blog entry! After waking up around 1:00pm on Saturday, I spent the rest of the day working with my data and reading The Glass Castle—a book Mom lent me, written by Jeannette Walls. The book was very captivating, so much in fact that I finished reading the whole thing (quite a feat since I had about 150 pages to go and am no speed reader). As the day came to a close I found myself sitting in the grass beneath an olive tree silently contemplating the end of the novel. I deftly squished a few ants as I saw them climb up my legs and, once an entire army began to march up my sandals, I figured it was time to go inside. I stood up to leave, just in time to notice that an inch away from where I'd been sitting was a rather ominous looking ant-hill. "Sorry for invading your territory, guys" I told the little insects. I was feeling in both a somber yet extremely satisfied mood, as people often do whenever they close a good book for the last time--realizing that the characters' lives they've just invested in are over or at least temporarily suspended, and now it was time to return back to the tangible world.

When Sunday morning came around, I attended a lecture that Lior had told me about in an e-mail. The talk was given by a researcher in the department of biochemistry and concerned the nature of protein evolution. Although the subject seemed riveting enough, I found myself again reading another paper on animal behavior. While I didn't discover how "GroEL/ES chaperones increase the number and variability of enzyme mutations," I instead learned that pigeons are just as good as young children at placing objects into categories (like identifying which photographs are one's of insects, birds, dogs, etc.). If anything, I'm coming to realize more and more that I'm much more interested in working on the large scale (with systems and whole organisms) than with itty-bitty proteins and molecules. Besides, unlike proteins which aren't very clever without the help of a discerning researcher, monkeys can do things like reason, make facial expressions, and snap you back into reality with a sharp pinch of their fingers and an opposable thumb!

As soon as Lior returned from his neuroscience exam yesterday, he and I went for lunch at the Jubilee Restaurant on campus. The restaurant serves tasty Kosher food like fish, salads, and calzones in a cafeteria style-line at a set price of 16 shekel ($4.80). At such a good price and with no limit on the amount of food you get, it's hard to refrain from piling your plate until it spills over! Among the many options, I chose an egg and vegetable dish, a side of potatoes, salad, and a dish made with bulgur (a sort of grain). Lior and I sat on the second floor of the restaurant which overlooks a small orange grove inside the Weizmann Institute. At lunch, Lior told me all about his recent trip to Brazil where he spent two weeks in the Amazon rainforest on a guided tour. He said the excursion cost him about $70 a day which he found to be a fairly reasonable price given the sights he saw. He and the group he was with traveled down the river by canoe and trekked through the jungle. They caught sight of thirty species of monkeys (spider, squirrel, and red howler monkeys to name a few) and even got to pet a sloth! Lior also told me about a very interesting paper that he'd read the other day about this computer program made by the Japanese. After putting several different photographs of a person's face into the computer, the computer program is able to generate life-like representations of that same person doing a specific facial expression that the user defines. Thus, you could potentially see what a grumpy old person who never smiles would look like if they did smile. Of course, this isn't the only application (others have applications in criminal identification and cosmetology)…but it's nonetheless a very cool idea.

After work yesterday, Rony and his wife Netta had me over to dinner at their apartment. For dinner we had an appetizer of freshly cut orange bell-pepper, cucumber, and cherry tomatoes. We ate roasted chicken, eggplant, and potatoes and had mango sorbet for dessert. Iddo, their two-year-old, was very giggly and excited the whole time, partly because I was new to him but also because he wasn't used to hearing everybody speak English! He kept wanting to show me his very cool shark sunglasses, a gift from Kati (my faculty advisor in the States). I had fun sitting next to him at dinner; he kept asking me to hand him little cucumber coins or in his words "mel'af'fon!" Abigail, about four-months, sat in her stroller through dinner making funny faces.

When dinner was over, I went back to my dorm to do laundry. As I was doing laundry, I ran into Tess who asked if I wanted to grab dinner. Tess is from Colorado and had just arrived that afternoon and even though I'd eaten already, I told her I'd come along. On our way out we ran into Tanmay, my new Indian roommate who arrived this weekend. Tanmay is a hoot! He's got a cool Indian accent mixed in with some British inflections from his undergraduate study at Oxford. His parents weren't exactly happy about him coming to Israel because they were afraid he'd be mistaken for a Palestinian. He casually "forgot" to tell them that when he's not out exploring the shady sides of Israel, he'll be in the lab working closely with HIV! Tess was also fun to hang out with, though she was still a bit disoriented from her travels. It turns out that she's studying neuroscience in the same building as I am and is actually working with bats as her model organism. I'll have to be sure to get a tour of her bat lab; it sounds really cool.