apalazzo | April 27, 2007Well it was officially last weekend but there are events going on this weekend as well, including a model of the human genome that stretches from Kendall Square to Harvard Yard.
For more info click here to visit the official Cambridge Science Festival site or visit Corie's blog.
apalazzo | April 26, 2007One question that keeps popping up in conversations on and off the internet is the question of what is a blog? As bloggers, what rights do we have? How should we be treated? When do we keep our information private? What should we write about, and what is off limits?
I was talking to someone at Cell about an upcoming article in that journal about science bloggers and we talked quite a bit on this subject. Personally I feel that science publications have a lot to gain when bloggers write about articles that are copyright protected by these journals. By including a couple of key figures, as I've…
apalazzo | April 26, 2007It looks like I'll be giving a talk at our inaugural meeting on May 15th. More details to come shortly.
See this previous post.
apalazzo | April 26, 2007There is a great post on Mike Daisey's excellent blog with regards to the aftermath of the recent vandalism incident at ART. It turns out that the man who poured water on Daisey's notes was a religious fellow whowanted to protect his high school class from evil atheist thoughts. Mike tracked down the vandal and had a quite civil conversation with the guy - a fascinating read.
apalazzo | April 24, 2007This past weekend was gorgeous. Sunday we were hanging out at Plum Island taking in the sun, when a pair of Piping Plovers, an endangered species, came near our beach towel. Here are some pics:
I also shot some interesting pictures of various sand patterns - I'll have to post them one of these days.
apalazzo | April 23, 2007Two weeks ago we went to see Mike Daisy's monologue, Invincible Summer at ART. A great show.
Once upon a time, Mike was putting on a one man show in Seattle about the dot com life when a fire, a book deal, and some crazy ideas led him to move to New York City. After settling in to his new home, he started "working" on his manuscript when September 11th happened. In his new show he recounts all this and more.
The performance was excellent. Daisey is a master story teller. Even John Hodgemen gave it a great review on his blog (yes, John Hodgeman has a blog).
Then this afternoon I got an email…
apalazzo | April 23, 2007Want to manage all those scientific articles that you've downloaded over the years? Evil Gomez at ScienceSampler shows you how (link).
apalazzo | April 21, 2007Support the What's Up, Postdoc? carnival by submitting a post on postdoc-hood or any other related subject. You've got just 2 days left so send it TODAY. Click here for details.
apalazzo | April 21, 2007A phenocopy of Maradona's great goal by Lionel Messi.
Here is Messi's recent goal:
Here is Maradona's famous goal:
And now here ther are, side by side:
apalazzo | April 19, 2007Lots of little interesting tidbits in here like
-the expansion of the use in tobacco products in Asia
-cervical cancer is a big problem in India
-lots of other stuff on recent cancer research and ideas like cancer gene addiction and cancer stemcells
-collaborative research
-plus a plea to increase the NIH budget!
apalazzo | April 19, 2007It looks like the paper that describes the FT mRNA as a messenger molecule that is transported between plant cells is fraudulent. FT mRNA is a transcript that regulates flowering in plants.
Damn, that was a cool paper. Read about the whole thing here. Original Science article here.
Also I noticed the title of another paper which cites the Huang paper:
Dynamics of a Mobile RNA of Potato Involved in a Long-Distance Signaling Pathway.
A. K. Banerjee, M. Chatterjee, Y. Yu, S.-G. Suh, W. A. Miller, and D. J. Hannapel (2006)
PLANT CELL 18, 3443-3457
Is this real? Sadly the fraud committed in the…
apalazzo | April 18, 2007(disclaimer: I am a foreign postdoc)
Did any of you read this from the latest issue of Science: Huddled Masses on foreign postdocs?
A recent paper by Harvard economist George J. Borjas shows, however, that even for doctorate-level researchers, "the supply-demand textbook model is correct after all." Unlike most economic analysts, Borjas focused not on what foreign-born scientists add to the scientific enterprise or society as a whole but on what their presence costs individual American scientists. For postdocs and other early-career Ph.D.s in a number of fields, unfortunately, the picture he…
apalazzo | April 17, 2007This is for all you libertarians who think that laws and government are shackles. Just remember that society is a contract.
Now that those who practise justice do so involuntarily and because they have not the power to be unjust will best appear if we imagine something of this kind: having given both to the just and the unjust power to do what they will, let us watch and see whither desire will lead them; then we shall discover in the very act the just and unjust man to be proceeding along the same road, following their interest, which all natures deem to be their good, and are only diverted…
apalazzo | April 17, 2007I left this comment on Rob Knop's site:
I read this post, and then the comments, and I thought to my self, it would be nice if both sides engage in a discourse.
The "anti-gun" side asks for a balance in our society. They compare countries that have lax laws with those that have strict laws ... proper science - you take a situation and change a variable. Sure it's not perfect but it's the best data we have.
Then you the "pro-gun" arguments. Full of platitudes and mantra chanting and false comparisons (cars vs guns??? that is not what you call changing a single isolated variable). Second…
apalazzo | April 17, 2007Sad, very sad. 32 dead.
Reading about it ... how the killings came in several waves, hours apart ... I wonder why didn't they stop the guy. I guess that unlike Dawson, which is located in downtown Montreal, V Tech is in a small college town (from my understanding).
Another question: why do these large scale massacres take place in schools (Columbine, U. of Montreal, Concordia, Dawson, U Iowa, V Tech)? Sad.
apalazzo | April 16, 2007We finally got this off the ground, email me if you are interested.
Dear Colleagues,
In an attempt to foster discussion within the local RNA community we are initiating a monthly informal data seminar, the Boston RNA data club. These meetings will consist of two 30min talks given by postdoctoral fellows or grad students. We are currently soliciting private sponsors and hope to provide food and beverages for each of these meetings. If you are interested please respond to this email so that we can gage how many labs and individuals are willing to participate. The list of the labs we are…
apalazzo | April 13, 2007I got an email from an old friend (the perfect way to distract from my assembling the figures for my manuscript) about this ... Quantum secrets of photosynthesis revealed. Check this out:
"We have obtained the first direct evidence that remarkably long-lived wavelike electronic quantum coherence plays an important part in energy transfer processes during photosynthesis," said Graham Fleming, the principal investigator for the study. "This wavelike characteristic can explain the extreme efficiency of the energy transfer because it enables the system to simultaneously sample all the potential…
apalazzo | April 13, 2007I've been writing my manuscript all week - hence the lack of posts. But this morning I flipped open the paper and read that they've sequenced by mass spec (proteomics in the new lingo) several proteins from the interior of a T. rex bone. So I'm reading the article in the NYTimes and then I stumble on to Lew Cantley's name. Lew's lab is into Dino bones? Interesting. From the article:
Lewis C. Cantley, a Harvard biology professor on the team, said he was satisfied that the findings were "unlikely due to contamination."
In a press release from Harvard, Dr. Cantley said, "Basically, this is the…
apalazzo | April 9, 2007How come no one told me about this site?
STRING is a database of known and predicted protein-protein interactions.
The interactions include direct (physical) and indirect (functional) associations; they are derived from four sources: -Genomic Context -High-throughput Experiments -(Conserved) Coexpression -Previous Knowledge
STRING quantitatively integrates interaction data from these sources for a large number of organisms, and transfers information between these organisms where applicable. The database currently contains 1,513,782 proteins in 373 species.
Check this out. An interaction map…