clock | August 13, 2007I may be a little late to this, but better late than never. Laelaps has penned one of those rarities - an exceptionally detailed historical summary of the way people's understanding of human origins changed over time. Bookmark and read when you have time to really focus.
clock | August 13, 2007Sarah Wallace is interviewing some amazing people while doing her research in the Ukraine:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Obligatory Readings of the Day
clock | August 13, 2007No, not the novel by Frank Herbert, but a couple of recent carnivals:
Encephalon #29 is up on Memoirs of a Postgrad
Carnival of the Green #90 is up on Miss Malaprop
clock | August 13, 2007The last week's conversation about an icon that bloggers could use to indicate they are writing about peer-reviewed research has progressed towards something closer to implementable. Pitch in over there in the comments.
clock | August 12, 2007Tonight is the last pre-scheduled ClockQuote and there are no more re-posts in the pipeline! Does this mean I have to start blogging again? But when? I am working now!
clock | August 12, 2007Checking out hundreds of pictures from Scifoo that people have uploaded on Flickr and their blogs, I found a couple of more that have me in them:
In this one, I explain to Greg Bear that Open Access is not Science Fiction any more:
[Photo: Simon Quellen Field]
In this one, I tell Sara Abdulla (of Nature) how nice it is to work for an Open Access publisher:
[Photo: Jacqueline Floyd]
And in this one, I stand on a street corner in the middle of Googleplex, preaching Open Access to whoever will listen (perhaps I should grow a long beard, wear a toga and some sandals, and get Jack Chick to…
clock | August 12, 2007NBM found an excellent online article (which I have seen before but I forgot) depicting Phase-Response Curves (PRC) to injections of melatonin in humans, rodents and lizards.
Note how the shape is roughly opposite to that of a PRC to light pulses, i.e., at phases at which light elicits phase-delays, melatonin produces advances and vice versa:
The lizard PRC was actually constructed in our lab, about ten years before I joined. The article, though, gives the wrong reference to this:
Underwood, H. and M. Harless (1985). "Entrainment of the circadian activity rhythm of a lizard to melatonin…
clock | August 12, 2007Lisa Junker of Associations Now interviewed Patrick Brown, one of the founders of the Public Library of Science:
Into the Great Wide Open
A very clear explanation of what Open Access is all about. Obligatory Reading of the Day.
(Via via)
Want it shorter? Here is a five-liner by Jonathan Eisen.
clock | August 12, 2007Last week I had lunch with a good old friend of mine, Jim Green. He got his degree in Zoology, then a law degree (patent law) and is now coming back for yet another degree in biological and chemical engineering. He did his research on snakes, so we reminisced and laughed about the time several years ago (that was before Kevin joined the lab, which is why I was recruited for this study in the first place) when we were taking blood samples from copperheads.
What we wanted to do is see if snakes have melatonin and if so, if it shows a diurnal rhythm in concentration like it does in other…
clock | August 12, 2007Why are all the cool meetings happening all in the same week? On top of three I will attend, there is another one I just heard of that sound really cool:
The fourth Image and Meaning workshop, IM2.4, part of the Envisioning Science Program at Harvard's IIC will be held Oct. 25 and 26, 2007, Thursday and Friday at the Hilles library on the Harvard campus.
Application deadline is September 17, 2007
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Scientists, graphic designers, writers, animators and others are invited to join us in exploring solutions to…
clock | August 11, 2007Everyone who gets sleepy at night should have a simple decent place to lay their heads, on terms they can afford to pay.
- Millard Fuller
clock | August 11, 2007From June 26, 2006....
In the beginning, there was period.
Before 1995, the only known circadian clock genes were period (Per) in Drosophila melanogaster (wine fly) and frequency (Frq) in Neurospora crassa (bread mold). Some mutations, though not characterized at the molecular level, were also known in Chlamydomonas, Euglena as well as the famous Tau-mutation in hamsters.
I still remember the strained mathematical models attempting to account for a 24-hour rhythm with just a single gene controlling its own expression. We now know that multiple genes are involved in circadian function in…
clock | August 11, 2007I have linked to and posted pictures of Eva Vertes from SciFoo before and you may ask: "Who is she? Why was she invited there?" The Wikipedia page I linked to earlier is a short stub and full of errors. So, to make it clear, see this page as well as comments on this talk she gave two years ago when she was 17:
clock | August 11, 2007Since I came back from California, I've been trying to get Time Warner to remove one of the firewalls from my cable connection so I can get into the belly of the beast of PLoS. The wifi in the apartment complex is pitiful. I also tried at Town Hall Grill, but the loading of every page was very slow on their wifi.
The absolutely best wifi in the area is at La Vita Dolce. It is superstong and superfast, both inside and outside, and I've been going there every day to do my work. In addition, I just love the place - since new owners took over several months ago, this little cafe has become…
clock | August 11, 2007Much of the biological research is done in a handful of model organisms. Important studies in organisms that can help us better understand the evolutionary relationships on a large scale tend to be hidden far away from the limelight of press releases and big journals. Here's one example (March 30, 2006):
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Short answer: nobody knows. Nobody has looked yet. Most of the research in biology is, quite rightfully, performed in just a handful of standard models. A sponge is not a standard animal lab model.
Should one expect sponges to have…
clock | August 10, 2007Blessed be he who invented sleep, a cloak that covers all a man's thoughts.
- Miguel de Cervantes
clock | August 10, 2007Sometimes a metaphor used in science is useful for research but not so useful when it comes to popular perceptions. And sometimes even scientists come under the spell of the metaphor. One of those unfortunate two-faced metaphors is the metaphor of the Biological Clock.
First of all, there are at least three common meanings of the term - it is used to describe circadian rhythms, to describe the rate of sequence change in the DNA over geological time, and to describe the reaching of a certain age at which human fertility drops off ("my clock is ticking").
I prefer the Rube-Goldberg Machine…