Dinner with the Transcription Crowd

Category: Pure Biology

Notes from a dinner with Kevin Struhl, Danesh Moazed, Steve Buratowski and James Manley.

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 11:11 AM • 3 Comments •

Quote of the Day

Category: Misc

Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. - Hunter S. Thompson...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 2:40 PM • 0 Comments •

Rubens Tube Experiment

Category: Misc

Visualizing sound waves using a PVC pipe, gas and a lighter in some guy's garage. Now this is how physics should be taught!...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:30 AM • 3 Comments •

Why I'm Proud to be Canadian

Category: Misc

Terrorism and civil rights.

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:03 AM • 6 Comments •

Notes from a Tadataka Yamada Talk

Category: Science & Society

A seminar, by the president of the Bill and Melinda Bates Foundation.

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 7:57 PM • 0 Comments •

New online tools from Nature

Category: Lab Life

OK a good friend and former colleague has induced me to get a Connotea account ... and I have to say that it's great. It's like a cross between Endnote and your bookmark page ... on steroids. If you don't...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 4:52 PM • 1 Comments •

Bacterial Mitosis

Category: Pure Biology

I guess prokaryotes are looking more and more like eukaryotes. It turns out that their DNA is moved around by cytoskeletal filaments. The most recent (and one of the most dramatic) examples can be seen in a recent article in...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 11:22 AM • 2 Comments •

Mirror Neurons, Empathy, Autism

Category: Science & Society

I saw this last night:...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:32 AM • 3 Comments •

It's time for some quirky numerology ... Year of the Gold Pig

Category: Misc

Fire Golden Pig. Welcome to the economic based renaming of our current astrological year.

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:34 PM • 0 Comments •

Trip to NYC

Category: art, food, music, citylife and other mental stimuli

I wasn't around for a bit - as you can tell I was overloading. Thus it was time to head down to the city. So Friday we packed our bags and headed down to NYC. Highlights from the trip: Although...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 11:35 AM • 1 Comments •

Lectures at the Museum of Science Boston

Category:

Not only is the acclaimed Darwin exhibit comming to Boston's Museum of Science starting this Sunday, but there will be a series of lectures by local researchers to accompany the show: Evolution as a Tool Kit for Understanding Human Disease...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 7:37 AM • 0 Comments •

Valentine's Day Lesson #1

Category: Misc

This was sent by MF (initials are meant to keep my source out of trouble, I hope that I won't be subpoenaed on this one): Menstrual cycle phase modulates reward-related neural function in women In other words, giving roses at...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:03 AM • 1 Comments •

Happy B-Day Mr. Darwin

Category: Science & Society

198 years old today. I would type something up, but after a frustratingly bad day, full of horrible microinjection needles and an hour of playing soccer with this out of shape body of mine, I feel selected against. For a...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:50 PM • 0 Comments •

Junk DNA - origin of the term

Category: Science & Society

Where does it come from? (And some comments on ID.)

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:45 PM • 12 Comments •

Canadian Research Funding Problems

Category: Science & Society

In the 90s there was a severe brain drain out of Canada, I should know, I left Montreal in '97 to get a PhD at Columbia University. This trend was halted and even reversed in the earlier part of this...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:48 AM • 4 Comments •

Book(foodorgy)club

Category: art, food, music, citylife and other mental stimuli

Last night we hosted a meeting of our Boston based bookclub. We discussed Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow. Next up is Pirandello's The Late Mattia Pascal. I posted some pics at the Boston Bookclub blog. You can guess from these photos...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 12:27 PM • 0 Comments •

Eye Candy

Category: Pure Biology

Last Thursday, Stephan and I "imaged" some macrophages being infected with a vicious strain of vibrio, here's a cool image of one of the poor suckers:

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 10:00 AM • 2 Comments •

Drew Gilpin Faust new Harvard Prez.

Category: Science & Society

First female president in Harvard's history. Article here in today's NY Times. My only complaint - she's not a scientist (she's a civil war historian). Here's something I hadn't heard: Dr. Faust emerged in recent weeks as a finalist among...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:45 AM • 2 Comments •

Quote of the Day

Category: Lab Life

Overheard in the lab:

You can't just dump stuff into it. You know, it's not a truck. The ER is a series of tubes!

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 4:03 PM • 0 Comments •

Map that Campus XXXIII

Category: Map that Campus

Next week, let's all collect some data for the famed institute located on this campus.

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 7:33 AM • 5 Comments •

Another silent nucleotide change leads to altered protein activity

Category: Pure Biology

MDR: Multi Drug Resistance Protein. It's an ABC (ATPase Box Cassette) Transporter. In other words, this gene encodes an energy utilizing pump that sits on the plasma membrane and actively transports (mostly hydrophobic?) compounds out of the cell. As I...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 5:02 PM • 4 Comments •

No I'm not Dead

Category: Lab Life

This is prompted by two emails. Both from good friends. Email #1 is from a friend who got Shingles, I think - (hope you get better, we'll all drink to your health Saturday during food-orgy ... I mean bookclub). The...

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Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:09 AM • 9 Comments •