apalazzo
Posts by this author
November 6, 2007
One reason that microscopy is such an important tool for biological research is that biological entities function in part through their organization. Just take a look at any micrograph and you will see order, organization and compartmentalization.
But much of the organization that produces…
November 2, 2007
For those in the Boston metro area.
First up, next Friday, November 9th, there will be a conference being held here at the Medical Campus entitled Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences. Not only is fellow blogger Anna Kushnir part of the organizing committee,…
November 2, 2007
Yes it's time for this week's mystery campus. And I don't want to disappoint you, especially after this crushing decision, but Stephen, it's not your alma mater.
So with out further delay, here it is:
Since there is a big hint right on the image itself, all that I'll say is that some of the labs…
November 1, 2007
So this morning baymate was telling me how she's taking a course called Intro to Maya with Gael McGill, a former gradstudent here at Harvard Med School. Gael co-founded Digizyme and gained quite a bit of attention with his fantastic "cellular movie". You know the one where a kinesin motor protein…
October 31, 2007
I would like to thank the speakers and all of you who attended our NERD Club (New England RNA Data Club). One amazing aspect of our club is the diversity of the topics included. Last night we had talks about mTOR signalling (TOR = Target of rapamycin) and how it activates the translation of certain…
October 29, 2007
Last week I saw an awesome lecture by Gaudenz Danuser who has a lab at the Scripps institute in San Diego. It has taken me a week to fully digest what was said, plus I haven't had the time to jot this down.
Over the past few years the Danuser lab along with Claire Waterman-Storer's group (see this…
October 28, 2007
Some beautiful images taken by my good friend Jan Schmorandzer are being displayed at the M.W. Offit Gallery in the Gottesman Library at Columbia's Teacher's College.
For more information visit: www.CellPortraits.blogsplot.com www.CellPortraits.blogspot.com
(The blog includes a cool video of Jan…
October 26, 2007
Over the past month, many have asked me to reinstate this Friday feature. So after a 6 month hiatus, I present to you this week's mystery campus:
hint:
One might think of an answer
But is it true?
Trying to disprove it
Is all that's left to do.
If this makes any sense to you, leave a comment. If…
October 25, 2007
All the info is here. A copy of the resignation letter can be found here.
[HT: Eye on DNA]
October 24, 2007
Last night, the US Senate approved the Labor-HHS appropriations bill that includes a provision requiring all NIH funded studies to be available free of charge (i.e. Open Access). Furthermore, the bill passed 75-19 preventing any possibility of a veto. And the Inhofe amendments? From Open Access…
October 24, 2007
Here is the email I sent out today:
Hello All,
The next meeting of the New England RNA Club will take place October 30th starting at 6:00PM in the Cannon Room of Building C at Harvard Medical School. Our speakers will be:
- Xiaoju (Max) Ma, Blenis Lab (HMS)
- Andrew Grimson, Bartel Lab (Whitehead…
October 24, 2007
I'm sick and tired of this debate of "do you believe in evolution?" Who cares? Who freakin' cares?
You see to me belief is cheap. Any person can claim to believe in any old idea. So what if Obama and Hillary believe in evolution and Huckabee believes in creationism? What I want ...what I expect…
October 23, 2007
OK here is some background.
AAP: American Association of Publishers.
They are behind PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine), a lobby against Open Access (OA). This organization was set up based on suggestions from Eric Dezenhall, a lobbyist has worked for Enron chief…
October 22, 2007
This site says it all.
If you are wondering why the American Chemical Society is fighting open access, the answer is simple ... ACS management receives bonuses that are tied to the revenues generated from ACS publications. They are also paid in part with money collected from membership dues (yes,…
October 22, 2007
As you probably know, today the US Senate votes on amendments sponsored by Senator Inhofe (Rep. - OK) which would effectively nullify parts of the the bill (FY08 Labor-HHS Bill) that would require all NIH funded work to be published in a media freely accessible to the public (i.e. Open Access).…
October 19, 2007
This week has just come and gone. I didn't do a single experiment. As for the blog, I typed two measly entries. But I did finalize my PLoS paper, give journal club and prepare for the next New England RNA Data Club. It's taking place here at Harvard Medical School on October 30th.
So what else…
October 18, 2007
So I heard about this PNAS paper all summer long but never got around to reading it until yesterday.
Neutrophils are white blood cells, whose job it is to chase around invaders that enter your bodily fluids. They can sense foreign invaders by sensing chemical traces. Thus the chemical traces are…
October 17, 2007
... from my long extended vacation. And it's been over 3 weeks since I last posted anything original. (Hope you didn't mind all those reposts). So, what has happened since then?
The Nobels came out, and although I hadn't predicted any winners, the author of a certain comment did call the Medicine…
October 12, 2007
I'm on the last bit of my protracted vacation. I'll be back on Monday. To commemorate work (got to get back into that mind-set) here's a little rant I posted last year.
Here's a tale from the lab.
Today we had an interesting discussion. It started off with PBS and ended up on the topic of…
October 11, 2007
By now I should be flying in to Paris to meetup with some old friends. Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk at the Universite Pierre & Marie Curie entitled: The Signal Sequence Coding Region: promoting nuclear export of mRNA, and ER targeting of translated protein. Here is a post from a year ago. At…
October 10, 2007
I'm in Italy. Until I get back I've set up my blog to repost some old entries. Here's a post from last year.
Yesterday, while driving up to Ipswich to spend the day at Crane beach and watch the see the annual July 3rd Fireworks, a group of us gabbed about the transient nature of being an academic…
October 8, 2007
I'm in Italia. Here's one of my favorite entries. It first appeared last year.
You can clearly divide scientists into two categories, those who build new models and those who prove old models. The explorers and the crusaders. Usually the former are seeking the truth, or something close to it,…
October 5, 2007
I'm in Italy. Over the past two weeks I've been reposting my entries on technology. Here is a related post on Le Corbusier and his conception of the modern city.
Seed is disseminating questions to its bloggers (I guess a la www.edge.org) so this week the question is:
If you could cause one…
October 3, 2007
Still in Italy. Here is a post from last year that was a follow-up to the entry that was reposted yesterday.
Lets think about technology for a moment. Here I am typing on this laptop. Ideas flow (misspelled and grammatically incorrect) from my brain to my fingers to the keyboard ... over a wireless…
October 2, 2007
I should be walking around the family olive grove by now. Here is yet another old post from last year.
OK here is a myth that I'd like to explode (or at least be provocative about). Technology is NOT inevitable.
Say what?
We humans think that technology increases steadily. With every space shuttle…
September 30, 2007
Yes still in Italy. Looking back at this post, it looks like most of the small biologists (excluding structural biologists) who practiced the molecule-centric approach have been weeded out by the stagnation in NIH funding, but I still beleive that the temptation to perform such research is still…
September 28, 2007
Yes you've guessed it, I'm in Italy. Here is another entry dealing with scientific thinking.
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…
September 26, 2007
Still in Italy. Here's another old entry for you.
I'm not sure about the history of "the three types of experiments" (3 T's), 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 is informative.
Type B…
September 25, 2007
The Nobels are coming up. Here is last year's prediction (note that I had listed Mello and Fire).Who will win this year? You tell me.
Some guesses for the Medicine & Physiology (or perhaps Chemistry) below the fold. Warning - the predictions presented here are highly biased towards cellular…
September 23, 2007
Jenni and I spent the last 3 days in the big city, meeting friends, celebrating weddings and preparing to leave for the mother country.
We stayed with our good friend Jan who lives in Morning Side Heights near the Columbia main campus. Right outside his apartment the Cohen brothers were filming…