apalazzo

User Image

Posts by this author

May 11, 2008
Friday I was supposed to meet up with Mike Springer from the Kirchner lab. At some point Mike and I had set up a collaboration in order to figure out what was so special about little regions of the genome that encode signal sequences. (To read more on my paper and what we did click here). In any…
May 8, 2008
The lack of posts has been epic. Sorry life has been just too hectic. I'll give you a flavor: Running around. Setting up experiments. Training young rotation students. Off to Microbiology seminar. Off to Cell Biology talk. Off to Montreal. Where next? Vacation? Need to lengthen those telomeres.…
May 5, 2008
What a week. I spent half of it at University of Montreal's IRIC, or Institut de recherche en immunologie et en cancerologie. I was truly impressed. This new center was the brain child of half a dozen University of Montreal professors. They wanted to build a state of the art facility to tackle…
April 27, 2008
It is interesting how different corners of the world are preoccupied by unique items of interest. Take Montreal, my "home town". There is a long history of hockey here and recently the whole town has gone Berzerk. You see unlike Boston and the Red Sox, Montreal not only has a historic team, but…
April 24, 2008
I'll be giving a short talk at the University of Montreal's Institute for Reasearch in Immunology and Cancer as part of their Young Investigators Research Symposium. The title of the talk will be:Beyond the signal sequence hypothesis: nuclear export and endoplasmic reticulum targeting of mRNAs…
April 20, 2008
They announced rain today - instead it is sunny, warm and ... a perfect distraction. Since I haven't yet decamped for lab and am waiting for my wife to shower so that we can have a short picnic by the river before i head out to work, I'll just leave you a few links to some VERY interesting and…
April 19, 2008
I'll type something for you quickly as I have a couple of minutes. This week has been a little crazy. I've been preparing my talk in Montreal and gearing up to perform a major experiment, some old school bucket biochemistry. Baymate performed a similar experiment using dog pancreas, and I need to…
April 14, 2008
Sorry, posts will be few and far between. I need to do some experiments. Here's a nice giant cell with gobs of ER.
April 11, 2008
OK I've been prodded into this. Here's this week's campus: hint: Where is it? If you know what they are looking for and why they are looking here (and not ... let's say there), leave a comment.
April 9, 2008
In the near future I can see that my blogging will slow down as my experiments become longer and more involved. In the meantime, here's a few items to help pass the time away: First off, yesterday the New NIH Public Access Policies were implemented: The Director of the National Institutes of…
April 8, 2008
I've been too busy being a postdoc. Here's a passage I just listened to on my iPod. It made me think about our current crop of president-wannabes. The only office of state which I ever held, O men of Athens, was that of senator: the tribe Antiochis, which is my tribe, had the presidency at the…
April 6, 2008
To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. - Matt Richtel in today's NYTimes
April 5, 2008
Fantastic! Previously: David Soldier and the Elephant Orchestra
April 5, 2008
Well I finaly synthesized and purified the magic protein. Yesterday I used this protein in an experiment that was dictated to me by the ghost of Ockham. I should know the result this afternoon.
April 3, 2008
Click here for more details. Unfortunately I'll be in Montreal the week of April 27th giving talks at UofM's IRIC (I'll post details in the next couple of weeks), but I'll try to attend events on the first day of the festival.
April 2, 2008
In the previous two parts I've described how cell biologists (and scientists in related fields) began to uncover the causes of cancer. Today I'll wrap things up with a recent discovery that goes full circle. But first lets have a recap and an expansion on some key points. I started this series of…
April 1, 2008
NCBI Core nucleotide # U41319.1. Don't believe me? Click here. For more info on this NCBI entry, check out Sandra Porter's post.
April 1, 2008
Well it looks like the top honchos at Seed Media Group wanted to diversify their little empire known as ScienceBlogs to include "other view points". "Other" meaning pseudoscientific. Here is some info on William A. Dembski from Wikipedia: After completing graduate school in 1996, Dembski was…
March 30, 2008
OK there's been a whole story here at Scienceblogs that has been developing over the past two years. It started when PZ, Richard Dawkins and other prominent anti-ID critics were interviewed under false pretenses for a movie, first entitled Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion then…
March 29, 2008
If I were you, I would add Juniorprof to your blogroll. (I think it's time that I clean up my blogroll as well ...)
March 28, 2008
This will be short - I'm performing a big protein purification prep today. Visualizing a single ribosome translating amino acids, one at a time at Biocurious (Nature Article here). Two posts on that Lin-28 paper in Bayblab and The Skeptical Alchemist. Just to remind you, Lin-28, a factor that was…
March 26, 2008
We realy screwed up in so many ways. We created a mess. We lost any shred of credibility we ever had, we created terrorists, and even if we went into Iraq for the oil, we are so inept that we can't even get that job done properly. Yes we are too incompetent to even be greedy. In the American mass…
March 25, 2008
George Daley dicussed the results of that incredible Lin-28 paper on NPR's Talk of the Nation. Click here to listen.
March 25, 2008
Here's a micrograph that I snapped way back in December 2004. This is a picture of a mouse fibroblasts, a cell type found in connective tissue. The chocolate chip like circles are cells' nuclei where DNA is stored. The chips in each cookie, are nucleoli where ribosomes are manufactured. I took…
March 24, 2008
There have been some interesting posts about the relationship between scientists and the public. Here's a little snap shot: Jake at Pure Pedantry advocates that scientists should refrain from making subjective assessments of the general population's lifestyle based on their scientific findings.…
March 24, 2008
Last past week was incredible. A slew of very important papers stemming from basic science and having deep impacts on cancer and stem cells came out in Nature and Science. Both stories came from labs here at Harvard Medical School, and everyone's been talking about both papers. The first story is…
March 22, 2008
A docudrama by Piet Hoenderdos on Douglas Hofstadter, philosopher and author of one of the greatest books ever published, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. [HT: Mental Floss]