Excel Unusual: Engineering and Modeling in Excel

Excel Unusual is a blog written by electrical engineer George Lungu from Colorado. It really shows off what can be done with Excel and VBA programming/macros. There are some really impressive examples including a 3D flight simulator, doing fourier transforms, roller coaster sim, planetary simulator, and much more!
http://excelunusual.com

Nitinol and Nitinol Engines

I remember working with this stuff back in high school. Seemed like magic at the time. Amazing alloy. But if I remember correctly, it is quite expensive.

While I'm not a big fan of the title of this video, "Free Energy Nitinol Heat Machines invented in the early 1970"
...I hope they're talking about Gibbs free energy..., the video is quite interesting. 

Software Carpentry: TEACHING LAB SKILLS FOR SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING

The people over at Software Carpentry provide tutorials on a number of subjects relating to scientific computing including Unix, python programming, version control, regular expressions (regex), MATLAB, and more.
Check em out. You might find it useful.

http://software-carpentry.org/lessons.html

Software: Mass Spectrometry

Handy pieces of software and web servers for mass spectrometry

1. ESIprot: "ESIprot 1.0 enables the charge state determination and molecular weight calculation for low resolution electrospray ionization (ESI) mass spectrometry (MS) data of proteins." http://bit.ly/14vt9tw

2. iso2L: (java)  "software to calculate the isotopic distribution of a chemical formula or a amino acid chain" http://sourceforge.net/projects/iso2l/ 

3. IPC (Isotope Pattern Calculator): (java) "The Isotope Pattern Calculator calculates and displays the isotopic distribution and exact masses for peptides and other molecules." http://omics.pnl.gov/software/isotope-pattern-calculator

Note that both iso2L and IPC can predict mass spectra (not just peak lists but output simulated spectra) from a fasta sequence.

4. ExPASy Peptide Mass: "cleaves a protein sequence...with a chosen enzyme, and computes the masses of the generated peptides... also returns theoretical isoelectric point and mass values for the protein of interest... If desired, PeptideMass can return the mass of peptides known to carry post-translational modifications..." http://web.expasy.org/peptide_mass/

Software: Predicting Solvent Accessibility of Amino Acid residues in proteins

These softwares can be used to obtain info regarding solvent accessibility of amino acid residues in proteins, among other things (such as structure for DSSP).

Get Area links to the web server. 

Get Area: http://curie.utmb.edu/getarea.html
DSSP: http://swift.cmbi.ru.nl/gv/dssp/
Surface Racer: http://pharmacy.mc.uky.edu/faculty/tsodikov/software.php
MolMol: http://sourceforge.net/projects/molmol/ 
Jmol: http://jmol.sourceforge.net/

1. Get Area: quickly calculate solvent accessible surface area or solvation energy

2. DSSP: Provides solvent accessibility and protein structural info.

3. Surface Racer: calculates exact accessible surface area, molecular surface area and average curvature of molecular surface for macromolecules. The program also analyzes cavities in the protein interior inaccessible to solvent from outside

4. MolMol: molecular analysis and display program. Can also output accessible surface area.

5. Jmol: Computing a solvent accessible surface area using Jmol. Link (below) to a non-affiliated blog showing you how to get solvent accessible surface area by running a script in Jmol. http://molecularmodelingbasics.blogspot.ca/2014/11/computing-accessible-surface-area-using.html

How the first transistor worked!

1947 Bell labs transistor.

The engineerguy (I love this guy's videos!!!) shows off a faithful replica of the first ever transistor. Almost looks like junk, but amazing that this is one of the most important pieces of technology to date. Transistors have come a long way since then. See link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdYHljZi7ys

Mechanical Fourier Transform Instrument

Amazing 19th century machine!
Albert Michelson's Harmonic Analyzer. The engineerguy gives a superb overview of this device. See link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAsM30MAHLg