Getting the Science Write

A Blog for the novelist looking for Sci-Fi ideas, or who justs wants to spell "ammonium thioglycolate" right

[gettingthesciencewrite]

Scien(tist) Fact of the Week

For those of you wanting to make your scientist characters more human/relatable, remember this:

Scientists can (and do) cry in the lab.

Maybe it is because your bacteria won’t grow for the hundredth time, and your lab PI is growing super impatient.

Maybe it’s because someone spilled your valuable experiment all over the floor, and now you have to spend another 6 weeks redoing the experiment.

Maybe it’s because your pipetter broke, and after having your bf/gf break up with you that morning, and having a stack of bills waiting for you when you get home, and you still have to write that grant that’s due Friday, that broken pipetter was the last straw.

Or maybe they just need a good cry after a stressful week of meetings and journal paper rejections.

Most of the time, your science doesn’t go as planned, and you just gotta let it all out. Remember this with your characters!!

[writingdotcoffee]

“It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”

— Robert Hass

[gettingthesciencewrite]

Science Fact of the Week

Scientists have a sense of humor... and it is interesting, to put it lightly.

Someone named a developmental gene SHH, or “Sonic Hedgehog”.

Some genius managed to get away with naming the gene encoding the L-fuculokinase protein (and I kid you not, this is in OFFICIAL LITERATURE)...fucK.

There is a mutation in the fruit fly that makes the fly really susceptible to alcohol, and what do we call it? The “Cheap Date” gene.

Someone named a species of acorn worm after Yoda from Star Wars.

And there is some goofball out there that managed to name a technique that gave it the acronym: ChIA-PET.

So, all of you people wanting to make new scientific names for your story, remember that even in real life, scientists like to be little sh*ts with naming (especially with references that will go over older generations heads 😆)

[gettingthesciencewrite]

Cloning, Part 1

Post number 2! Enjoy!

[gettingthesciencewrite]

Bonus Science Fact of the Week

(Because I am procrastinating on studying for my Ph.D...)

Humans have 46 chromosomes, or 23 pairs. Two of those are sex chromosomes (x and y).

Sooooo..... I would like to point out that the reason why humans can create kids is because one parent provides 23 chromosomes, and the other parent provides the other 23 (all packages up nicely in these cells called “gametes”). When you have a human mate with something like an alien, you’re not going to get a viable offspring.

(I mean, that’s even if they parents can mechanically get together! Most likely, with the speciation due to evolving on seperate planets for who-knows-how-long, a human and alien will not have “compatible parts,” so to speak.)

Back to my non-viable kid comment earlier though: what do I mean by that? Well, there are two options if the egg can be fertilized:

1) The egg is fertilized but does not form a viable fetus for a variety of different reasons (or doesn’t even start growing after fertilization).

2) The fertilized egg does make a living fetus (yay!) that can grow, but the child is now sterile.

Number 2 is the more interesting option here, and we need to know why it happens. To be fertile, one must be able to make gametes (the sperm or the egg/oocyte). You can only make gametes through a process called meiosis, and that doesn’t work for you if you don’t have the same chromosome count from each parent.

This is actually the problem with the mule, which is a cross between a donkey and a horse. The mule can grow, but all mule are sterile (they can’t even mate between other miles). That’s because the horse and the donkey have two different chromosome counts. To form your gametes during meiosis, there’s a step called Metaphase I where your chromosomes in pairs line up. Buuuuuuuut, if you got half of your genes from mom (23 human chromosomes) and the other from dad (28 alien chromosomes), the chromosomes don’t line up correctly, causing meiosis to come to a halt.

So, this puts Spock from Star Trek in a new light: maybe he wasn’t shunned just because he was half human, maybe it also had something to do with him being sterile. I mean, that’s an interesting take on a character!

In summary: the likelyhood of naturally occuring human-alien hybrid kids are extremely unlikely, BUT if it does happen, consider making that character sterile. See how they handle it, and how society treats them for it.

Edit: spelling fixes

[gettingthesciencewrite]

Science (Related) Fact of the Week

Want to write a scientist in your story but don’t want to have them working in a lab all of the time (or what we lovingly call “benchwork”)? You’re in luck!

Not all scientists choose to work in a lab after they get their Ph.D or masters. Some choose to go into industry, some work exclusively on writing codes at home, and some goose to work in communications (like medical writing, or grant writing). Some folks only go to universities/colleges where they only have to teach and don’t have to work in a lab!

That being said, these folks still earned a graduate after working for 4-6 years on their scientific thesis. Just because your character is not in a lab does not mean they can’t still understand procedures, science papers, and concepts (if they got a Ph.D, they most likely are an expert in a specific field).

The benefits of having a non-benchwork focused scientist is that you, the writer, get to avoid procedures! But more importantly, your characters may be trained to communicate science in a way that others outside of a field can understand. They also are more likely to have a wider breath of knowledge on different fields (with a small catch: they lack the knowledge depth of said fields).

So, if you need aim credibly specific expert, choose the lab PI or benchwork scientist. If you need the Jack of All Trades type of scientist, you might be better off writing a “bench-less” scientist.

[gettingthesciencewrite]

Science Fact of the Week

Want a really cool (and hot) setting idea for a fight or a section of a journey? Then I have the perfect idea for you: Frozen Lake with methane bubbles.

Lake Abraham is our real life example: bacteria at the bottom of the lake fork methane gas, which then becomes trapped in ice. Now, this is a man made lake, but that’s not to say you can’t worldbuild s natural one in your stories.

Why is this such a big deal, though? Two things:

1) Methane is flammable. Picture a fight happening on a frozen lake. Someone sprays fire onto the cracking ice. Maybe it’s from a dragon (if you’re into fantasy), or from a flamethrower (for my more sci-fi writers). The frozen lake erupts into flames. How. Cool. Would. That. Look?

2) Methane displaces oxygen. Any gas can do this, really, but the important bit here is that if you start breathing in an excess of methan gas, you start to develop “hypoxia,” or “low oxygen.” Can you imagine your characters trekking across a frozen lake, only to start becoming dizzy and feeling faint because they are breathing in methane that may be escaping from the ice? (It would be so scary: Methane is both colorless and, contrary to popular belief, odorless. Your characters would start choking and they wouldn’t know why).

[scinerds]

‘Radioactive‘ Trailer This one was not even on our radar, a (by the looks so far) well produced, possibly well written Marie Curie movie? I hope so.

From the looks of this trailer for such movie, ‘Radioactive‘ is looking promising. Women in stem in general is not often placed in the likes of Hollywood media, to see women in stem being accurately portrayed on the big screen like this is a rarity I hope to see more of.

[gettingthesciencewrite]

Science Fact of the Week

If your characters are hit with an arrow or a knife or something sharp...DO NOT HAVE THEM JUST PULL IT OUT. As badass as it may look to have your MC just rip out that weapon and keep on trucking, that actually will kill them.

The “thing” that impaled/hit/injured them is actually keeping the blood in; pull that thing out, and you create a wound that can potentially cause them to bleed out to death. EMTs and Paramedics are taught to stabilize the impaled item and then hurry the patient to the hospital to have a surgeon take care of it.

So, if you want the MC to survive a fight where they are stabbed, have them keep the knife or sword in there until they can find someone to help them. Otherwise, have them put TONS of pressure on there and hope that stops the bleeding.

[gettingthesciencewrite]

Science Fact of the Week

For those of you wanting to put female scientists in your stories, this one’s for you!

Nettie Stevens is the geneticist who actually discovered sex chromosomes from her work in meal worm beetles. She saw that males have a single smaller chromosome compared to the females (what would be called the Y and the X chromosomes) and theorized CORRECTLY that not only did these differences in chromosomes were the means of determining sex in the beetles, but also that this different chromosome actually came from the sperm, not the egg.

E.B Wilson got credit for discovering sex chromosomes, though. He published a similar paper that came out before hers (even though her conclusions were much stronger and more accurate).

So, pro tip for writing women in science: find the ones that were sidelined in history, and read their work!!

[gettingthesciencewrite]

Science Fact of the Week

Since I am currently studying and practicing so many fruit fly punnet squares, y’all get to enjoy a Drosophila fact with me:

Like humans, fruit flies have an XY sex determination system (males are XY, females are XX). However, the Y chromosome is not necessary for a fly to become male: males having only a single X chromosome have been observed. The Y chromosome does determine if the little guy is steril or not! No Y, no sperm.

[gettingthesciencewrite]

Science Fact of the Week

(A bit late, but still here!)

The first protein structure to be determined as actually myoglobin! Max Perutz and John Kendrew publishes their Noble Prize winning work in “Nature” magazine and they showed the structure.... with a clay model.

[gettingthesciencewrite]

First post covering two different approaches to use science in your writing!

[gettingthesciencewrite]

Science fact of the Week

The geography come snail hunts small fish with venom. The venom is actually a form of insulin! When the snail stings it’s prey, it injects insulin into the fish, causing the fish to go into hypoglycemic shock (or “low blood sugar”) and can’t move.

How does a snail sting it’s prey, you ask? By harpooning them.

[gettingthesciencewrite]

Science fact of the week:

Did you know that the main oxygen transport protein in fetuses are actually specialized fetal hemoglobin (or red blood cell proteins)?

These hemoglobins have a higher affinity to oxygen, which means that when the mother’s veins and the fetus’s cross paths in the placenta, the oxygen in the mother’s blood is “sucked” into the fetus’s blood thanks to the higher affinity.

Why? Because of a single amino acid change from histidine to serine in the fetal hemoglobin!