The glow of a firefly's butt

In the butts of fireflies there is an enzyme (big macromolecule like a protein) called Luciferase. When luciferase is exposed to the common energy currency among life forms, ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate) it glows. The more ATP the brighter the glow. A PhD student in our lab uses this firefly butt enzyme to measure the concentration of ATP in a groundwater samples. Why would she do that? She does it to measure the activity level of bacteria in the water. The more ATP, the more active they are. It strickes me as amazing how useful a bugs butt can be. Who knows what other insect appendages will become useful next?

Leipzig and Ulm in October

The glass structure is a university building they are rebuilding on the site of a church that the communists destroyed.



St. Thomas Church in Leipzig where Johann Sebastian Bach was the choir master for 20 years.



Downtown Leipzig.



This is the Leipzig Main train station. The biggest in Germany!



Biking from Ulm to Blaubeuren in the Swabian Alb, a limestone karst landscape filled with caves, underground rivers, canyons and vampires (I made the last one up).




Blautopf which means Blue Pot. An underground river that runs through a long cave system exits the ground here and makes a river which is really clear and bluish. The flow rate is pretty good and when there is a rainstorm it bubbles up like a hot tub and gushes water out very quickly. The river flows into the Danube River 20 Km downstream.



See it's really blue! I saw a big fish in there too!



Here is a Closter that was built around this mystical site in the middle ages. Science has since disposed of all such mysticism. Too bad. Legends are fun.



I'm up on a cliff looking into the valley. It was a nice warm place for a Sunday afternoon nap in the sun.



Tallest cathedral in the world in Ulm. Built over the course of 400 years in competition with a very similar looking cathedral in Cologne. It is 512 feet tall and you can climb to the top along narrow spiral staircases.





This is part of the old city wall and watch tower along the Danube River. Ulm is a very nice medium sized city with a well preserved old city. It also has only three letters in its name which is impressive! If only all German words could have so few letters. They tend to have very long words in German. English speakers would consider some German words sentences like Schwarzwalderkirshetorten (Black Forest Cherry Cake).







This house is 500 years old, like most of the houses in the fisherman's quarter of Ulm. It is an example of subsidence with one end of the house's foundation in a stream bed. The wood has slowly bent to accommodate the settling and the hotel guests all have levels attached to their beds to ensure no settling is occurring during their stay.



Here we go up the cathedral!

A little city which reminds one of eastern Germany's past

I road the train through this city on the way back to Munich after a weekend visiting some old friends who lead a small church in Leipzig, eastern Germany. The city is called Goeschwitz (pronounced Go-sh-vits) and has some very ugly communist buildings that likely each hold several thousand people in tiny apartments. I learned from living in a similar area of Leipzig (2001-2002) that privacy was discouraged and often families would share apartments and bathrooms were often in the stairwell for everyone to use instead of having a private bathroom.

For some reason I am fascinated as I look at this fading picture of the second world. That other part of the world where individual achievement was discouraged through a range of economic and domestic spying tactics. I like the hills in the background with outcropping sandstone covered with snow. The rocks never cared who was in power. They have been there far longer than us humans and will be there after we leave most likely. Nature resists alignment with a given political or religious view it seems. It just exists, sometimes inadvertently against, sometimes supporting humans, but usually just very quiet and neutral.

The mountains and rivers seem timeless. One can stare at the Urals and resonate with Tolstoy or stare at the Mediterranean and feel with Homer. Our views of earth and the solar system change from century to century, but they remain what they always were before we came. Perhaps this is a good reminder of who God is, unchanging, but the rocks don't give that answer away. If they know the answer, they are hiding it from us.