Aaron Irving – Nightshadow

So, while waiting for my father to negotiate the purchase of his new honda bike I went for a walk and discovered Dr Jekyll- a funky cafe in St Kilda (107 grey street). Anyway the place had a good vibe to it, looks funky, friendly staff and the menu looked good. I didn’t eat there unfortunately but will do soon. The coffee was awesome, unfortunately I didn’t see the brand. A nice rich deep and nutty flavor. Flavour! Stupid American spellchecking in this iPad app. Anyway, check out the cafe. A good little find, basically the corner of barkly and grey.

As most of you know – Melbourne has some damn good coffee. It has some crap coffee and a lot of average coffee, but yes, some damn good coffee. The problem is – you find a good place and then some toss* like Matt Preston writes a review and voila – busy as hell. Two of my favourite places have slowly declined in quality that much that I don’t even want to go there anymore.

Liar Liar in hawthorn, just hasn’t been the same since the owner sold it and moved on. The new staff just can’t cut it and I have actually had bad coffees from there. The vibe is just all wrong aswell.

Chimmy’s in Richmond – again just can’t cut it with the crowds lately. Cold meals, massive waits and then the coffee is more often average than not lately. Very disappointing based on how good it has been in the past. They have all their fresh-baked goodness though.

A lot of places are just dishing out mediocre coffees as they can’t handle the amount of people anymore… I blame the write-ups for all the extra people. It certainly can’t be the global financial crisis.

Anyway there is hope. The dancing Goat in the city. St Ali in sth Melbourne. Artichoke and Whitebait @ Monash. Jones @ Chadstone. Ilios at Richmond. The new merlo place in degraves. Di Bella in nth melbourne or at the vic markets. The green room @ Brunwsick. BBB also in the city and lat but not least, BBB’s sister – Seven Seeds at Carlton. There are plenty of other Gems around but Seven seeds takes the cake.

Definitely my pick of the cafes in melbourne at the moment.

One day soon I will do up a list of all the good cafes/coffee places to visit.

Why must one walk up a rampfrom the footpath to get to “lower ground” in my complex?

Why was there one supra, one mitsu Evo X, one GTI, one skyline GTR, 2 HSV coupes a WRX STi, a civc type R (rally prepped) and 2 highly modified nissan patrols in my apartment carpark at midday? Why spend lots of money on a car then leave it parked in the garage all week long.

Why does the name “Craven Cottage” sound so cool?

Why did the butcher let me down? (Worst lamb shanks ever for diner tonight, I swear the sheep must have been 20 yr old reject stock).

Merlo or Di Bella?

Why does the microscope work fine when your cells don’t express the protein properly, but screws up when you get good clean expression?

Enough questions for now anyway…..

On another note, I’m going to cross post my ResearchGate Blog posts from their to hear aswell. Starting with this one on Gene therapy to restore color blindness.

A recent Nature letters paper by Mancuso et al details the use of a recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) in gene delivery to restore the function of photo-pigments in squirrel monkeys. The male monkeys, red-green color-blind from birth, obtained the ability to process red-green color information via the delivery of the L-opsin gene into the retina. 

While this research opens the door for further hope of gene therapy involved in human eye conditions, including blindness, it also raises some interesting questions. It was previously thought that the brain of adult monkeys would be too "hard-wired" to gain a beneficial effect from the restoration of deficient pathways. The recent paper proves that gene therapy can be utilized in "middle aged" monkeys, and is not solely an avenue to be pursued during early development. This adds a lot of significance to work already begun in human patients, to restore an enzyme involved in a type of hereditary blindness.

Original Article:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08401.html

Gene therapy for red–green colour blindness in adult primates

Katherine Mancuso¹, William W. Hauswirth², Qiuhong Li², Thomas B. Connor³, James A. Kuchenbecker¹, Matthew C. Mauck³, Jay Neitz¹ & Maureen Neitz¹