apalazzo
Posts by this author
November 5, 2006
Here are some things for you.
If there is one radio show you should listen to every week it's This American Life.
This week: What's in a Number? 2006 Edition. The preview from www.thislife.org:
A new study in the British medical journal The Lancet estimates the number of Iraqi dead since the U.S.…
November 4, 2006
Well, last week we had Frank Zappa comment on the state of the media, now let's hear what Thom Yorke has to say about the political process:
And if you want to sing along:
I will stop, I will stop at nothing.
Say the right things when electioneering
I trust I can rely on your vote.
When I go…
November 3, 2006
I didn't blog about this when it first came out, go see Janet Stemwedel's blog (here, here and here) on how Susumu Tonegawa dissuaded Alla Karpova from taking a position at MIT.
Here's the latest from the Boston Globe:
Susumu Tonegawa , whose actions sparked an outcry from several colleagues, will…
November 3, 2006
I guess last week's mystery campus was way too easy, congrats to Arrowsmith for his two correct answers. This week will be a little harder.
So here is this week's "campus":
hint: Great place to have a trip, I got more done here than ever before!
Email me or leave your answers in the comment…
November 3, 2006
How much is this botched war costing us?
From the National Priorities Project, who base their data on congressional appropriations, the up-to-the-minute total is $339 billion. As for 2006, the current estimate is $100.4 billion. From zfacts:
The US budget for Iraq in FY 2006 comes to $3,749/Iraqi.…
November 2, 2006
I know that we have NCBI etc. but couldn't someone construct something close to the Yeast Genome Data Base for the human genome??? This site rocks.
(P.S. Yes probably ENSEMBL is the best pan genome bioinformatics gateway, I'm exploring it now. Hmm. So is my favorite gene in platypus???)
October 31, 2006
... when you finish your experiment at 5:15PM then exit the microscope room and discover that it's pitch dark outside.
October 31, 2006
OK sorry for the lack of updates. I've been rereading lots of mlp literature. Mlp = myosin like proteins. These are found on nucleoplasmic face of the nuclear pore complex (NPC) and seem to filter what goes out of the nucleus, specifically unspliced mRNA precursors. It's old data so I won't go over…
October 31, 2006
Some people have asked me why I haven't written anything about Richard Dawkins' new book. To be honest, it's just another manuscript arguing that religions preach ignorance and can promote other societal evils. We've all heard this before. On the other hand, Marc Hauser's book, Moral Minds, is a…
October 28, 2006
OK one last comment from my trip to western Connecticut. One morning I flipped on the TV, and got bombarded by campaign ads that focused on the congressional race there. Real nasty ads like "so-and-so supports sex-offenders and is a friend of terrorists". I can't believe that people fall for such…
October 27, 2006
Last night I saw Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God at the Sander's theatre. It was a great show. I won't go into too many details, but just to let you know, it's a longer version of the monologue that appeared in This American Life last year. Here's a review of the NYC performance in the NY Times.…
October 27, 2006
What type of biomedical research costs the most? That is an interesting question. With the NIH asking for a 20% cut in everyone's grant, our lab has been looking into who spends what, and where can we cut costs. An interesting number set fell out of this internal audit: how much each postdoc in the…
October 27, 2006
Yes, it's back. And for the 20th edition we have a nice pair for you.
So here THEY are:
X: What could it be?
x: I'm sure we'll find it, we just need to focus.
X: You know, I've never seen you in a modest mood.
x: Look we need to go over the evidence. There are others who are hot on the topic.
X:…
October 26, 2006
That is this week's question from the Seed mothership.
Born and raised in Canada, I have to say that there is one obvious choice: The Nature of Things. Almost every Canadian in my age group has a picture of David Suzuki seared onto some part of their neocortex. Now some folk try to diss Dr. Suzuki…
October 26, 2006
At that same meeting over the past weekend, I heard Tim Mitchison give an interesting talk about mitosis and pharmacogenetics. For any of you who don't know, Tim's lab has been at the fore front of analyzing how the mitotic spindle operates. Tim was the first to visualize microtubules, the major…
October 25, 2006
Does this type of expression profile look familiar?
From my limited experience from these types of pan-tissue blots, it would seem like every damn protein is expressed in testes.
Why?
All they do is make sperm (i.e. swimming machines). I mean sure these little guys are complicated, but compared…
October 23, 2006
Again some interesting thoughts about problem solving in biological systems ... ripped off of a seminar intro from this weekend's retreat. Here goes ...
Scientists are tinkerers. We need tools to get inside a system and manipulated it to understand what is going on and to ultimately test our…
October 20, 2006
Well I'm packing up to go off to western Connecticut for my fellowship retreat. Oh yeah, about that last minute experiment ... I nailed it! Not only did the experiment work but I also got the anticipated result confirming my pet theory.
Ain't that a pretty image of a cell! The cell was injected…
October 18, 2006
Thank God ... um I mean The Flying Spaghetti Monster ... for Youtube.
(Update: the frantic last minute experiment seems to be going well, I'll know the results domani.)
October 17, 2006
Sorry I'm not updating often. I've got a meeting this weekend and I'm trying to get that last piece of data (I know it sounds cliche, but face it, we all do it). What makes it worse is that my wife is out of town so now I have no excuse to come home at a decent hour. So instead of going on about…
October 16, 2006
It's not one of mine, waiting to be completed.
It's not from a competitor, scooping my precious results.
It doesn't even have much impact on my own work.
No it's a paper I once printed, and have heard about from others. It sits on my cluttered desk staring at me every day, and I just simply refuse…
October 13, 2006
Face it, they're unicellular ... they don't like groups (i.e. they are not urbanites). And even when they do grow together in a colony they have no real central control (like a brain) ... in other words they are anti government.
With their cell wall they are clearly isolationist. (I guess they're…
October 13, 2006
One of the problems in modern day biomedical research is turning on/off protein expression.
In order to control in vivo protein levels, many researchers have reverted to genetically tractable organisms such as yeast and worms. In the September issue of Cell, there's a cool paper by Banaszynski et…
October 13, 2006
In keeping up with "numbers week" here is today's mystery campus:
hints:
85, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, (99), (100), 101, 102, 103, controversy for 104-106, 116 and 118 (the last one being retracted)
This should be an easy one. Leave your answers in the comments (or email me).
(PS Michael, this one's…
October 12, 2006
OK this is officially quantitation week on The Daily Transcript.
Today's number is provided by Gilbert Burnham's group at The John Hopkins: 655,000 deaths due to the Iraqi war. From the Globe and Mail:
Mr. Bush has previously put the number of Iraqi deaths at 30,000. He reaffirmed that number…
October 11, 2006
Why stop now!
The latest stats for you: Top 10 cities in university research spending in the US.
[From Network Boston.]
City -- R&D expenditures by the city's universities and colleges in 2004 (dollars in thousands)1
1. Baltimore, MD--1,750,9042
2. Los Angeles, CA--1,527,602
3. Boston, MA--1,…
October 11, 2006
For some reason I have this irrational love of statistics. It could be due to the fact that as a microscopist I am very weary of qualitative data ... it's easy to see what you want to see. Quantification is the attempt to provide a more objective assessment of the world.
This fascination of…
October 10, 2006
Just came back from Montreal. We attended a wedding, a thanksgiving feast, and countless outings. Basically lots of eating and drinking. I just read at ScienceSampler that interfering with actin polymerization enhances ethanol tolerance. If only I knew. The only question left is that will it cure…
October 6, 2006
This week lo tendremos en espanol.
(without the accents - for some reason the default ScienceBlog font screws them up!)
Aqui esta su pista:
La institucion mas grande de esta region.
Si usted sabe la respuesta, digame.