apalazzo
Posts by this author
November 30, 2006
I forgot to bring this up yesterday. Science conducted a review of it's publishing practices (due to the whole cloning affair). Honestly it would have been hard for them to have prevented this. In the end the best check on a scientist's work is reproducibility. But the review board did recommend…
November 30, 2006
There was some minor controversy for the RNAi Nobel ... should Rich Jorgensen's have been acknowledged? and the miRNA people?
Here is what Rich Jorgensen has to say (from the latest edition of Science):
I feel that the Nobel committee's decision to focus on the central role of double-stranded RNA (…
November 29, 2006
OK I finally did that experiment that people asked for ... and more.
If you want to know why I performed this experiment, read this post on RNA treatments for autism. Here I present to you evidence that your body is secreting enzymes, called RNAses, that will chew up your RNA in minutes.
So the…
November 29, 2006
When I was a grad student, eukaryotes had all the neatest toys ... actin, microtubules, kinesins, dynein, myosin, dynamin, SNAREs ...
OK that's not totally true - bacteria had their version of tubulin (the constituent of microtubules), and it's called FtsZ. Then others found that bacteria had a…
November 27, 2006
I mostly agree with Tyson ...
[Here's a different take on the whole culture-war phenomenon, what we scientists need to fight aggressively for is tolerance ... tolerance for ATHEISTS. On this front Dawkins is losing ground.]
[HT: Ed Brayton]
November 27, 2006
I woke up from a nice restful weekend (the first in a while), to read this crap in today's NY Times. In reference to Dawkins', Dennet's and Harris' books, Richard A. Shweder writes:
...the current counterattack on religion cloaks a renewed and intense anxiety within secular society that it is not…
November 26, 2006
I heard about this great new (parody) company, NEXTgencode. You gotta love their tagline: Your Destiny is no Longer in Question.
From their website:
Want to see some of their "products"? Here's an add:
And here's even more adds!
Some products include:
- Permapuppy ... have a pet that never grows…
November 26, 2006
Thursday, my wife and I hosted our annual Thanksgiving for the left behind. Every year, we gather all the foreigners and Americans who couldn't make it back to their own family and have a great big feast. This year, we stuffed 14 people into our small apartment and had a ball. This is the 7th year…
November 24, 2006
So another week has flown by.
Here is today's mystery campus:
hint: Turkey, what a fine bird.
Leave your answers in the comments section.
November 23, 2006
If you haven't seen this, Orac is shocked that I'm shocked and then proceeds to give a run down of other autism related quackery ... go check it out.
In contrast, Abel Pharmboy is joyous about my shockingly shocked post.
OK time to start Thanksgiving day cooking ... oddly enough I'm preparing duck…
November 21, 2006
Autism seems to keep popping up everywhere.
In today's NYTimes there's an commentary on new Federal legislation whose aim is to boost Autism research. But that's not what I want to talk about.
So I've been perusing a couple of blogs by autism researchers to discover that there is a thriving…
November 20, 2006
So not only is McGill's radio station CKUT hosting a new show on global health, Health on Earth, but for their first edition they'll be talking about the Access to Essential Medicines campaign spearheaded by Doctors Without Borders. You may recall that I recently wrote about the student branch of…
November 20, 2006
It looks like Tonegawa stepped down as head of MIT's Picower Institute after the kerfuffle over his emails to Alla Karpova, who was offered a job at MIT's McGovern Institute. Read the article in today's Boston Globe: MIT neuroscience center head quits.
On the one hand those emails, although PC on…
November 20, 2006
For biologists, this is the magical sentence. N=3. What does it mean?
Well lets say you perform an experiment. You want to see whether protein A binds to protein B. So you run to the lab, pipette away until the wee hours of the morning, prepare a sample, separate your proteins on a gel, probe for…
November 20, 2006
In my work, I've investigated mRNA distribution in cells. Many aspects of mRNA metabolism and regulation seem dependent on splicing. And so I've been doing some digging with respect to the survey of intronless genes that I wrote about yesterday. According to their bioinformatic analysis of the…
November 19, 2006
Introns are parts of the gene that do not contain coding information, they have to be spliced out of precursor RNA to form mature messenger RNA (mRNAs). But ask most biologists and they'll tell you that in "higher eukaryotes" all genes have introns. All? They may reply, "well not quite". The most…
November 19, 2006
You've probably heard this, but earlier this week many individuals (Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and Sunni Kurds) affiliated with Iraq's small academia were rounded up by gunmen. From the Boston Globe:
On Tuesday, gunmen dressed like Interior Ministry commandos abducted as many as 150 men from the central…
November 17, 2006
It's been a while since I've written about mRNA and mRNA export. There has been lots of CPEB papers (cytoplasmic polyadenylation element binding protein), but nothing fundamentally new at the molecular level. As for mRNA export, the Reed lab will have a big paper out soon, and when that comes out I…
November 17, 2006
To quote an ex-Canadian (Jim Carey):
I've [been fixated on] the number 23 for years. It's everywhere. Each parent passes on 23 chromosomes; Earth's axis is at a 23° angle. Psalm 23 is my mantra...
Now he's in a movie called The Number 23 (it's plot sounds almost like Darren Aronofsky's Pi). Here…
November 16, 2006
A couple of weeks back I wrote about dynamins and mitochondrial fusion. Well the latest piece of the puzzle came in ... I just saw a paper in the latest issue of Nature Cell Biology on this very topic. Apparently a mitochondrial version of phospholipase D (MitoPLD) may act downstream of the dynamin…
November 15, 2006
I haven't written about any extracurricular activities in a while (I don't have to as Tulula takes care of that, but don't tell her that I sent you to her blog ... and yes every post is both in English and in Espanol.)
Last night we saw Anne-Sophie Mutter at Symphony Hall.
What can I say?
Mutter…
November 15, 2006
Chapters of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) are pushing their local universities to sign Equitable Access Licenses (EAL) that would lift patent barriers on drugs developed by university labs. These agreements would effectively increase the access of medicines to poor countries…
November 14, 2006
This is for cell motility aficionados.
How do cells crawl? Well most in the field would say that actin polymerization generated by the Arp2/3 complex at the leading edge acts to generate an actin meshwork (see pic). The addition of actin monomers right under the membrane (arrows) act as a…
November 13, 2006
Working in a lab for too long and you'll acquire a type of lingo that we call "X-speak". It happens to everyone you borrow words used within one environment and apply them to other situations. With so many members of our lab preparing solutions we (as I'm sure many of you) many here are fluent in X…
November 10, 2006
It's that time of the week. Let's try something a bit more challenging. Here is today's mystery campus:
Hint: How proteins get into these organelles.
Leave your answers in the comment section.
November 9, 2006
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."
-Samuel Beckett
November 9, 2006
... while I'm waiting for our daily lunch caravan to assemble. My 10 sec analysis:
- A partial change in governance will be good for the country. Hopefully funding will increase for education and science.
- Look at these maps of changes in the house and senate, and they say that the North East…
November 7, 2006
Not only funny, but reminds the voting population that we must disregard these ridiculous attack ads.
November 6, 2006
One thing I never understood about US colleges is the amount of money pumped into their sports teams. It's an open invitation to wasted resources and (in worse case scenarios) corruption.
From today's NY Times:
College Sports Get a Warning
The National Collegiate Athletic Association's enthusiasm…
November 6, 2006
I heard about this paper (Deng and Hochstrasser. Nature (06) 443:827-831) and took a look at it over the weekend. Wow! There are lots of goodies in there. And it showcases how manipulable yeast are. (As you can tell I am really jealous of researchers who use yeast as a model system.)
The premise…