Video about BARD

My co-workers made a video about the BARD project, it is short but a great explanation of why BARD is needed and what it does.  Please consider checking it out and if you like, lick the thumbs up button:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9Z00y6g1iQ

Carob Porter - the conclusion

Had a bottle of the Carob Porter on 2014-03-02 - at room temperature - tasted pretty good.  Bottom of bottle was covered in sediment, but the poor into the glass was not cloudy.  It is a very dark beer.

I continued to drink it on an almost daily basis and found it quite enjoyable.

Brewing a peanut butter porter - the wort

I began work the peanut butter porter today.  Ingredients:

12.75 oz. (includes plastic bag though) of grains (2/3 crystal malt, 1/6 black patent, 1/6 roasted barley)
3/4 oz. crystal hop pellets
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup blackstrap molasses
5 3/4 oz. corn sugar
2 1/4 oz. regular sugar
11 5/8 oz. CBW special dark malt extract (Briess)
1.5 lb. DME CBW special dark
1/2 lb. peanut butter, including oil on top, Teddie natural
1/8 oz. galena hops

I ground up the grain using the grain mill of our kitchenAid (coarsest setting, slowest speed), added it to 0.75 gallons of water in a 2.5 gallon pot, put it on high heat.

Peanut butter in water - doubling the amount

A quick experiment today around boiling peanut butter in water.  I doubled the amount of peanut butter to 56 g in 1 cup of water.  During the boil it formed a complete emulsion, as far as I could tell there was no water, it was all very foam-like.  After the boil, I transferred to a mason jar with total volume slightly more than 4 cups.  It was initially uniformly cloudy white, but then settled into the 3 layers previously observed.  The bottom layer was bigger than previously observed.

I used a baster to extract the middle layer (water) and tasted it - tasted like peanut butter, but not more so than previously.

There doesn't appear to be any major benefit of using double the amount of peanut butter, and the downside is that the greater amount of bottom sediment might mean less usable / uncloudy beer.

Previous post about peanut butter in water: Testing boiling peanut butter in water: results

Next post: Brewing a peanut butter porter - the wort

Hydrogen bonding in drugs

A member of my group, Patrick McCarren, worked on modeling the hydrogen bonds in some molecules at the Broad Institute that we screen as potential drugs.  It was part of a very nice paper which included a lot of solid experimental work:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jm500059t

It got a write up here:
http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2014/02/hiding-hydrogen-bonding-groups-in-large.html

and here:
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/02/28/computational_nirvana.php

STEM Career talk at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School

I gave an ~11 min talk at Cambridge Rindge and Latin about my job / career and how I ended up in it:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwt7GLsjfgEdS2FHSW9rV2tVNFE/edit?usp=sharing

Testing boiling peanut butter in water: results

Following up on preparing to test boiling peanut butter in water, after letting the mixtures sit for a day, I tested them.  They looked very similar - they hadn't noticeably separated further.  The oil layer (top) was about the same thickness, same color, possibly less homogeneous.  The other two layers also appeared the same (thickness, color / cloudiness).