It's alive, it's ALIVE!!

So after much mulling about starting one of these, I've done it... I have created a BLOG! Probably quite horrific; my monster will now be stumbling across the internets, throwing my random thoughts on life, the universe and science at the unsuspecting. Mainly I hope to share my love for SCIENCE!!, my annoyance at occasional bad science in the media and documentaries and how I feel (yes, it is all about me) about stereotypes of scientist. Oh and my occasional adventures as a junior scientist (basically meaning I don't have a Ph.D, ... yet).

So let's begin with a quick explanation on my catchy blog title...
Coming up with a title has been a long arduous journey in which I have driven countless people (actually more like 2) and my cat crazy. The difficulty was to come up with a catchy title that would sum up me and my blogs hand-wavy yet sciency objectives, preferably in under half a dozen words. Eventually, I turned to wikipedia for help. I had decided what I needed was a clever way of saying "random thoughts". Well, thoughts form in the brain and have something to do with electrical impulses traveling along the nerve fibers, or axons, from the neurons to other neurons, so after reading up on axons, the human brain, etc. I stumbled across the term "Nodes of Ranvier". [Side note: some wiki articles really geared towards experts in a particular field rather than interested laymen] Now maybe it is just me, but that's one catchy name*. The nodes are basically little gaps in insulation across the axon where a small voltage difference is created. This causes an action potential and allows the electrical impulse to leap across, basically speeding up the travel time of the electric impulse (or nerve impulse), the process is called saltatory conduction. Basically I am picturing little sparks of thoughts leaping across the tendrils forming the thought highways of my brain. Below is part of wikipedia description on saltatory conduction

"because the cytoplasm of the axon is electrically conductive, and because the myelin inhibits charge leakage through the membrane, depolarization at one node of Ranvier is sufficient to elevate the voltage at a neighboring node to the threshold for action potential initiation. Thus in myelinated axons, action potentials do not propagate as waves, but recur at successive nodes and in effect "hop" along the axon, by which process they travel faster than they would otherwise. In summary, the charge will passively depolarize the adjacent node of Ranvier to threshold, triggering an action potential in this region and subsequently depolarizing the next node, and so on."

On that note adiue and good night!

*it seems I am not the only one that thought this was a catchy name, seems there was a Christian metal band from South Dakota who decided it would make a great band name.