User:Anthony Salvagno/Notebook/Research/2009/06/22/Laser Diodes

I was looking up what Mark Williams used for his laser. It is 850nm diode from some company called SDL. It was improperly referenced in a different paper as SDS which made my search more difficult. I can't really find the company, but I found some sites that sell the diode (ebay and stuff like it). I give up.

Communication loops continue. I only know about our progress with the tweezers because Koch and I sort of talked about it last Thursday, which is why I was looking into a new diode (like MC Williams's).

I did come across a sweet short paper of his that I will read and write about here.

Paper

Stuffing a virus with DNA: Dissecting viral genome packaging - cool title

It is a pretty interesting paper, and nicely short, but I can't seem to focus to well. In short he talks about several other papers that look into several aspects of how DNA can fit into such a small space when referring to the capsule that viruses use. That was the worst sentence ever. Whatever I will come back to this later.

Steve Koch 02:14, 23 June 2009 (EDT): This looks like "a commentary" on a paper published in the same issue by the Doug Smith lab at UCSD. Commentaries are common in journals such as PNAS, Nature, Science (they have different names for them, such as "perspective"). I agree with you that they are often much easier to read (which is I guess the point). From what I've seen, often (but not always) they ask one of the referees to write the perspective, since that person has already put in like 80% of the work. Someday, I'll get asked to write one, and then I'll ask you to help, so it can be Commentary by Salvagno and Koch.