apalazzo
Posts by this author
May 9, 2007
I once made an offer to this guy that I'd word for him if he offered me a permanent postdoc position with a 100% pay raise.
Now everywhere I turn, I see his face.
Open Nature, and there are back to back papers with his name as a co-first-author. Skimming through HMS's Focus magazine, and there is…
May 9, 2007
Monday I saw an incredible lecture by U. Wash's Ning Zheng. (Yes Bil, I actually enjoyed a structure biology talk!)
I'll just summarize Dr. Zheng's last paper that was on the cover of the April 5th edition of Nature.
Intense studies on phototaxis in plants that began in part by Darwin (yup, that's…
May 6, 2007
So apparently I'm a month late on this item.
*** CORRECTION ***
Keepon was developed by Dr. Kozima and Dr. Nakagawa at NICT in Japan (see comments). Marek Michalowski, a robotics student at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed the rhythm recognition, hence his thesis:
the use of rhythm in…
May 5, 2007
We arrived in New York last night and we joined a friend for dinner in Williamsburg at a joint called Tacu Tacu, a Peruvian/Thai place (they had an excellent ceviche platter). Eventually talk drifted to biotechs. Apparently Bloomberg in collaboration with Alexandria Real Estate initiated a project…
May 4, 2007
Yesterday I saw Dr. Alan Cowman give a talk. He's a big guy in the Plasmodium field. Plasmodium is strange. It's the eukaryote parasite that causes malaria. But that's not why it's strange. Let's put it this way, if animals, plants and fungi are three siblings, Plasmodium would be their 6th cousin…
May 3, 2007
There's a little "Leading Edge" review by Laura Bonetta on scientists who blog. I spoke to her last week and some of our conversation is in the peice. Some other ScienceBlogs mentioned are A Blog Around the Clock, Pharyngula, Aetiology, and Framing Science. Larry Moran is also quoted. Go check it…
May 2, 2007
Joolya has been having some problems with contamination.
Now she needs your help. Can you identify the mystery organism that causes her tissue culture cells to bleb?
May 2, 2007
In the lab we were discussing whether prokaryotes have true membrane bound organelles. By membrane bound organelles I mean that the membrane surrounding the organelle is not contiguous with the cell's delimiting membrane. Magnetosomes and other such organelles are though to be invaginations of the…
May 1, 2007
I have to say that I had never seen Eric Olson's seminar before, and it was awesome. Lately the Olson's lab has been looking at HDACs, i.e. histone deacetylases.
Don't forget that in the nucleus DNA is wrapped around nucleosomes that are composed of proteins called histones (see image, right). One…
April 27, 2007
Well it was officially last weekend but there are events going on this weekend as well, including a model of the human genome that stretches from Kendall Square to Harvard Yard.
For more info click here to visit the official Cambridge Science Festival site or visit Corie's blog.
April 26, 2007
One question that keeps popping up in conversations on and off the internet is the question of what is a blog? As bloggers, what rights do we have? How should we be treated? When do we keep our information private? What should we write about, and what is off limits?
I was talking to someone at Cell…
April 26, 2007
It looks like I'll be giving a talk at our inaugural meeting on May 15th. More details to come shortly.
See this previous post.
April 26, 2007
There is a great post on Mike Daisey's excellent blog with regards to the aftermath of the recent vandalism incident at ART. It turns out that the man who poured water on Daisey's notes was a religious fellow whowanted to protect his high school class from evil atheist thoughts. Mike tracked down…
April 24, 2007
This past weekend was gorgeous. Sunday we were hanging out at Plum Island taking in the sun, when a pair of Piping Plovers, an endangered species, came near our beach towel. Here are some pics:
I also shot some interesting pictures of various sand patterns - I'll have to post them one of these…
April 23, 2007
Two weeks ago we went to see Mike Daisy's monologue, Invincible Summer at ART. A great show.
Once upon a time, Mike was putting on a one man show in Seattle about the dot com life when a fire, a book deal, and some crazy ideas led him to move to New York City. After settling in to his new home, he…
April 23, 2007
Want to manage all those scientific articles that you've downloaded over the years? Evil Gomez at ScienceSampler shows you how (link).
April 21, 2007
Support the What's Up, Postdoc? carnival by submitting a post on postdoc-hood or any other related subject. You've got just 2 days left so send it TODAY. Click here for details.
April 21, 2007
A phenocopy of Maradona's great goal by Lionel Messi.
Here is Messi's recent goal:
Here is Maradona's famous goal:
And now here ther are, side by side:
April 19, 2007
Lots of little interesting tidbits in here like
-the expansion of the use in tobacco products in Asia
-cervical cancer is a big problem in India
-lots of other stuff on recent cancer research and ideas like cancer gene addiction and cancer stemcells
-collaborative research
-plus a plea to increase…
April 19, 2007
It looks like the paper that describes the FT mRNA as a messenger molecule that is transported between plant cells is fraudulent. FT mRNA is a transcript that regulates flowering in plants.
Damn, that was a cool paper. Read about the whole thing here. Original Science article here.
Also I noticed…
April 18, 2007
(disclaimer: I am a foreign postdoc)
Did any of you read this from the latest issue of Science: Huddled Masses on foreign postdocs?
A recent paper by Harvard economist George J. Borjas shows, however, that even for doctorate-level researchers, "the supply-demand textbook model is correct after all…
April 17, 2007
This is for all you libertarians who think that laws and government are shackles. Just remember that society is a contract.
Now that those who practise justice do so involuntarily and because they have not the power to be unjust will best appear if we imagine something of this kind: having given…
April 17, 2007
I left this comment on Rob Knop's site:
I read this post, and then the comments, and I thought to my self, it would be nice if both sides engage in a discourse.
The "anti-gun" side asks for a balance in our society. They compare countries that have lax laws with those that have strict laws ...…
April 17, 2007
Sad, very sad. 32 dead.
Reading about it ... how the killings came in several waves, hours apart ... I wonder why didn't they stop the guy. I guess that unlike Dawson, which is located in downtown Montreal, V Tech is in a small college town (from my understanding).
Another question: why do these…
April 16, 2007
We finally got this off the ground, email me if you are interested.
Dear Colleagues,
In an attempt to foster discussion within the local RNA community we are initiating a monthly informal data seminar, the Boston RNA data club. These meetings will consist of two 30min talks given by postdoctoral…
April 13, 2007
I got an email from an old friend (the perfect way to distract from my assembling the figures for my manuscript) about this ... Quantum secrets of photosynthesis revealed. Check this out:
"We have obtained the first direct evidence that remarkably long-lived wavelike electronic quantum coherence…
April 13, 2007
I've been writing my manuscript all week - hence the lack of posts. But this morning I flipped open the paper and read that they've sequenced by mass spec (proteomics in the new lingo) several proteins from the interior of a T. rex bone. So I'm reading the article in the NYTimes and then I stumble…
April 9, 2007
How come no one told me about this site?
STRING is a database of known and predicted protein-protein interactions.
The interactions include direct (physical) and indirect (functional) associations; they are derived from four sources:
-Genomic Context
-High-throughput Experiments
-(Conserved)…