BioCurious has a nifty methods article on Labeling λ DNA—if you’ve ever wanted to know how to tag a strand of DNA with a bead so you can tow it around with your optical tweezers, here’s the theory (and they’ve got optical tweezers? I am so jealous.)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Santa: What do you want for Christmas, little boy?
PZ: Multi-beam fast-steerable optical tweezers!!!
Santa: You’ll pluck your eye out, kid!
This is the part where I look horrified and start to cry, right?
Really cool. Did you know that you can use the laser pointer (yup, the kind you use for giving talks) to play golf with neurons? You can push them around the plate until each cell is sitting inside the little hole on bottom of which is an electrode so you can monitor electrical activity of each neuron.