April 20, 2008
FEST ended with a (excellent) keynote lecture by Lawrence Krauss:
April 20, 2008
One of the important questions in the study of circadian organization is the way multiple clocks in the body communicate with each other in order to produce unified rhythmic output.
In the case of mammals, the two pacemakers are the left and the right suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The tow nuclei…
April 20, 2008
Mighty Microbes: Bacteria Filaments Can Bundle Together And Move Objects 100,000 Times Bacterium's Body Weight:
Researchers from The University of Arizona and Columbia University have discovered that tiny filaments on bacteria can bundle together and pull with forces far stronger than experts had…
April 20, 2008
The podcast of the radio interview with Derek Law and me about Open Access is now available online. Most of the show is in Italian, but if you cannot understand it, our interview is in English and it starts at the 22:07 minute point.
April 20, 2008
Yup, as soon as I land in Belgrade, I will be giving two lectures about Open Access and the Science Communication in the Age of Internet. The first one, this Tuesday at 11am, will be in the beautiful hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, sponsored by the Serbian Museum Association…
April 20, 2008
Some more pictures....
Saturday dinner:
Alessandro interviewed me for the newspapers:
We were sitting on the edge of Adriatic:
Then I gave another interview, this time about blogging (there will be no podcast - this material will be used for a written text):
April 20, 2008
The third post in the series on entrainment, first written on April 10, 2005, starts slowly to get into the meat of things...As always, clicking on the spider-clock icon will take you to the site of the original post.
In the previous post, I introduced the concept of entrainment of circadian…
April 19, 2008
Professor Steve Steve went to FEST with me yesterday and made many friends (I told his story 50 times at least). Here he is with Lawrence Krauss:
And I hope Mrs.Coturnix does not click on the "Read on...." button, as Professor Steve Steve is a well-known and certified babe magnet:
April 19, 2008
Here are some even better pictures from the panel:
April 19, 2008
The science blogging session yesterday was really fun. I am wearing headphones as everyone else was speaking Italian, so I listened to the simultaneous translation. The locals also listened to me via the interpreter:
April 19, 2008
Who can tell whether learning may not even weaken invention in a man that has great advantages from nature and birth; whether the weight and number of so many men's thoughts and actions may not suppress his own or hinder the motion and agitation of them, from which all invention arises; as heaping…
April 19, 2008
One of the assumptions in the study of circadian organization is that, at the level of molecules and cells, all vertebrate (and perhaps all animal) clocks work in roughly the same way. The diversity of circadian properties is understood to be a higher-level property of interacting multicelular and…
April 19, 2008
Not many people know that James Joyce spent 11 years in Trieste as a lecturer at the University. Now, his bronze statue still walks the bridge across the canal on Ponte Rossa:
April 19, 2008
I love how many dogs I saw roaming FEST and learning about science....
April 19, 2008
This is the second in a series of posts on the analysis of entrainment, originally written on April 10, 2005.
The natural, endogenous period of circadian rhythms, as measured in constant conditions, is almost never exactly 24 hours. In the real world, however, the light-dark cycle provided by the…
April 19, 2008
Yes, that is Lawrence Krauss on the left....
April 19, 2008
Last night, Derek Law and I were taped for about 15 minutes for Radio3, about Open Access and the world of publishing:
April 19, 2008
Yesterday afternoon, Sely Costa and Derek Law did a fun session, where she pretended to be an unconcerned citizen and he tried to persuade her that OA is a good thing. It was a fun way to demonstrate how OA benefits everyone, not just researchers.
April 18, 2008
Clues To Ancestral Origin Of Placenta Emerge In Genetics Study:
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have uncovered the first clues about the ancient origins of a mother's intricate lifeline to her unborn baby, the placenta, which delivers oxygen and nutrients critical to the…
April 18, 2008
One of the highlights of the visit to Trieste was the opportunity to finally meet an old blog-friend of mine. Franc Nekrep is a professor of Mikrobiology in Ljubljana, Slovenia and we have been reading each others blogs for a couple of years now. It was so much fun to finally meet in person. He…
April 18, 2008
Here are, quickly for now, some pictures from the yesterday's panel "Open Access; let's do it: top down, bottom up or both?" Stevan Harnad did his presentation first via Skype (from Montreal) which was, unfortunately, not recorded. The rest of the session was recorded and at some time in the…
April 18, 2008
To Hell with Expelled! a special, one-time carnival is up on Dinosaurs and The Bible: A Creationist's Fairy Tale
Change of Shift: Volume Two, Number 21 is up on Nurse Sean (dot) com
I and the Bird #73 is up on A Snail's Eye View
Friday Ark #187 is up on Modulator
April 18, 2008
Politicians are quite unfit for government. They are however very useful for ceremonial banquets, official openings, launchings, unveilings, and greeting foreign delegations, leaving more time for the genuine work of government to those of us who have the proper training and experience…
April 18, 2008
It's nice to get to know your fellow panelists REALLY well over a dinner and wine the night before the event. So we got together and had great fun: Sely Costa from Brasil, A.R.D. Prasad from India, Derek Law and his wife from Scotland, Stefania from Italy and myself.
Warning - marine biology…
April 18, 2008
Trieste at night. Smell of the Adriatic sea, in which I learned to swim some decades ago, just two towns (and two border crossings) away from here. Ponte Rossa, where I got my first jeans, back in 1970 or so. Nostalgia.
April 18, 2008
How birds know when and where to migrate (from April 03, 2006)
I've never ever expected to see the word "Zugunruhe" in New York Times! But here it is. It is one of my most favourite words of all times (right after "elusive"), and is even described pretty accurately:
Zugunruhe brooks no confusion.…
April 18, 2008
Going into more and more detail, here is a February 11, 2005 post about the current knowledge about the circadian organization in my favourite animal - the Japanese quail.
Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica), also known as the Asian Migratory Quail, are gallinaceous birds from the family…
April 17, 2008
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
- Sir John Lubbock
April 17, 2008
I am having a blast in Trieste - FEST is fantastic, people friendly, program interesting, the smell of Adriatic evokes nostalgia (I learned to swim in the northern Adriatic), but I am really pissed with the Jolly Hotel I am in. Room is fine. But they charge wifi at exorbitant prices.
About a year…
