apalazzo
Posts by this author
March 20, 2009
As you can see, juggling lab and fatherhood has left me no time to blog. So now that I'm waiting for the centrifuge to cool down I'll take this opportunity to quote a great musician whose words have some resonance these days:
Cranium implants, false debt, funny money, dead sat heart, signs of the…
March 6, 2009
Monday, our son Xander was born. Since then I've been getting to know who this new human being is. I've been taking care of most of his, and my wife's, needs. We've shared many moments and lived a life without distractions. Like Zen Buddhist monks our only concerns are food, sleep and poop. The…
February 26, 2009
Today's quote is from the first two lines of a research manuscript about the neuroscience of Schadenfreude that appeared in a recent issue of Science.
Envy is one of the seven biblical sins, the Shakespearian "green-eyed monster," and what Bertrand Russell called an unfortunate facet of human…
February 26, 2009
Well after a bit of a holiday, the New England RNA Data Club is back. We'll be meeting next week here at HMS. Here's the latest email:
Hello All,
The next meeting of the New England RNA Club will take place Wednesday, March 4th. We will have beverages starting at 5:30PM and talks from 6:00-7:00PM…
February 24, 2009
An article appeared in today's Science Section under the title, Beaker-Ready Projects? Colleges Have Quite a Few
Here's a passage that highlights what I've been harping about:
The acting director of the National Institutes of Health begged university administrators on Wednesday to avoid even…
February 24, 2009
Natural human pathological variation can be readily identified by highly trained professionals, in other words doctors. Pathological variations of other model organisms are usually eaten.
- Stephen O'Rahilly, Co-Director of IMS and Director of IMS Metabolic Research Laboratories, Cambridge…
February 23, 2009
If you have happened to browse DrugMonkey, you'll have noticed a discussion about how the NIH should spend its share of the stimulus package (~$10 billion). (For more info click here.) Unfortunately the plan, according to the NIH statement is the same usual BS - all quick fixes and no forethought…
February 21, 2009
One common feature of bench work is downtime. Some activity, such as cutting and pasting DNA, require the researcher to incubate their samples for various periods of time. What to do? Well ideally the scientist in question should take advantage of this time to either, perform other experiments,…
February 19, 2009
Yesterday I and a few local PhDs had a chat with a reporter from [insert name of big newspaper here] and we started talking about the life of a gradstudent and/or postdoc in the biomedical sciences. At the end of the conversation I brought up the academic blog scene and the reporter asked for a…
February 17, 2009
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice, there is.
- Yogi Bera (also attributed to Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut and Chuck Reid according to Wikiquote)
February 17, 2009
As many of you may know, I have been examining how mRNAs are transported and localized within the cell and how the regulation of mRNA metabolism contributes to gene expression. From data accumulated recently within the "RNA Field", we know that transcription in eukaryotic cells is very sloppy -…
February 12, 2009
... I have two simple requests:
Stop asking people if they "believe in evolution". Every time I hear some dumb ass politician or right wing theological nut say "I don't believe in evolution", it makes me cringe. Evolution is not some magical mystical process that you take on faith. Do you ever…
February 11, 2009
You take out your scissors and start cutting.
(A photo of baymate working on supplemental figure 12 of Ward et al., PNAS 2007.)
To be honest, we didn't know what to make of the final arts & crafts product, a floppy ABC transporter that can be shifted into various conformations, each of which…
February 9, 2009
As you know, I'll be leaving the US in the middle of the year to head up north to my native land where I'll be setting up my new lab.
Having lived in both the US and Canada, I am in a good position to evaluate both societies. My basic conclusion? America you have a lot to learn from your northern…
February 9, 2009
Bloggers like to talk about how nasty the Main Stream Media is (I'm looking at you physioprof). And although I agree that there are MANY problems, I think that the fifth estate makes a real contribution to our public discourse.
Now unlike what others have written, I am not talking about science…
February 4, 2009
I just listened to journalist and historian Gwynne Dyer discus what's to come in the not so distant future due to accelerated climate change.
The quick summary? The rate of climate change is very fast, the development of technology (good and bad) may be even faster, but the rate of cultural change…
February 3, 2009
... strike again!
It's crazy but Boston (and Brookline in particular) is full of wild turkeys. Every once in a while you bump into a gang (or a gobble) of them. Baymate knew of one living near her in Washington Square. One day as one lady left Starbucks, baymate's turkey spotted her and proceeded…
February 2, 2009
Wow, last week was memorable. Not only did I sign my contract with the University of Toronto, but it appears as if my super duper theory that I thought I had killed, might have been resuscitated.
To remind you, the last time I wrote about my trials and tribulations, I thought that I had ruled out…
January 30, 2009
Yes, now that I've received the contract and signed it, I'll officially announce what some of you already know - effective July 1st 2009, I will be a faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto.
One of my "first acts" will be to collect a little payment from Larry…
January 29, 2009
From the AAAS:
The three agencies highlighted in the America COMPETES Act of 2007 and President Bush's American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) would do extremely well in the stimulus appropriations bill. The National Science Foundation (NSF) would receive $3.0 billion; the Department of Energy's…
January 28, 2009
I just saw this video on Biocurious:
And I have to agree with Dobbs, postdocs are underpaid largely due to an oversupply of foreign PhDs (and yes, I am a foreigner, although I received my PhD here in the US). This is why women drop out of science, this is why there most blogs written by postdocs…
January 27, 2009
I woke up, got the paper and then read this half baked OpEd by David Brooks, the world's most confused conservative.
The thesis of his article: liberalism destroys institutions. Here's the opening paragraph:
A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of…
January 26, 2009
Yesterday, I was diligently working on my computer when my brother suddenly appeared on MSN's instant messenger. His engineering firm had recently sent him to Doha, Qatar, to work on a new factory being built near the harbor and I was pleasantly surprised that I could chat with him. Next I was…
January 26, 2009
This has become a yearly tradition. I usually posted near the end of the year, but this time around I had many "distractions". Better late then never:
Click here for a full size version.
Previous years:
2007
2006
January 25, 2009
So this week I tried to gain evidence that supports my supper dupper theory, based on my unexpectedly amazing mass spec results I told you about a few weeks ago. Fortunately I had a staight forward way of testing the implications of these initial findings. And my experiments conclusively…
January 19, 2009
Hello world.
Once upon a time, I had a laptop. As time went on, its hard drive filled up with pdfs, music files and an enormous (well, relatively enormous) operating system. This pattern of exponential expansion continued for a few years until, the imbalance between data and storage capacity, just…
January 6, 2009
Yes it looks like I've abandoned my blog, but to be honest in the past few weeks my world has been rocked, scientifically.
You see to be a scientist is to be obsessed. Now like some crazed psychotic individual I will try to explain the nature of this infatuation with my work. This desire to obtain…
December 24, 2008
Here I am, in the lab with one last experiment to go before I leave to feast on a Christmas Eve dinner, so while I wait for that last centrifugation step, I'll write a quick post about all these great papers on RNA Polymerase II and chromatin remodelling. As I've said before, if you want to…
December 23, 2008
This is hard. A few days before Xmass, I have HOT results comming out of the lab, and a major snafu is comming out of that endless reservoir of angst, scientists complaining about science journalists ... and now those science journalists are lashing back.
I have to say that I really like George…
December 21, 2008
The lack of posts can be explained by this equation (lab work = 1/updates) so I'll make it up to you with a weekend smorgasbord of links. So today as I sit in my warm cozy snowed-in apartment I present to you the latest edition of Tib Bits.
First off, I would like to wish happy birthday to the late…