apalazzo
Posts by this author
March 7, 2007
From a license plate on Comm. Ave. near Kenmore square in Boston:
DNARNA
March 6, 2007
In the Februray 6th issue of Cell there is an indept study by the Borisy & Sheetz labs that describes how crawling cells push and ruffle and bend the membrane at the very front with the aid of actin dynamics. Very cool stuff, very cool movies. I'll blog (or attempt to blog) about the actual…
March 5, 2007
Over the weekend I posted a link to the Postdoc Carnival ... lots of good stuff in there including this entry from The Unbearable Lightness of Being A Postdoc on the woes of postdoc-hood. I also saw a nice post at Sunil's blog on What does it take to be a pioneering scientist? And there is a bit…
March 3, 2007
Through our newest blog Highly Allochthonus I've learned that there is a Postdoc Carnival. Check out what blogging postdocs have to complain about say at Post Doc Ergo Propter Doc.
And I've discovered that The Daily Transcript has been reviewed (about a month ago) at BlogCritics.
Here's what…
March 2, 2007
After bitching about how postdocs (and grad students) are treated like slave labor I stumbled onto these videos over at Omni Brain:
and
March 2, 2007
After a one month hiatus, it's back.
I now present this week's mystery campus:
hint: He once built a table here.
Know the answer? Don't be shy, you can either leave a comment or if you don't want to ruin it for others, email me.
March 1, 2007
OK it's time for a rant. (It's been a while.)
Lets have a discussion about competitiveness in the lab-space. Yesterday over lunch, we had a discussion of all the nastiness going on within labs here at the medical campus. You know, people in the same lab competing against each other. This can…
February 27, 2007
Well last night I was invited to dine at Clio's with our Seminar Speaker, James Manley and some of the local transcription gurus, Kevin Struhl, Danesh Moazed, Steve Buratowski and Miriam Bucateli, a postdoc in the Buratowski lab. Unfortunately Dr. Manley had to leave early to catch a flight back to…
February 25, 2007
Visualizing sound waves using a PVC pipe, gas and a lighter in some guy's garage. Now this is how physics should be taught!
February 25, 2007
This week, many things have been happening up north. The most important being ... from the NY Times, Canadian Court Limits Detention in Terror Cases :
Canada's highest court on Friday unanimously struck down a law that allows the Canadian government to detain foreign-born terrorism suspects…
February 24, 2007
Last week I attended a seminar by Dr. Yamada who is now president of the Bill and Melinda Bates Foundation.
Here's a couple of interesting points from his talk:
- The pharmaceutical industry has developed and patented almost 15,000 drugs, only 30 of which are directed towards diseases that…
February 24, 2007
OK a good friend and former colleague has induced me to get a Connotea account ... and I have to say that it's great. It's like a cross between Endnote and your bookmark page ... on steroids. If you don't know what Connotea is, it's a social bookmarking tool that lets you keep track of websites,…
February 23, 2007
I guess prokaryotes are looking more and more like eukaryotes.
It turns out that their DNA is moved around by cytoskeletal filaments. The most recent (and one of the most dramatic) examples can be seen in a recent article in G&D where Fogel and Waldor describe how ParAI polymers yank the DNA…
February 20, 2007
Yes it is the Fire Golden Pig. Welcome to the economic based renaming of our current astrological year.
I was just told this funny story by Dr J.
This is the year of the Gold Pig in the Chinese calendar. The calendar is based on a repeating cycle of twelve animals ... so that last year was year of…
February 20, 2007
I wasn't around for a bit - as you can tell I was overloading. Thus it was time to head down to the city. So Friday we packed our bags and headed down to NYC.
Highlights from the trip:
Although I thought that it was fading, the gallery scene in Chelsea was alive and well. On Saturday we not only…
February 16, 2007
Not only is the acclaimed Darwin exhibit comming to Boston's Museum of Science starting this Sunday, but there will be a series of lectures by local researchers to accompany the show:
Evolution as a Tool Kit for Understanding Human Disease (Lecture)
March 13, 2007 This is the first event in The…
February 14, 2007
This was sent by MF (initials are meant to keep my source out of trouble, I hope that I won't be subpoenaed on this one):
Menstrual cycle phase modulates reward-related neural function in women
In other words, giving roses at the wrong time will do nothing for you!
Ref:
Jean-Claude Dreher , Peter…
February 12, 2007
198 years old today.
I would type something up, but after a frustratingly bad day, full of horrible microinjection needles and an hour of playing soccer with this out of shape body of mine, I feel selected against.
For a gadzillion links to various Darwin Day posts go checkout Coturnix' post.
February 12, 2007
In biological labs, the term junk DNA is commonly used to describe portion of the genome which have no described function. When I first moved my blog to Scienceblogs, I wrote a little summary of a great theory advanced by William Martin and Eugene V. Koonin on the origin of the eukaryotic nucleus…
February 12, 2007
In the 90s there was a severe brain drain out of Canada, I should know, I left Montreal in '97 to get a PhD at Columbia University. This trend was halted and even reversed in the earlier part of this decade.
But the stagnation in research funding that has plagued science in the US is being repeated…
February 11, 2007
Last night we hosted a meeting of our Boston based bookclub. We discussed Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow. Next up is Pirandello's The Late Mattia Pascal.
I posted some pics at the Boston Bookclub blog. You can guess from these photos that our bookclub is just an excuse to get together and have a…
February 10, 2007
I haven't done one of these in a while. Last Thursday, Stephan and I "imaged" some macrophages being infected with a vicious strain of vibrio, here's a cool image of one of the poor suckers:
The macrophage is on the top right, a few vibrio cells can be seen on the lower left. Note that the…
February 10, 2007
First female president in Harvard's history.
Article here in today's NY Times.
My only complaint - she's not a scientist (she's a civil war historian). Here's something I hadn't heard:
Dr. Faust emerged in recent weeks as a finalist among the candidates being considered by the university's search…
February 9, 2007
Overheard in the lab:
You can't just dump stuff into it. You know, it's not a truck. The ER is a series of tubes!
If you have no idea what we're talking about, where have you been! OK I'll be a little less facetious ... watch this instructional video on the internet and tubes:
And if you are…
February 9, 2007
This one was a sent over by Jeff Lanam:
Hint: Next week, let's all collect some data.
Leave your answers in the comment section.
February 8, 2007
MDR: Multi Drug Resistance Protein. It's an ABC (ATPase Box Cassette) Transporter. In other words, this gene encodes an energy utilizing pump that sits on the plasma membrane and actively transports (mostly hydrophobic?) compounds out of the cell. As I wrote yesterday, a silent change in this gene…
February 7, 2007
This is prompted by two emails. Both from good friends. Email #1 is from a friend who got Shingles, I think - (hope you get better, we'll all drink to your health Saturday during food-orgy ... I mean bookclub). The second email I received yesterday from a friend down in NYC asking me if I was still…
January 31, 2007
A number of cells were bidirectional, in that they did not a have a peak firing rate in a preferred direction that was at least doubled that in the opposite direction, raising the possibility that apparently reverse replay events merely reflected forward replay of neurons in the opposite direction…