apalazzo
Posts by this author
May 27, 2006
Hi Folks,
Sorry for the delay. It's been a busy week for me. Being swamped with work, the Daily Transcript was ignored. I've thought about it all this week ... life writing a blog and living the life of a postdoc. It's stressful. I enjoy both however the combination does not leave enough time in…
May 23, 2006
Sorry, I haven't been writing much in the past few days.
Here are some cool ER papers I've seen recently:
Direct membrane protein-DNA interactions required early in nuclear envelope assembly Sebastian Ulbert, Melpomeni Platani, Stephanie Boue, and Iain W. Mattaj JCB (2006) 173:469-476
When the…
May 21, 2006
I am back in Montreal for the weekend. Anyone who grows up in Canada is subjected to 3 things:
1- Hockey
2- Winter
3- CBC
And a great show that I used to watch as a kid on CBC was The Nature of Things hosted by David Suzuki.
Well I was just reading in the Montreal Gazette that Dr. Suzuki has a new…
May 19, 2006
This week's question:
If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?
That's tough. Perhaps the meaning of the word HUBRIS? But that's not really "scientific". I guess the easy answer would be evolution or global warming ... but to be honest I would be…
May 19, 2006
About two weeks ago I wrote an entry on what I hated about scientific journals. I intentionally did not include the issue of public access to publicly financed research, but it came up in the comment section. Interestingly Maxine, an editor at Nature, replied:
On the access problem mentioned here…
May 19, 2006
Good news from RPM:
I just got word that the House of Representatives passed the FY2007 Budget Resolution which includes an amendment that ensures that all programs within the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill will be funded at FY2006 levels, including a 2% increase…
May 18, 2006
While preparing for my talk, I guess I really missed the boat on this one.
So the question was:
Will the 'human' race be around in 100 years?
Well if it isn't around, it's only 'cuz it went somewhere else. (That would be a resounding yes.)
As for predicting the future. What shall I say?
- Major…
May 18, 2006
Yesterday I gave a talk. Everything was fine although I thought I was a little wordy.
So instead of writing something I'll throw you a few pictures.
Here is a picture of a two cells that were microinjected with mRNA. The mRNA encodes a protein that is cotranslationally inserted into the endoplasmic…
May 16, 2006
From RamblingsThoughts of Prof Bil the Man: Protein Synthesis the film (it's a 37MB file off of a slow server, be prepared to wait).
Some background on the film from Bil's blog entry:
I gather that it was made in the early 70s and we have clearly learned a lot about protein synthesis since then.…
May 15, 2006
You got a love blog entries that start like this ... "there are two types of scientists"
Yes I know I do it too. But categorizing is what the human mind does best and so in this vein I'll present to you "Robots and Independent Thinkers"
A friend from Columbia told me about this particular type of…
May 14, 2006
I'm in the lab on a rainy Sunday. This week I was too busy to really blog.
Fortunately other people had interesting stories ...
Ed Brayton discusses an interesting (but flawed) OpEd in the Wall Street Journal on the misplaced support of Inteligent Design by NeoCons.
Speaking of ID, here's an OpEd…
May 12, 2006
Well a good friend of mine is starting a virtual journal club, Science Sampler. We'll be 3 to 5 contributors and the entries will be about articles from the current scientific literature. From the website:
We read them so you don't have to!!! Comments on recent works in Cell Biology, from the…
May 11, 2006
I missed this. From the March edition of the Scientist. The top 10 in North America:
1. The J. David Gladstone Institutes, San Francisco
2. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle
3. US Environment Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, NC
4. Emory University, Atlantic, GA
5. National…
May 11, 2006
(from Daily Zeitgeist) There's a new Halliburton product for any CEO concerned about the upcoming apocalypse: SurvivaBall.
What is this crazy Brave-New-World device? From Halliburton's web site:
Most scientists believe global warming is certain to cause an accelerating onslaught of hurricanes,…
May 11, 2006
Gubernatorial Candidate, Chris Gabrieli, who made a fortune in the biomedical industry, has made a new pledge to support Stem Cell Research in Massachusetts. From today's Boston Globe:
Democratic candidate for governor Chris Gabrieli today will propose that the state invest $1 billion in embryonic…
May 10, 2006
Blogs = web+log. I started writing one to force myself to write. Although each entry is stored out there in the either of the net, blogs tend to be transient creatures. But how about all those great entries those that are read for a week then ignored?
Well in my "About" section I've now included a…
May 9, 2006
Ah, back to work.
One thing I miss about being at the microscope is listening to NPR. A couple of hours ago there was a good piece on Here & Now about the gap between rich universities and poor universities. And it's not only that the endowment gap has increased, but the composition of the…
May 8, 2006
A great review of Dan Gilbert's first Book: Stumbling On Happiness in the NY Times Book review.
Gilbert is an influential researcher in happiness studies, an interdisciplinary field that has attracted psychologists, economists and other empirically minded researchers, not to mention a lot of…
May 7, 2006
Seed is disseminating questions to its bloggers (I guess a la www.edge.org) so this week the question is:
If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?
The invention I would choose to uninvent? I spent the weekend asking…
May 6, 2006
Yes it's the speech that has gone around the world via email.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias
And did you see that Colbert thanked Bill Kristol for helping him write the address? I personally got 7 emails with links to the ifilm's compendium of Colbert's little gig at the White House…
May 6, 2006
OK now time for some real blogging (I.e. rant).
Things I hate about journal publications.
1) Supplementary Data. You see a neat paper, you downloaded of the website and then as you go through the text you bump into "see supplementary data". Now I don't really mind this, however I hate that journals…
May 5, 2006
After coming back from a vacation, how many days does it take you before you can work? It seems like I can't even blog.
So instead here are some photos from my last trip...
May 4, 2006
From a peice in the latest issue of Nature:
But this year, as three years of flat budgets begin to bite, Zerhouni's tenure at the NIH is being openly attacked by some scientists. The focus of their ire is his 'Roadmap', a set of activities that run across different NIH institutes and attempt to…
May 3, 2006
I guess that's why I study it. I usually never take these dumb online quiz things but provoked by another science blogger's entry I did this one anyway ... and yes I'm the ER.
You scored 46 Industriousness, 48 Centrality, and 7 Causticity!
You're the Endoplasmic reticulum! The ER modifies proteins…
May 3, 2006
OK I'm back from the west coast where we visited friends, family and the desert. My laptop has been resurrected and NO MORE RERUNS, I promise. Also I've seen that trackback spam has evolved (well perhaps intelligently evolved is closer to the truth).
Northern California was great (although in the…
May 2, 2006
(OK folks I'll be back this afternoon, this post is the last in serries of entries from my old blogs ... and this one is a hard core science entry from about 1 year ago ... enjoy)
Late last week I posted an entry on tubulin modification ... an area of research that one well respected cytoskeletal…
May 1, 2006
(from my old blog)
Two days ago I was talking to a rotation student in the lab about the Nobel laureate and Columbia Professor Richard Axel, then last night at another BBQ (this time at Ben's place), the biology of olfactory was brought up, and finally this morning flipping through the Columbia…
April 30, 2006
(I'm still on my little trip - but I'll be back soon. Here's what I wrote when I came back from Spain last summer)
Is this entry about the eventual fall of the west?
Perhaps not directly.
Although wedding plans loom large, the people and places from our last trip to Iberia keep coming back to haunt…
April 29, 2006
(here is a nice post from my old blog back in early December '05 - one of the least scientific ones you'll get from me)
While my column is washing, and my brain is fried, I should finally write this entry ...
A while back, right around the time of Katrina, I read a spectacular book, The Control of…
April 28, 2006
(two entries from my old blog)
I've been reading Ernst Mayr's This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World. In it there is this great quote:
It is often asked why we do science? Or, what is science good for? ... The insatiable curiosity of human beings, and the desire for a better…