apalazzo
Posts by this author
Surfing on William Gibson's blog, I stumbled on to this amazing video of an amphibious snake-like robot.
then you read this story: Prof denied grant over evolution. Agency wants proof Darwin is correct; But McGill says committee's reasoning is faulty. From the Montreal Gazette:
McGill University says the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council made a "factual error" when it denied Professor…
Last night I was invited to a Seed dinner in Cambridge. The idea, I guess, was to throw together scientists from various disciplines and Seed contributors, and observe the resulting chemical reaction.
I had very interesting discussions with Drew Endy of MIT who is developing a molecular tool kit to…
Plagued with scandals and other baggage, today DeLay announced that he's giving up.
Usually I've steered clear of pure political talk on my blog, although those of you who know me personally know that I've been politically active. Well with DeLay's announcement I have a story to tell - and it's…
No this is not an entry on shmooing, but on practical tips on working with Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
(OK confession, I have worked on yeast briefly as a rotating student in Liza Pon's Lab at Columbia.)
Much of modern cell biology is based on Yeast genetic screens, the most famous are those…
I'm not sure about the history of "the three types of experiments" (3tes), but they are referred to quite often in the labs I've been in. So what exactly are they?
Here goes ...
Type A Experiment: every possible result is informative.
Type B Experiment: some possible results are informative, other…
(from the archives)
As a microscopist you are often are stunned by the beauty of what's on your microscope slide. I remember as a grad student showing this technician (a former doctor from China) a slide where cells were stained by immunofluorescence against microtubules. After peering into the…
A major field of research in the "RNA field" is the quality control of mRNA production.
Remember from the central dogma:
DNA=>RNA=>Protein
When "genes are activated", what is really going on is that a DNA segment (i.e. the gene) is copied into RNA, that is then processed to form messenger RNA…
I just couldn't believe it ... read the confession here.
Yeah I know ... crazy. But now that I have your attention, click here to contact your house representative to tell him/her to support the NIH by increasing funding in the new House budget resolution.
What is the NIH? ... the National…
Weird things are afoot.
It all started last time the crazies got together. We had our fill of food and drink. The conversation had turned to nudist beaches and the next thing we knew, books were stolen, a member was held up, and then German Nihilists hijacked the Boston bookclub blog.
That's when…
So a couple of weeks ago, I wrote an entry about gender and science. I encourage you not only to read the post but also the comments. In that post I mentioned a 2003 Caltech postdoc survey that parsed some of the data by gender. Again I strongly recommend that you examine the raw data.
Here are…
Harvard announced yesterday that it would waive tuitions for undergrads whose families earn less than $60,000 annually. From the Harvard Crimson:
The newly expanded financial aid program, which will also reduce the contributions of families with annual incomes between $60,000 and $80,000, is…
If you haven't, go and read to evolgen's entries on the Specter-Harkin Amendment that successfuly passed in the Senate to increase the NIH budget. Next up is the House. If you care about basic research in the biomedical sciences contact your local reps pronto.
Contact Your US Representative about…
Last night I was at another party in Cambridge, a good friend of mine is leaving Boston to go work for Pfizer in NYC. (Aside - why does it seem like anyone in Cambridge who is not a student or a professor, works for Biotech, Pharma or an IT start up?)
In any case I had an interesting conversation…
Remember that special moment when everything changed. Were you listening to a particular song? Or was it some food? Well a couple of friends just posted about such associations.
The first is from Tall Med Student, a former Harvard postdoc who is now a med student at the University of Calgary.
In…
OK after making fun of System Biologists out comes Peter Sorger's latest paper in Cell.
In this paper, Sorger's team collected almost 8000 intracellular measurements (they collected some of the data directly and got the rest from the literature - I'll have to check on that) plugged it into an…
(from the archives)
Once upon a time, we made the necessary chemicals from scratch to purify DNA from bacterial cultures. These days, for a couple of dollars, you can get all the reagents you need all packaged in a nice box - these things are called commercial "kits".
You may ask, why do you use…
The van Oijen lab (here at HMS) had a nice paper in Nature where they indirectly observe single T7 DNA polymerase complexes copying DNA.
How do they do it? One end of the DNA is fixed while the other side is coupled to a bead that can be visualized. A laminar flow is applied to the reaction…
Want to be a Cell Biologist? Take a look at this phase image of a rat hepathocyte (liver cell) that I took sometime last year. Try to identify the three mystery organelles A through C
And to be totally clear:
A) The big blob in the lower right hand corner
B) The dark round organelles
C) The…
Well after that mRNA song, I got wind that there is an x-ray crystallography poem floating out there. So we searched, and searched. Finally undercover agents from the Steitz lab emailed the sought-out credo to our contacts.
Allegedly, this poem was composed by Bernard Rupp, who teaches a famed…
So I've been bumping into this idea on several blogs (idea? or is it a cult? ... I refuse to call it a meme, sorry Richard). I have some trouble understanding what it all means. Is it hard, as in hard core?
To help us understand the meaning of all this rhetoric, they (a bunch of hard core German…
(from the archives)
Prodded on by my father, I read David Wick's Infamous Boundary, an account of the history of Quantum Mechanics and of the EPR controversy.
In the book, there is a nice passage about mentorship ... for those of you not in science, a large chunk of a scientist's career takes…
In today's Boston Globe, Derrick Jackson echoes what we in the sciences have been worrying about. From his OpEd:
Nobel laureate and Princeton physics professor Joseph Taylor this month said on Capitol Hill that budget cuts will drive future astronomers to other fields or out of science altogether…
We've noticed that our cumulative knowledge of any individual process is inversely proportional to the number of researchers striving (i.e. contaminating) to gather data.
Take APC, no not that APC, but the Adenomatous Polyposis Coli ... too many people study the damn thing and ... who knows what it…
Damn those Intellectual terrorists! Click here to read the rest of this episode of Dinosaur Comics.
Well lets see where are budding endeavour has gone. 4 Scienceblog bloggers are heading this joint project. So far we have collected a measily 4 entries, a ton of comments/emails from disgruntled scientists, and a rusty can openner.
My favorite comment (so far) comes from a lab blog (Wow! I didn't…
I was notified of this review in PLoS-Biology by Richard Robinson. It gives a nice outline of the current thought in the field and delineates the genes first vs. metabolism first views (although in my not-to-much-of-an-expert opinion, I don't think that the "metabolism first" theory is likely ...…
Evolution biologists, ecologists, epidemiologists, earth scientists, herpetologists ...
I obviously didn't know what I was getting into when I posted the first of many Geek Taxonomy entries. This led to many disgruntled comments and emails from all the non-bench biologists. People wanted to know…
Here's a site for you - Visualcomplexity.com
This site is the brain child of Manuel Lima who is now living in NYC (Edgar, you know this guy?). From the website:
Goal
VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The…