Transcription and Translation

Mystery in the Pseudointellectual Boston Scene

Weird things are afoot. It all started last time the crazies got together. We had our fill of food and drink. The conversation had turned to nudist beaches and the next thing we knew, books were stolen, a member was...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:46 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Caltech Postdoc Survey Parsed by Gender

Category: Lab Life

So a couple of weeks ago, I wrote an entry about gender and science. I encourage you not only to read the post but also the comments. In that post I mentioned a 2003 Caltech postdoc survey that parsed some...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 11:21 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Bravo Harvard

Category: Education

Harvard announced yesterday that it would waive tuitions for undergrads whose families earn less than $60,000 annually. From the Harvard Crimson: The newly expanded financial aid program, which will also reduce the contributions of families with annual incomes between $60,000...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:20 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

NIH Budget

Category: Science & Society

If you haven't, go and read to evolgen's entries on the Specter-Harkin Amendment that successfuly passed in the Senate to increase the NIH budget. Next up is the House. If you care about basic research in the biomedical sciences contact...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:02 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Update from Life Science Industry

Category: Lab Life

Last night I was at another party in Cambridge, a good friend of mine is leaving Boston to go work for Pfizer in NYC. (Aside - why does it seem like anyone in Cambridge who is not a student or...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:04 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The Sound and Taste of Revelation

Remember that special moment when everything changed. Were you listening to a particular song? Or was it some food? Well a couple of friends just posted about such associations. The first is from Tall Med Student, a former Harvard postdoc...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 6:59 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Computing Signals

Category: Pure Biology

OK after making fun of System Biologists out comes Peter Sorger's latest paper in Cell. In this paper, Sorger's team collected almost 8000 intracellular measurements (they collected some of the data directly and got the rest from the literature -...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:32 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Systems Biology DNA Prep???

Category: Retrospective

(from the archives) Once upon a time, we made the necessary chemicals from scratch to purify DNA from bacterial cultures. These days, for a couple of dollars, you can get all the reagents you need all packaged in a nice...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:33 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

To watch a strand of DNA replicating

Category: Pure Biology

The van Oijen lab (here at HMS) had a nice paper in Nature where they indirectly observe single T7 DNA polymerase complexes copying DNA. How do they do it? One end of the DNA is fixed while the other side...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 6:40 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Organelle Quiz

Category: Misc

Want to be a Cell Biologist? Take a look at this phase image of a rat hepathocyte (liver cell) that I took sometime last year. Try to identify the three mystery organelles A through C And to be totally clear:...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 1:19 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks