apalazzo
Posts by this author
April 6, 2007
I have no time to blog today (and no time for Map that Campus - next week I'll have a new Northwestern mystery campus for ya).
Here's an entry from 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…
April 4, 2007
Apparently Reed Elsevier, publisher of countless academic journals such as Cell, Neuron, Current Biology and the Lancet, is also organizing arms exhibition shows.
In a bizarre development, the editors of the Lancet agreed with researchers who want to start a boycott of their journal.
To read more…
April 3, 2007
Well I tried some weird experiments on my cells, injecting fluorescent DNA. The result is some psychedelic images. The cells clearly were not happy.
Here is some fluorescent DNA molecules that aggregated in the cell's cytoplasm. Cellular chickenpox?
Note that we are simply viewing the fluorescence…
April 3, 2007
It's nice to see scientific fighting discourse from the outside. I say this as a spectator wanting to see a fight, but as a scientist it makes me worried.
Yesterday I mentioned the John Hogan/George Johnson vlog about the Greene/Krauss debate on string theory on Bloggingheads.tv ... well there are…
April 2, 2007
Finally. NPR has been providing almost all their content online for quite a while.
First you can watch Charlie Rose ... for free! (It use to cost 1$ a show, now you can watch the last week no charge.)
Now NOVA has some videos. Great!
Then if you want more see John Hogan (The End of Science) and…
April 2, 2007
I've been struggling with eIF4E. You see eIF4E is the major cytosolic cap binding complex. When mRNA is synthesized in the nucleus the cap is loaded with nuclear cap binding complex, CBP80/20. Then (the story goes) the mRNA is exported to the cytoplasm where the ribosome engages the transcript and…
April 2, 2007
In this month's edition of Mendel's Garden we present to you the latest from the home office in Brno: Mendel's Premium Fish Flakes.
Guaranteed to invigorate your favorite genetic model organism, these flakes will work wonders.
Here are some testimonials:
Coturnix is wowed about how his massive…
April 1, 2007
I have to admit this one is better than last week's post. Yo, TCA man, T-C-A.
[HT:Dario]
April 1, 2007
A video of one of the most bizarre phenomena known to man. I believe that PZ Myers wrote his undergraduate thesis on this fascinating subject.
March 30, 2007
There is a divide within the biological sciences, those that are concerned with proximal causes and those concerned with ultimate causes. For every question in biology there are two answers.
Ultimate causes have to do mostly with the "why?"s. Why was this structure selected for? But not always.…
March 29, 2007
Tuesday and Wednesday Dr Neupert was here at the medical school. The topic of his two seminars was mitos.
It is amazing how many protein shuttling mechanisms there are in mitos. Mitos only make about a dozen proteins from their own DNA, the rest are synthesized from nuclear genes. These nuclear…
March 25, 2007
Quebec's provincial elections are being held tomorrow. I won't be voting in this one - my green card application is still under review, and I can't cross the border until all my paperwork is settled. Since the thee main parties are tied in the pre-election poles, it's likely that like the Quebec…
March 25, 2007
No video, just 44min of audio on Popper, one of the great philosophers of Science. (No I don't stricktly hold his views, but his ideas are very insightful.)
It's interesting how Popper's ideas were shaped by the progression of physics from Newtonian physics to Einstein's relativity in contrast…
March 25, 2007
Next week I'll be hosting the latest edition of Mendel's Garden, a blog carnival for genetics blogging. Despite the fact that I've been blogging for over two years and participating in many carnivals, this will be my first time as a host (not that your entries are parasites ...)
So send in your…
March 23, 2007
from a stairway at Harvard Medical School.
Interesting tags ... just like street graffiti, scientific graffiti is probably meaningless to the untrained eye.
Here's a closeup:
Notice the greek slang (lambda for microlitres), the violent use of base to strip off antibodies, the reference to blood…
March 21, 2007
OK here's a refresher ...nuclear export of mRNA in yeast:
Nucleoplasm is on the bottom, cytoplasm on the top. The bilayered nuclear envelope is represented by the two black lines. The top line is the outer nuclear envelope the bottom line is the inner nuclear envelope. The big red/blue thing with…
March 20, 2007
Yesterday we had a look at the science funding sutation south of the border, today we look up north.
In their new budget, the Tories have allotted some extra cash for graduate-student scholarships and university research. The increase will amount to an additional 40% for postsecondary education…
March 19, 2007
Click here to watch now. It's over.
To read Elias Zerhouni's statement click here.
A pretty good presentation. Zerhouni was joined by some department heads (including our own, Joan Brugge).
Some highlights:
-The approval rate of first time RO1s by first time investigators is down from 15% in the…
March 19, 2007
From the Metropolitan Diaries section of today's NYTimes:
I boarded the 57th Street crosstown bus at York Avenue and, as usual, inserted my senior citizen transit card incorrectly. The driver very kindly took it out of the fare box slot and reversed it before handing it back to me to reinsert. I…
March 17, 2007
I adjusted my blog roll for the first time in ~6months, I'll do some more tomorrow. If you want me to list you, let me know. Also I added some new entries to the Taxonomy of Sciences. Two new outside entries + a bunch of genetics entries that I ripped off of evolgen.
March 16, 2007
A challenge! Can anyone beat Willie's posse to the correct answer?
Here is this week's mystery campus:
hint: He's coming over in April.
Answers can be deposited in the comment section (or email me, if you prefer.)
March 15, 2007
So Sir Paul Nurse gave a talk today where he discussed the 5 big ideas in the Life Sciences.
Instead of going through the talk, I'll just say that he ended it with his 5th big idea - biological organization. It reminds me of discussions I've had with colleagues on cell polarity. And in someways it'…
March 15, 2007
Yesterday I posted something on that great graphic of scientific literature and paradigm clustering, it reminded me of a serries of posts from last year on a taxonomy of scientists for the layman. I'll repost each entry and the author (below the fold):
THE LIFE SCIENCES
Biochemist:
Basically…
March 14, 2007
I've been so busy. But I have 15 minutes to spare and so I'll attempt to give a quit session of Tid Bits (including a mention of The Daily Transcript in ... Nature!):
Others seek more of a balance, such as the cell-biologist postdoc author of The Daily Transcript (http://scienceblogs.com/transcript…
March 14, 2007
Each lab is like a tribe, it has its own particular traditions and rituals. X is stored here, Y is stored there and Z is made up fresh. We share reagent A, we make our own reagent B, we buy a kit for reagent C. It's hard when you enter the tribe, you have to learn all of these unwritten rules.
- A…
March 11, 2007
Yesterday we visited MIT's List Visual Arts Center (LVAC) to see part II of the exhibit Sensorium (for part I see Tulula's post, scroll down for the English version.) What is Sensorium? From the LVAC website:
This two-part exhibition organized by the MIT LVAC, explores various ways in which…
March 8, 2007
... finally. Sign up http://www.cellpress.com/misc/page?page=podcast> here. Or enter http://podcast.cell.com/cell.xml into your podcast subscription.
It has a nice summary of a new Hannon paper on the role of piRNA in suppression of transposons in germ cells, another summary of how WASP is…
March 8, 2007
There's a new paper in Dev Cell with a nice reconstruction of a fission yeast cell (S. pombe) with all its microtubules.
From the abstract:
Here, we describe a large-scale, electron tomography investigation of S. pombe, including a 3D reconstruction of a complete eukaryotic cell volume at…
March 7, 2007
Well I got an email from the Journal of Visualized Experiment (JoVE). Here's the key pitch:
JoVE is a new open-source publication that allows free access to the latest biological research and experimental techniques in video format.
Video-articles published in the second issue include a variety of…