Alex Palazzo is a postdoctoral fellow working in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School.
Cell Biology Blogs
Non-Sb Science Blogs
1 Degree of Separation
Misc. Blogs
Carnivals
Stay abreast of your favorite bloggers' latest and greatest via e-mail, via a daily digest.
April 30, 2006
Category: Retrospective
(I'm still on my little trip - but I'll be back soon. Here's what I wrote when I came back from Spain last summer) Is this entry about the eventual fall of the west? Perhaps not directly. Although wedding plans...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:41 PM • 2 Comments • 2 TrackBacks
April 29, 2006
Category: Retrospective
(from my old blog) While my column is washing, and my brain is fried, I should finally write this entry ... A while back, right around the time of Katrina, I read a spectacular book, The Control of Nature by John McAfee (Amazon site). When man's interests conflict with an ever changing environment, what does man do? He/she fights change.
(All images were hijacked from maps.google.com.)
Part 1Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:37 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 28, 2006
Category: Retrospective
(two entries from my old blog) I've been reading Ernst Mayr's This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World. In it there is this great quote: It is often asked why we do science? Or, what is science good...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:26 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 27, 2006
Category: Retrospective
(from my old blog) Every subject has its lingo and its share of strange terms. Add abbreviations and acronyms, and certain areas of expertise can be almost incomprehensible. Then there is Biology. Life has a diversification machine, evolution. Thus those...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:33 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 26, 2006
Category: Retrospective
(from my old blog)
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:19 PM • 4 Comments • 2 TrackBacks
April 25, 2006
Category: Retrospective
(from my old blog) About a month ago I had a conversation with my thesis advisor about the h-index. It is a new method, proposed by Jorge E. Hirsch of UCSD to quantitatively measure a scientist's influence. His proposal was published in PNAS and Nature had a little report on it. Here's a publically available link to the paper (for those who don't have institutional access to PNAS) ...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:12 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 24, 2006
Category: Retrospective
(from my old blog) OK here's a post geared mostly to cell biologists. My big pet peeve about reading the scientific literature is ... colored fluorescent images. Why do people insist on pseudo-coloring their images? I know that you want...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:07 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 23, 2006
Category: Retrospective
(from my old blog) OK this week I've been obsessed with the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). This organelle is comprised of a continuous network of membranous tubes (and sheets) that extends to the cell periphery. In addition ER sheets also envelopes...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:05 PM • 0 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Retrospective
Non-cell biologists have often viewed the cell as a bag of molecules. Over the years as cell-biology has developed, it became clear that this was a simplistic generalization. Cells are organized by a dynamic cytoskeletal network that can organize the...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:03 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 22, 2006
Category: Retrospective
(from my old blog) Portuguese (tissue) culture: Looks like she's mouth pipetting, or drinking (we're not sure) some yummy tissue culture media. I hope that this newspaper clipping won't spark riots....
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:00 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 21, 2006
Category: Retrospective
(from my old blog) Just read an article in the last issue of JCB, where the authors used a nifty new technique to investigate when and where certain RNA binding factors associate together. What's neat, is that this technique, bimolecular...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:58 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 20, 2006
Category: Retrospective
So it looks like ... my laptop dying + rejected paper + a resubmitted paper = vacation to the west coast. Does this mean that you'll be stuck reading about how cephalopods perform really cool tricks (from the CBC, not...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:31 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 19, 2006
Category: Pure Biology
A new paper out in Nature, brakes through the diffraction barrier to see things that have never been seen before. Using this novel fluorescence-microscopy technique called STED (stimulated emission depletion), Willig et al., see Kiss and Run. And yes they...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:05 PM • 0 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Science & Society
Remember that Open Letter to Canadian PM on Climate Control? Well there is a counter-letter out. From the CBC: A group of 90 of Canada's most senior climate scientists have sent an open letter to the prime minister, warning that...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:03 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 18, 2006
Category: Science & Society
Well remeber the entry about the Templeton Prize Winner John Barrow? If you missed it here it is: When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer's Templeton-Cambridge...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 2:53 PM • 7 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Pure Biology
OK I haven't been writing anything on papers I've read recently, to make up for this here is a brief summary of a neat paper on Sad1: 1- Sad1 is a homologue of the SUN proteins in S. pombe (fission...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:26 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science & Society
There is an OpEd on Stem Cell Research Support in today's Boston Globe by Christopher Thomas Scott and Jennifer McCormick. From the OpEd: The consequences of the Bush policy [on stem cell research] are profound and unambiguous. NIH officials admit...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:24 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 16, 2006
There is a review in this week's NY Times book section: The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite,' by Ann Finkbeiner. I had never heard of The Jasons. From the review: Jason (the term refers both to the...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:58 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Misc
Yesterday we made a quick stop in central park with our photoblogger friend. To see the result of these action photos click here....
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:28 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 15, 2006
Category: Science & Society
Last night, what we call the Portuguese Mafia (aka the Federation of Portuguese Scientists living in New York) came over for drinks. With my veins acquiring the right level of Alcohol I asked several individuals the question. Here is what Edgar told me:
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 11:19 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 14, 2006
Category: Science & Society
Sorry I promised you all some thoughts on "WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?". Last night my laptop was disintegrating, and now it's on the verge of a coma. Having said that let's see...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 1:18 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 13, 2006
Category: Science & Society
Talking to some people about Dyson, I was told to take a look at this open letter in the National Post (the conservative national newspaper in Canada): Open Kyoto to debate Sixty scientists call on Harper to revisit the science...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:57 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Misc
What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it + Tangled Bank + Carnival of Education + Gossip
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:13 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 12, 2006
Category: Pure Biology
Spurred on by some comments left by Coturnix on the Three Types of Experiments entry, and by the Microparadigm paper (see my entry, and another discussion of this paper at In the Pipeline), I now present to you ... the...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:05 PM • 3 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
April 11, 2006
What a great title for a book. Here's a review of Nick Lane's latest from the March 31st edition of Science (subscription required). From the review: Lane [a science writer whose previous book Oxygen (1) was well received and whose...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 12:16 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Lab Life
Well I've been preparing for labmeeting so instead of giving you another long diatribe about the significance of negative data I'll list some interesting current events ...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 7:56 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 10, 2006
Category: Pure Biology
I just came back from a Wade Harper talk where we were subjected to an obscene amount of ubiquitin biology and even more ubiquitin nomenclature. This blasting of your brain with technical terms is becoming more and more common...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:06 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 9, 2006
Category: Science & Society
Just saw a glowing review in the NY Times' Suday Book Section on Eric Kandel's new autobiography: In Search of Memory. Prof Kandel is one of the nicest people in science (and one of the most enjoyable lecturers). And this...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:17 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 8, 2006
Category: Lab Life
Well just came back from the lab, after a day of failed experiments (on a Saturday no less) when I read this great commentary on Confessions of a Community College Dean. The post discusses an article in Inside Higher Ed...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:20 PM • 13 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
There is an interesting entry over at In the Pipeline about a recent paper in PNAS: Microparadigms: Chains of collective reasoning in publications about molecular interactions. In this paper, the authors analyzed summaries of papers as processed by Geneways -...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:44 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 7, 2006
So one of the most important stories over the past week (besides the immigration bill in congress), was the health insurance bill in Massachusetts. I won't give you a summary of what's been going on but instead give you some...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:45 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Misc
If you've ever read or saw The Last Temptation of Christ, you'll somehow recognize some of the passages from the newly discovered Gospel according to Judas. From the NY Times article: In this text, scholars reported yesterday, the account of...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:53 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 6, 2006
Category: Lab Life
I had one interesting thought about the Seed dinner that I've been wanting write about for a while - the isolation of biomedical sciences from the rest of the scientific academic community. This fact was apparent at the Seed dinner...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 6:03 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science & Society
Surfing on William Gibson's blog, I stumbled on to this amazing video of an amphibious snake-like robot....
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:16 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 5, 2006
then you read this story: Prof denied grant over evolution. Agency wants proof Darwin is correct; But McGill says committee's reasoning is faulty.
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 6:39 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science & Society
Last night I was invited to a Seed dinner in Cambridge. The idea, I guess, was to throw together scientists from various disciplines and Seed contributors, and observe the resulting chemical reaction. I had very interesting discussions with Drew Endy...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:18 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 4, 2006
Category: Science & Society
Plagued with scandals and other baggage, today DeLay announced that he's giving up. Usually I've steered clear of pure political talk on my blog, although those of you who know me personally know that I've been politically active. Well with...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:31 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Lab Life
No this is not an entry on shmooing, but on practical tips on working with Saccharomyces cerevisiae. (OK confession, I have worked on yeast briefly as a rotating student in Liza Pon's Lab at Columbia.) Much of modern cell...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:28 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 3, 2006
Category: Lab Life
I'm not sure about the history of "the three types of experiments" (3tes), but they are referred to quite often in the labs I've been in. So what exactly are they? Here goes ... Type A Experiment: every possible result...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:44 AM • 15 Comments • 2 TrackBacks
April 2, 2006
Category: Retrospective
(from the archives) As a microscopist you are often are stunned by the beauty of what's on your microscope slide. I remember as a grad student showing this technician (a former doctor from China) a slide where cells were stained...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:56 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 1, 2006
A major field of research in the "RNA field" is the quality control of mRNA production. Remember from the central dogma: DNA=>RNA=>Protein When "genes are activated", what is really going on is that a DNA segment (i.e. the gene) is...
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 2:07 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Misc
I just couldn't believe it ... read the confession here.
Posted by Alex Palazzo at 6:35 AM • 2 Comments • 2 TrackBacks
