Tib Bits
apalazzo | February 21, 2009One common feature of bench work is downtime. Some activity, such as cutting and pasting DNA, require the researcher to incubate their samples for various periods of time. What to do? Well ideally the scientist in question should take advantage of this time to either, perform other experiments, make reagents such as buffers, or catch up on the scientific literature. I tend to use Google Reader to scan the RSS feeds from various journals.
Of course I scan through blogs as well. Sometimes though your day is filled with some brain-draining activity, such as microinjecting tissue culture cells.…
apalazzo | December 21, 2008The lack of posts can be explained by this equation (lab work = 1/updates) so I'll make it up to you with a weekend smorgasbord of links. So today as I sit in my warm cozy snowed-in apartment I present to you the latest edition of Tib Bits.
First off, I would like to wish happy birthday to the late great Frank Zappa (yes to the chagrin of my wife, I'm a big fan). And what could be more fitting on a day like today than this song:
Next, the big news is the financial turmoil that has now spread to all the academic institutions. Even PhD comics had something to say about it:
Here are some other…
apalazzo | November 24, 2008I love the classics - be it Greek plays, Roman history, all of the great myths or all of the ancient philosophers that lie at the base of our western civilization. (Weren't those Atomists so prescient?) And yes, I also managed to marry a classics major. That's why I thank the FSM that I live in an age where you can obtain all this information for free and downloadable onto your iPod.
So what's out there?
Well a few months back I was in despair (along with hundreds of others) about the apparent downfall of the History of Rome Podcast. Well over the weekend Mike Duncan, just like Cincinnatus,…
apalazzo | October 24, 2008The New York Times Editorial Board on Proposition 1: Courting Chaos in Massachusetts
From NPR, Brian Lehrer interviews Naomi Klein. Also check out her latest book, The Shock Doctrine.
And if you missed it here's Klein on the Colbert Report:
Note trhat even Colbert is shocked by Klein's last line on the prison industrial complex.
Thomas Frank, Columnist for the Wall Street Journal and author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, wrote an excellent expose on how right wing ideology drove the current wave of corruption in Washington. This new book is called The Wrecking Crew and I highly…
apalazzo | April 9, 2008In 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 Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after…
apalazzo | March 28, 2008This 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 part of the four gene cocktail that the Thomson group used to program stem cells, has now been shown to inhibit the processing of let7 miRNAs. More posts on miRNAs and stem cells on Science and Reason.
RPM gets excited about how sleep deprivation affects fly sex - oh and it's all on prime time TV (…
apalazzo | February 27, 2008It's been a while ...
We'll start off with Science and Art: Design and the Elastic Mind at MoMA (NY Times article)
RPM at evolgen ponders about faculty members that blog. And now there are even journal editors that blog. In another post, RPM discusses the various phenotypes found in the typical audience attending the weekly departmental seminar.
We also have a pair from PhysioProf at DrugMonkey:
Submit Your RO1 Now
New Fiscal Policy at the NIH FY2008 - Cuts in existing RO1s
You gotta love Sunil's great stories. In a recent post he tells a few tales about the giant scientific egos he has…
apalazzo | January 12, 2008
What a beautiful day. We just got back from a walk in Mt Auburn Cemetery where we randomly came across Richard Buckminster Fuller's grave. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera. Fortunately we live in the time of the internet where information and photos can be acquired within seconds. (The photo on the left was ripped off of Wikipedia.) In addition we saw William Morton's grave. He's the guy who discovered that either could be used as an anaesthetic. The site was marked by a monument erected "by the citizens of Boston".
Getting back to this idea, of how we are living in a revolutionary…
apalazzo | January 3, 2008A link to Nature which has a summary of the primary candidates' stance on science issues. (HT: Mike)
Bora just announced the selections for Open Lab 2007, the best science blogging of the year (which I was a judge, although Bora may have forgotten ...)
The Edge asked its illustrious members, which include some of the smartest scientists and thinkers on the planet "WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?" There is also a nice sub-question:
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?
Speaking of science &…
apalazzo | August 6, 2007Some items I'd like to mention:
- before scifoo, there was a meetup of bloggers in the Bay Area. I finally placed some flesh over my electronic friends and got to meet some other bloggers. Andreas Engvig over at Sharpbrains has a photo. Bora has some more photos.
- one of the best conversations I had was after scifoo. On the train into SF, I sat next to Christopher Clark who studies how large wales whales communicate over long distances. If this sounds interesting, click here.
- here's a picture of Martin Rees, Freeman Dyson and me (it's really me, I swear!) ... and some other half hidden guy…
apalazzo | July 10, 2007First off, I will be hosting the next Postdoc carnival (What's up postdoc?) here on July 23rd. Email me your favorite blog entry on postdoc life.
Next up is a link that I missed in my science publishing linkfest: Revere mouthing off about open-access. One point that he makes has to do with PubMed:
It is currently NIH policy -- policy fought bitterly and with some success by lobbyists for big scientific publishers -- that NIH funded research be deposited in the publicly accessible online repository, PubMed Central, within 12 months of publication or earlier. Few scientists do it, and I'd guess…
apalazzo | June 20, 2007To all those who are getting married tomorrow, on the longest day of the year, congratulations.
Below the fold: more Web2.0, a book on the history of cell biology, trashy science journalism in WIRED, and the latest on stem cell legislation.
From Coturnix I learn of this great site, Scitalks, that acts as a repository for science seminars and interviews.
After posting about the latest web2.0 tools from Nature, I was alerted to Jeffsbench. As the developer Curtis describes:
We have tried to integrate a lot of the same tools that Nature is using (i.e. social networking, social bookmarking,…
apalazzo | May 20, 2007It has been a while. Here goes:
'Do you want to catch up on your Darwin?
Here's a link to the Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online.
Want something to listen to while you are stuck in traffic? How about the audio version of The Origin of Species.
Also there is a great podcast from the Whitehead - I've been wanting to write about this for a while - go check it out.
And there is the Science Saturdays at Bloggerheads.tv that I've mentioned previously.
What else is there ...
Via Hsien at Eye on DNA I stumbled onto this clip produced by Genome British Columbia's Learning Centre:
... uhm ... I…
apalazzo | March 14, 2007I've been so busy. But I have 15 minutes to spare and so I'll attempt to give a quit session of Tid Bits (including a mention of The Daily Transcript in ... Nature!):
Others seek more of a balance, such as the cell-biologist postdoc author of The Daily Transcript (http://scienceblogs.com/transcript), who mentions other blogs that detail "the woes of postdoc-hood" as well as what it takes to be a pioneering scientist. Apart from linking to both, the blog expands on the second, discussing the "fine line between doggedness and dogma".
(Thanks Tara for the heads up.)
So what else is out there…
apalazzo | December 20, 2006Chris Phoenix asked me to comment on his entry: Studying Molecular Biology. As someone who is constantly playing around with cells I'll add this advice to how biological systems differ from watches and the Antikythera Mechanism, biological systems are composed of adaptable platforms such as the cytoskeleton and the network of cell signalling molecules. When you think about cells, don't think cars ... think computer operating systems (yes insert pitch for systems biology here ...). What we are doing in the lab is figuring out what makes cells malleable. And to a certain extent the answer is…
apalazzo | December 9, 2006It's been a while since I did this. Baltimore on Dawkins. Three kingdoms? Skeptical publishing. Libertarians & adolescents? Kant vs. Archimedes. Yes they're all below the fold.
David Baltimore reviews Dawkins' The God Delusion. [HT: MM, FCD]
Larry Moran is writing a whole series of posts on Microbial Phylogeny and Evolution: Concepts and Controversies, or why the whole three kingdom description of life is flawed. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.
PubSkep? You betcha. It even comes with it's own intro.
Some great quote on libertarians found in the comment section of a tristero entry…
apalazzo | June 2, 2006Summers and the Allston expansion. Latest stats on gender and higher education. And free books! Ladies and Gentlemen start your hard drives. (all quotes+links below the fold)
From today's Boston Globe:
As Harvard University searches for a new leader, questions loom over its last president's most ambitious project: turning America's oldest university into the nation's hub for life sciences.
During his 5-year tenure as the university's president, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers worked to put Harvard at the forefront of research on how the human cell works, a question the school'…
apalazzo | April 13, 2006Yesterday I attended Seed/Harvard Bookstore/The Edge's sponsored event: What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it. The discussion narrowed down to key topics ... consciousness, free will ... etc.
Here's a link to a Harvard Crimson article about the whole affair: Profs Debate Consciousness.
(I'll write a longer entry on the whole "What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove" lecture later today.)
One tidbit that came out: apparently Freeman Dyson (noted cosmologist and member of the faithful) had some nasty things to say about Daniel Dennett. When I find…