Benchfly

How to describe this site? Well I think the opening page says it all: “Think of us as one of your labmates—except, we don’t fall asleep in group meetings…” (Yes, we’ve all been there.) Benchfly is a multifaceted resource for scientists, although the primary component of the site consists of video tutorials. Whether you want to know how to pack a capillary column, clean a rotovap, or smear parasites for counting, you could spend a great deal of time learning new lab tricks from the videos on this site. There are also a number of articles and blogs to consume your time. So, the next time you find yourself in the lab waiting for your gel to finish running or counting down the time between washes, flit over to Benchfly and enjoy.
www.benchfly.com

BugMeNot.com

Every now and then I find a site, which has such a wide audience and addresses a broad Internet-related concern that I feel compelled to write about it, even though it doesn't directly deal with biotechnology. The issue I'm talking about is the need to register at sites. I've complained about this on numerous occasions because of the tendency of some sites to sell that information, ultimately generating spam to visitors. Yes, I realize there are other reasons for registration and other uses of the information, but spam is a common problem. One approach to combating the spam issue is taken by BugMeNot.com, which provides fake login information for many sites requiring registration. While I don't necessarily condone fighting one evil (misuse of registration) with another (deception), I confess that I did try it just to see if it worked. Sure enough, I could log in to a site with the fake info provided. Is this ethical and a fair way to fight spam? I won't touch that one. You decide.
http://www.bugmenot.com/index.php

Iowa State University’s Tasty Insect Recipes

I haven’t covered a totally fun/silly site in a while, so I guess it is time to do so (or so my justification for including a weird site goes). Iowa State’s Tasty Insect Recipe is one of the more unusual sites I’ve covered here. Dealing, perhaps disturbingly, with the prurient interest of eating bugs, the site has been noticed by many people besides me, including Jay Leno, as seen on the opening page. Like all good sites, the Tasty Insect Recipe site covers all aspects of its topic, from providing specific recipes (Bug Blox, Banana Worm Bread, Chocolate Chirpie Chip Cookies, Chocolate Covered Grasshoppers, etc.) to providing nutritional information, and listing at least one source of insects for cooking (grubco.com). I’m not kidding on this one—a site you’ve got to see to believe.
www.ent.iastate.edu

A Protein Primer - A Musical Introduction to Protein Structure

If you’ve read this column for any period of time, you know that I like the offbeat. Consequently, I couldn’t resist this offering, which provides a musical introduction to protein structure. Yes, there are many sites like this one with similar ideas, but I’ll wager that none of them produce its interesting melodies. “A Protein Primer” accomplishes its magic by assigning increasing pitch to amino acids by their increasing hydrophobicity values and the duration of each note is set by the number of codons coding for it. I’m not a musician, but I’d find it hard to believe you wouldn’t appreciate the eerie beauty of the sequence of Calmodulin being played on your computer. My only complaint is that I’d like to be able to dump my own sequence into the site and have it play it back to me. Perhaps this will come in the future.

www.whozoo.org/