clock | April 29, 2008This is going to be a challenging post to write for several reasons. How do I explain that a paper that does not show too much new stuff is actually a seminal paper? How do I condense a 12-page Cell paper describing a gazillion experiments without spending too much time on details of each experiment (as much as I'd love to do exactly that)? How do I review it calmly and critically without gushing all over it and waxing poetically about its authors? How do I put it in proper theoretical and historical perspective without unnecessarily insulting someone? I'll give it a try and we'll see…
clock | April 28, 2008The human body represents to me the same universal innocence, timelessness and purity of all seed pods, suggesting the mother as well as the child, the parental as well as the descendant, conceived according to nature's longings.
- Ruth Bernhard
clock | April 28, 2008(First posted on July 21, 2006) Some plants do not want to get eaten. They may grow in places difficult to approach, they may look unappetizing, or they may evolve vile smells. Some have a fuzzy, hairy or sticky surface, others evolve thorns. Animals need to eat those plants to survive and plants need not be eaten by animals to survive, so a co-evolutionary arms-race leads to ever more bizzare adaptations by plants to deter the animals and ever more ingenious adaptations by animals to get around the deterrents.
One of the most efficient ways for a plant to deter a herbivore is to divert…
clock | April 28, 2008
Chad wrote a neat history of (or should we say 'evolution of') clocks, as in "timekeeping instruments". He points out the biological clocks are "...sort of messy application, from the standpoint of physics..." and he is right - for us biologists, messier the better. We wallow in mess, cherish ambiguity and relish in complexity. Anyway, he is talking about real clocks - things made by people to keep time. And he starts with a simple definition of what a clock is:
In order to really discuss the physics of timekeeping, you need to strip the idea of a clock down to the absolute bare…
clock | April 27, 2008Words mean what they're generally believed to mean. When Charles II saw Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral for the first time, he called it "awful, pompous, and artificial." Meaning roughly: Awesome, majestic, and ingenious.
- S. M. Stirling
clock | April 27, 2008UNESCO recently published and informative book: Open access to knowledge and information: scholarly literature and digital library initiatives; the South Asian scenario, which, from what I can see, can be easily modified for all other geographic areas as well. Perhaps it can be used as a template for publishing similar booklets for Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, etc.
clock | April 27, 2008This post is a relatively recent (May 24, 2006) critique of a PLoS paper.
----------------------------------------------------
There is a new study on PLoS - Biology that is getting some traction in the media and which caught my attention because it was supposed to be about circadian rhythms. So, I downloaded the paper and read it through to see what it is really about.
Well, it is a decent study, but, unfortunately, it has nothing to do with circadian rhythms. Many examples of tritrophic relationships involve parasitoids (usually small wasps) being attracted by plant volatiles which are…
clock | April 27, 2008Today is Orthodox Easter. Most everyone here will have lamb for lunch today. We did something different....
First, for breakfast I had snenokle (here is a recipe from a delightful Balkans food blog Palachinka) and I ground some chocolate on top of them:
Then, we had eggs. Not just painted on the outside, but simmered for many hours in onion husks, olive oil and a bunch of spices until the eggs were brown to the core:
I was a very picky eater when I was a kid. One of the things I liked was a simple beef soup with star-shaped noodles. As this is a Nostalgia Trip this week, that is…
clock | April 27, 2008My kum Miroslav (see previous posts just below) has taken a picture of this lizard, which is quite common in Nigeria. This is a male (females are more drab and single-colored) and it is about 0.5 meters long (20 inches). What is the common name and the Latin name of this lizard? Please tell me in the comments:
clock | April 27, 2008Considering I've been writing textbook-like tutorials on chronobiology for quite a while now, trying always to write as simply and clearly as possible, and even wrote a Basic Concepts And Terms post, I am surprised that I never actually defined the term "biological clock" itself before, despite using it all the time.
Since the science bloggers started writing the 'basic concepts and terms' posts recently, I've been thinking about the best way to define 'biological clock' and it is not easy! Let me try, under the fold:
A biological clock is a structure that times regular re-occurence of…
clock | April 26, 2008My 'kum' Miroslav (see the previous post) is working in Nigeria right now. A few weeks ago he went to Lagos on business and took this picture from the car:
clock | April 26, 2008'Kum', in Serbo-Croatian language, denotes two things - godfather to a child, or the Best Man at the wedding. Well, I was a Best Man at a wedding some 20+ years ago. So, yesterday morning I went to visit them.
I saw the kids (20, 13 and 10: boy-girl-boy) - I have only seen the eldest one when he was seven.
I saw the cats: the black one is Professor Snape, the white one is Lucius, and Harry is suspected to be in Azkhaban.
Then we kicked the kids out to play, got on Skype, and had a marvelous 3-way, 2-hour chat. Ah, the wonders of technology. Velda (my 'kuma') is the LINUX…
clock | April 26, 2008Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.
- Samuel Butler
clock | April 26, 2008I walked around town a little bit these days. My feet know the way, even if all the names of streets were changed from WWII National Heroes to saints and medieval princes. It has changed a lot - there are nice new stores, cafes, restaurants and apartment buildings everywhere, the parks are well kept and beautiful, and the people are beautiful and well-dressed. The old, gray, socialist city of my youth is gone and replaced with a modern European city:
This is the Serbian Parliament (formerly Yugoslav Parliament):
In the Pioneer Park, across the street from the Parliament, is the famous WWI-…
clock | April 26, 2008After the 1999 Clinton/Clark bombing of Belgrade, almost all of the ruined buildings were quickly torn down and replaced with modern buildings, perhaps out of spite (which is the national character trait). After all these years, the city is unrecognizable - it is cleaner, livelier, prettier, more modern and more optimistic than ever. Replacing the bombed buildings was also good for everyone's sanity here - to forget quickly, move on, build new...
But, if you arrive in Belgrade by bus, by train, or by plane (and then take the bus into town), one of the first things you will see are these…
clock | April 26, 2008There were quite a lot of events and actions in Belgrade for the Earth Day last week. I came in on that day so I did not have time to see anything. But I loved the balloon they placed in the center of the Slavija square: it was a globe with recognizable outlines of the continents. But the parts of the world were labeled with the names of main streets, parts and neighborhoods of Belgrade (with some effort to match "characters" of the places):
The balloon was supposed to be set free on Earth Day, but, just as I was speaking at the Pediatric Center, a huge storm started outside and broke…
clock | April 26, 2008I already mentioned my friend Srdjan Milovanovic before. Like his father, he is a psychiatrist now, but we go waaaaay back. We have been friends since we were really small - he was two and I was three years old. We grew up in this house - Srdjan on the 8th floor, I on 7th floor:
We were in the same classroom in the elementary school (grades 1-4), in the same middle school (5-8), and kept in touch even when we went to different high schools and later when I went to vet school and Srdjan to med school, and once I left for the USA.
Growing up, we spent a lot of time visiting each other. His…
clock | April 26, 2008It took a century to build the St.Sava Cathedral. I remember playing on its foundations as a kid - a great fortress to play in. But the enterior has just begun to be worked on - I am not sure if the pictures can show the immensity of the space in there:
clock | April 26, 2008Early Human Populations Evolved Separately For 100,000 Years:
A team of Genographic researchers and their collaborators have published the most extensive survey to date of African mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Over 600 complete mtDNA genomes from indigenous populations across the continent were analyzed by the scientists, led by Doron Behar, Genographic Associate Researcher, based at Rambam Medical Center, Haifa, and Saharon Rosset of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, NY and Tel Aviv University. Analyses of the extensive data presented in this study provide surprising insights into the early…