The Pineneedle Collective

Wednesday, 13 November 2013

Take a Step Outside

"Go on, take a step outside. It's a whole other world out there."

The second illustration from the "Annika is totally learning how to draw" series, haha. Today I was sick, so I ditched study and spent the day working on this instead. I wish that I could just transfer my ideas straight from my brain to a computer without the intermediate of my hand/drawing tablet, but this one happened to turn out pretty much as I imagined it in my head, so I was happy!

Sunday, 10 November 2013

High-Waisted Genes

Top is c/o Choies | Jeans from Dotti | shoes from Dotti

Photos by Ashley Dy

It's a rarity to see me wearing pants of any kind on my blog! These photos were actually taken last August when Ashley Dy came to visit. I still love this combination, though, and this outfit is actually more practical then it was at the time we took these photos - it's actually almost summer now - proper crop top weather, instead of the middle of winter!

Because I'm currently studying genetics like a mad lady and have probably lost my mind, here is a genetics joke. Oh dear. (Scientists have the worst jokes).

(But this actually made me laugh a lot when I first saw it.)

Back to studying I go. Hope you're having a great day,

Saturday, 9 November 2013

The Kawaii Lizard Lady

I have wanted to save up for a digital drawing tablet for ages now, mainly for the purposes of doing cutesy hand-writing on blog photos. But recently, I've also been really inspired by my favourite artists to learn how to do digital illustration as well.

So, I don't know where this is going, but my blog is where I share my creative pursuits (such as my first ever sewing attempt - and I got better at that, too!) so behold: My first ever illustration, that I did today to try out the tablet.

She is the Kawaii Lizard Lady (idk why either).

If you take a look at my favourite illustrators, you'll see that I'm very into surreal, cartoon-like illustrations of hipster girls with some element of japanese culture thrown into the mix (pop-surrealism is what you would call it, I guess) - so this is basically a direct emulation of that.

Anyway, I'm fairly happy with it for some kind of first-attempt-ever at illustration, because I have never been able to draw, yet I free-handed this lovely lady! I think the ability to "ctrl-Z" any lines that I've drawn wrong, and to copy and paste certain elements (like the eyes and bows), has stopped me from having such a fear of drawing! Still, baby-steps while it still looks like something drawn in paint, haha.

Are there any other digital illustrators out there? I'd love to see your work! (And any tips or learn-how-to-draw sources for someone with literally no knowledge of drawing wouldn't go astray, either).

I hope you're all very well,

Thursday, 7 November 2013

Who Stole The Milk Maid's Outfit? + New Human Body Parts

dress - c/o Romwe (way back) | socks - Clear It | blouse - thrifted | shoes - JuJu Shoes

So I'm justifying all my recent clothing purchases by "but it was on my ethical store directory! I should proooobably review it if I haven't already bought stuff from that store!"

The latest item to succumb to this "justification": these Juju Jellies. I thought that they were great (and looked amazing) until I tried to walk the 15 minutes uphill from the train station to my parents house last night whilst wearing them - where my choice of shoes inadvertently turned that short walk into an excruciating 35-minute hobble. This is because while the heel isn't so steep, the slight decline causes my pinkie toe to be wedged into a very uncomfortable position into that last cut-out before the toe-cap of the shoes. I thought my pinkie toenails were going to be black and bruised by the time I got the shoes off. Maybe I just have weird feet, or tiny pinkies, and I'll try to remedy the situation with some kind of soft foam on the insides of my shoes. Because while they're uncomfortable to walk in they're also BEAUTIFUL and I don't want to have to part ways with them! I think that these would probably be more comfortable.

So did you guys know that we're still discovering body parts?? As mad as it sounds, we are still learning about the basic anatomy of the human body, and finding things that we didn't already know existed. This new human body part is called the "anterolateral ligment" and is a ligament in the knee. People have suspected its existence in the past, but it's never been defined or definitively said to exist (meaning, it hasn't been something knee surgeons are taught about) until now.

That's like knowing there is a vague large mushy shape in the chest that beats occasionally, but not knowing that it's a heart (and having chest surgeons argue for years that it doesn't exist). Alright so it's not as important as a heart for life, but allow me this analogy.

I might be popping in here less frequently over the next 2 weeks while I finish off my exams and write up my giant scary research report! Wish me luck!

Monday, 4 November 2013

Buns & Bikes & Biochemistry Basics (part 1)

dress - Bonne Chance Collections | shoes - c/o Yeswalker | bike - Reid Cycles

With this bike, I successfully obtained Hipster level 9000 (I subtracted 1000 points due to my lack of square black-framed glasses - with them I would obtain the status of Ultimate Hipster. Too bad). I've been riding this beautiful thing around everywhere since I got it on Thursday, as you can probably see from the many bruises now adorning my legs (I bruise extraordinarily easily and am also pretty clumsy - not the best combination for bike riding, but I don't care!)

On the weekend, I rode to some fantastic second-hand markets where I also picked up this coat:

Which was a highly inappropriate purchase considering that it was a sweltering 30 degrees, and Sydney summers never require coats, but I couldn't help myself with its sailor-esque collar and cute white buttons.

Now, let's talk genetics!

Genetics and the basics of biochemistry take a long time to wrap your head around. Much of my love of science comes from actually understanding how things work. When you read science stories, you might be like, "yay! researchers discovered the gene for disease x!" and "scientists found that too much protein y makes you develop disease z!", and while that's awesome, without a background in molecular biology, you may also be like "...okay, but what does that actually mean?"

What the heck even are cells, DNA, genes, chromosomes and proteins?

So what I'm going to do in the next few posts is attempt to explain what these terms mean. I'm assuming no prior knowledge of anything biology-related. Today I'm going to explain cells, chromosomes and DNA. Let's go!

Your body is actually composed of units called "cells". Cells are little water-filled sacks that contain useful things needed to sustain life, including DNA. Take a look at your skin. If you could zoom right in on a single cell, using microscopic eyes, you would see something like this:

This cell actually looks like it's not very healthy, as it's been burst open on the left side and all of its contents are spilling out. Also, top-layer skin cells are usually actually dead cells without any DNA in them - skin needs to be tough, so this layer of cells often sacrifice themselves to become a tough outer-layer - but let's ignore that fact for the moment. Imagine that we're looking at skins cells a few layers of skin deep.

Cells make up most of your body - your organs, your bones, your brain - it's all made up of cells. And cells are pretty tiny, around 0.00001 - 0.00005 metres long.

However, in each of your cells - except for your red blood cells - you have 2 metres of a thing called DNA that is wound up really, really tightly. Remember how teeny tiny I just said cells were? So your DNA is wound up REALLY tightly to fit 2 metres of the stuff within every cell.

When DNA is all wound up like this, it's given the name "chromosome". A chromosome is really just a long strand of DNA, that's been wound around on itself a bunch of times. You have 46 chromosomes in each of your cells - 23 of these come from your mother, and 23 from your father. Each time a cell splits into two (which is how your body grows and fixes itself), it copies each of these chromosomes, and gives equally half to each cell it divides into.

DNA has written on it all the biological instructions needed to make you. These biological instructions come in the form of different molecules (molecules are things which are made up from a few conjoined atoms - and we'll get into that later) called "bases". Bases are what DNA is made out of.

In DNA, there are four such bases, and we give each a different letter: A, T, G and C.

The way that these bases are laid out along the DNA provides DNA with a kind of "language" that the cell can read, and from that, make particular things. For example, if your cell's "reader" (called RNA Polymerase) reads the sequence ATGTCGCGGATG, they will say "Oh! Make some blood-clotting factors!" whereas CCAAGTGTGCA will tell your cell to make insulin (okay, so it's a little more complicated than that, and the sequences it reads are a lot longer, but that's the basic idea of DNA!)

Did you know that you can even extract DNA from cells and have a look at it - using household items? I wrote instructions on exactly how to do so a few months ago! Though remember - unless you have microscopic eyes, you're not going to be able to actually see those bases. To even begin to be able to do that, you'd first need an electron scanning microscope. To wrap your head around the teeny size of cells, and the size of something as small as DNA (even though you've got 2 metres of it in each cell, it's very, VERY thin!) check out this website: The Scale of the Universe.

Read part two here!

Saturday, 2 November 2013

Watermelons, Zebras and Tactile Touchscreens

dress - c/o Oasap | watermelon shirt - DIY | shoes - c/o Chicwish | socks - Thrifted

This is probably the best photo-taking wall I've found since I moved to Sydney last April. One of my favourite things while out and exploring our neighborhood is coming across bizarre public murals such as this one. As for my outfit, after putting on this shirt I decided to just go the whole way and embody a watermelon by pairing it with a red skirt and green socks.

Also, I've been asked to speak at a TEDxWomen event that's happening here in a month's time! I'm pretty crazy nervous about it, but as it is going to be about one of my favourite things - science communication - it would help me immensely if you could let me know what your favourite science post was from my blog. (You can read through all my science posts here). The talk will be posted on the internet sometime in the future, and I'll make sure to include a link to it here when it is (so long as I don't just, you know, get up and drool for 5 minutes.).

This research project (somewhat strangely) being carried out by Disney is awesome: The creation of tactile touchscreens. Disney have been attempting to develop a technology which will allow people to feel the texture and gradients of images behind a touch screen. The screen itself stays perfectly flat, but the illusion of a three-dimensional object is generated by manipulation of the friction between a finger and the screen using electrical impulses.