USA! USA! USA!

I think I've caught something... WORLD CUP FEVER.

I hope y'all have been keeping up because it doesn't get more exciting than this. 45 minutes of uninterrupted, physical strategic play. Make sure you go to the bathroom at the half because you won't want to leave your seat. It's streaming online on BBC/ITV, ESPN3, and on a similar Canadian channel. Of course, for the proper environment you'll have to go to your dorm's common room, or a small bar or pub. We've conveniently scheduled 'lab meetings' in rooms equipped with projectors when the home country of our lab members are playing a match. Argentina, Germany, England, and USA. The Brasil, Spain, and Holland games also promise to be entertaining, so catch them if you can. We're doing a random lottery (British translation 'sweepstakes') around the lab and I pulled Nigeria and New Zealand, the second of which is the worst team in the entire tournament. 23 pound grand prize, 9 pound second prize.

Let me walk you through the the first half of my week. It's a very commonly used technique, so I doubt I'm divulging any classified information First, I collect a bundle of Xenopus (frog) oocytes, there are thousands in a sac, and they're all about half a millimeter in diameter and in different stages of development. I put them through a special rinse cycle which dissolves the collagen that binds them all tightly together. After incubation for an hour, which is the break I'm using to write this post, I put a couple hundred under in a dish under the microscope. Using a pair of sharp tweezers, I separate out about 25 of the more mature oocytes and remove the thin surrounding follicular layer. Then I load up an injection electrode with RNA and send it into the oocyte. The RNA is for sodium channels which take two/three days to express, after which I start my experiments.

America has left its footprint all over modern British culture. Although, as Jie was mentioning, they're about ten years behind. Some people in my lab started watching Friends, and Dominoes seems to be the number 1 pizza chain. The German student in my dorm watches mainly American films and tv shows, and he confirms the same is the case in most of Western Europe. All the buses have posters of upcoming American films (a month late) and the music is mostly American (90s, hip-hop, rock). The English do have smaller cars, and seem to be more environmentally-minded in general. It's probably because I'm on a college campus, but there's always a set of recycling bins nearby.

The similarities are becoming more apparent than the differences between our cultures. Do any of you guys in the UK speak French or Spanish and want to head down there?