May 12, 2008
Category: Misc
Or is it the age of Malthus?
To think that our natural resources can last forever is one of our society's greatest myths. As the world population rises and the standard of living in the developing world increases, the capability to cloth, feed and provide energy through non-renewable resources will inevitably diminish. A couple of weeks ago the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) issued a very frightening report entitled The Age of Scarcity.
What does the report say? Lets look at oil. Here are the major points:
- World oil production peeked about 2 1/2 years ago. The rate of new oil discoveries since then has been lower then the depletion of the "mature oil fields". Although oil production may recover somewhat in the upcoming years, oil production will fall after 2011.
- One benefit to oil depletion is the increase in natural gas production:
As an oil field matures, the resulting loss of reservoir pressure releases dissolved natural gas. The released gas forms an expanding cap over many mature oil fields, resulting in a rising ratio of natural gas to oil and hence, a rising ratio of natural gas liquids to oil production. This is precisely what is occurring in rapidly depleting fields like Mexico's Cantarell.
Bottom line: the rise in natural gas is an indication that many oil fields are being sucked dry.
- There are actually two world markets for oil, the oil producing countries who subsidize their own consumption and the rest who pay market prices. Here's what the authors had to say about this situation:
The extent to which prices ration limited supply over the next five years depends to a significant degree on how much oil will be diverted from world oil markets to meet the consumption needs of major oil exporters themselves.
So ironically the over-consumption of oil by producers may drive up fuel prices even further. The list of oil producing countries includes OPEC (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela ...), Russia and Mexico.
What does this amount to?
Read on »
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:49 AM • 14 Comments
May 11, 2008
Category: Pure Biology
Friday I was supposed to meet up with Mike Springer from the Kirchner lab. At some point Mike and I had set up a collaboration in order to figure out what was so special about little regions of the genome that encode signal sequences. (To read more on my paper and what we did click here).
In any case Mike had emailed me that Alex van Oudenaarden was giving a Systems Biology "Theory Lunch" and that he had to postpone our lunch. Having heard Alex once before and being impressed, I decided to check it out.
It was one of the best seminars I've attended in quite a while.
Read on »
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 12:14 PM • 3 Comments
May 8, 2008
Category: Misc
The lack of posts has been epic. Sorry life has been just too hectic.
I'll give you a flavor:
Running around. Setting up experiments. Training young rotation students. Off to Microbiology seminar. Off to Cell Biology talk. Off to Montreal. Where next? Vacation? Need to lengthen those telomeres. Paris, Munich, Reykjavik.
Convoluta Roscoffensis.
Need to get data club speaker. Must find new microscope room. Need to get reagent. Try to find protocol. Must get results!
Time to take a break. Flip journal. APC and mRNA? Strange. Too many people study that protein. It does everything and nothing. It's one of these proteins that entices ... study me I'm mutated in 50% of colon cancers ... but do we understand what it does? I'm not so sure. Maybe it's a sick joke. And mRNA? It's everywhere. It's nowhere. It must be somewhere. BUT WHY? We have no clue. Need a new idea.
Back to the lab. Must get results. No time to write. No time to think. Wake up, eat food, walk to the lab. Pipette liquids up and down. Coffee. Passage cells. Snap pictures. Lunch. Pipette more liquids. Type emails. Call thesis advisor. Call long lost friends. Call doctor. Pipette more liquids.
Need a break. Go to pub. Talk about Systems biology one night. All those posers. They don't know what systems is. All this data, what is it good for? Are we all just number collecting machines? N=200,000 and rising. The result, chaos. No insight. A waste of time. Next night, talk about literature. That Gore Vidal. He's incredible. And did you hear about the giant hotel. But then the same question comes up. How's the blog? Not sure. I neglect it. Bye bye readers. My blog must be dead. Have so many ideas. Big ideas. Big science. Little science. Should I continue with it? Euthanasia? Slow quiet death? Apoptois? Autophagy? Entosis. Back to the lab. And It's 9PM. Pipette more liquids. Split cells. Pipette more liquids. Done (well until tomorrow). Walk back home. Eat food. Try to read. Try to watch Jon Stewart. Forget about elections. Drift to sleep.
My blog. What to do. Maybe I need a change. Maybe audio is the next step. Maybe talk about the little bits of science that I love. How to think about a problem. How we figured out the nature of genetic material. The wonder of subcellular automata. How to think. What is an idea. How we are trapped by our own convenient theories. The tragedy of human mind. We are all trapped by misconstrued ideas. But you meet it head on in a personal way as a scientist. YOU REALY DO. So maybe audio is the way to go. Once a week. So much incredible stuff to talk about, so many great stories. So little available on the net. So much crap on blogs. No wonder the average person is confused and afraid of science. But science can be wonderful. Pondering ideas and how to think about life is so liberating. It gives you a precious and fragile possession, self-knowledge.
I'll have to think about it ...
Now where to. Toronto? Really? Let's try.
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:28 PM • 9 Comments
May 5, 2008
Category: Lab Life
What a week. I spent half of it at University of Montreal's IRIC, or Institut de recherche en immunologie et en cancerologie. I was truly impressed.
Read on »
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:13 AM • 0 Comments
April 27, 2008
Category: Misc
It is interesting how different corners of the world are preoccupied by unique items of interest. Take Montreal, my "home town". There is a long history of hockey here and recently the whole town has gone Berzerk. You see unlike Boston and the Red Sox, Montreal not only has a historic team, but everyone here knows a hockey player. For example the great Mike Bossy went to my high school (note that he never graduated). After leaving the Montreal Suburbs, he played with the NY Islanders and won four consecutive Stanley Cups with them. Unfortunately he had to retire extremely early due to a bad back.
It's been 15 years since the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup and this year the Habs have a great team. You might be wondering Habs? Whao are they? Once upon a time the Canadiens were known as Les Habitants, or Habs for short they then changed their name but have kept a small "H" in their logo that serves as some sort of vestigial appendage.
Read on »
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:39 AM • 4 Comments
April 24, 2008
Category: Misc
I'll be giving a short talk at the University of Montreal's Institute for Reasearch in Immunology and Cancer as part of their Young Investigators Research Symposium.
Read on »
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:37 AM • 4 Comments
April 20, 2008
Category: Science & Society
They announced rain today - instead it is sunny, warm and ... a perfect distraction. Since I haven't yet decamped for lab and am waiting for my wife to shower so that we can have a short picnic by the river before i head out to work, I'll just leave you a few links to some VERY interesting and insightful articles in Slate.The three part series was written by Daniel Engber and focus on how certain elements of our society (i.e. climate skeptics, the ID movement, and the tobacco industry) have cultivated this notion of super-skepticism in an attempt o discredit current scientific consensus.
Read on »
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 12:16 PM • 0 Comments
April 19, 2008
Category: Lab Life
I'll type something for you quickly as I have a couple of minutes.
This week has been a little crazy. I've been preparing my talk in Montreal and gearing up to perform a major experiment, some old school bucket biochemistry. Baymate performed a similar experiment using dog pancreas, and I need to repeat the protocol with a human cell line. I've already gone through the protocol twice and had to rethink some of the details. Right now the big experiment will start Sunday night continue through "Patriots' Day" and finish some time on Tuesday. So if you are wondering why you won't hear from me for a while, blame science.
But the results of Baymate's experiments are pretty exciting. I hope that by the end of May we'll have figured out the guts of a major cellular mechanism that no one has thought of looking at (well at least for the past 30 years).
Sorry to be so vague. I'll check back with you sometime next week.
You know, it's not as bad as they say it is. [HT: M. Frieman]
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:42 AM • 0 Comments
April 14, 2008
Category: Pure Biology
Sorry, posts will be few and far between. I need to do some experiments.
Here's a nice giant cell with gobs of ER.
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 6:35 PM • 0 Comments
April 12, 2008
Category: Education
Charlie Rose Science Series: The Imperative of Science.
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 7:50 AM • 2 Comments
April 11, 2008
Category: Map that Campus
OK I've been prodded into this.
Here's this week's campus:
hint: Where is it?
If you know what they are looking for and why they are looking here (and not ... let's say there), leave a comment.
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:15 PM • 11 Comments
April 9, 2008
Category: Misc
In the near future I can see that my blogging will slow down as my experiments become longer and more involved.
In the meantime, here's a few items to help pass the time away:
First off, yesterday the New NIH Public Access Policies were implemented:
The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
Everyone's blogging about it - in fact this week bloggers here at Sb (example #1) and over at Nature Networks (example #2) will be posting on this subject.
Next, congrats to Junot Diaz who just won the Pulitzer for his creation The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Our pseudointellectual-cum-food-orgy bookclub had a chance to meet with him last month to discuss his book and delve into the meaning of Fuku, The Fantastic Four and Frank Herbert's Dune.
Andre at Biocurious blogs about the newest microscopy techniques called PALM/STORM and STED (by the way baymate is playing around with STORM. We'll literally see how good our imaging can get!)
Dan at Migrations posted a clip from Jacob Brownowski's The Ascent of Man.
(more below the fold)
Read on »
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:20 AM • 1 Comments
April 8, 2008
Category: Misc
I've been too busy being a postdoc. Here's a passage I just listened to on my iPod. It made me think about our current crop of president-wannabes.
The only office of state which I ever held, O men of Athens, was that of senator: the tribe Antiochis, which is my tribe, had the presidency at the trial of the generals who had not taken up the bodies of the slain after the battle of Arginusae; and you proposed to try them in a body, contrary to law, as you all thought afterwards; but at the time I was the only one of the Prytanes who was opposed to the illegality, and I gave my vote against you; and when the orators threatened to impeach and arrest me, and you called and shouted, I made up my mind that I would run the risk, having law and justice with me, rather than take part in your injustice because I feared imprisonment and death.
-Socrates, from The Apology
(To download the audiofile of The Apology or other great works, visit librivox.org.)
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:15 PM • 4 Comments
April 6, 2008
Category: Misc
To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic.
- Matt Richtel in today's NYTimes
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:55 AM • 2 Comments
April 5, 2008
Alex Palazzo is a postdoctoral fellow working in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School.
