apalazzo | March 16, 2007A challenge! Can anyone beat Willie's posse to the correct answer?
Here is this week's mystery campus:
hint: He's coming over in April.
Answers can be deposited in the comment section (or email me, if you prefer.)
apalazzo | March 15, 2007So Sir Paul Nurse gave a talk today where he discussed the 5 big ideas in the Life Sciences.
Instead of going through the talk, I'll just say that he ended it with his 5th big idea - biological organization. It reminds me of discussions I've had with colleagues on cell polarity. And in someways it's no surprise as this is Paul Nurse's current topic of interest. To generate a front and a back, cells must have a large interactive cellular network full of scaffolds and feedback loops that enforce a differentiation within a cell. Cell polarity cannot be explained simply in describing the polarity…
apalazzo | March 15, 2007Yesterday I posted something on that great graphic of scientific literature and paradigm clustering, it reminded me of a serries of posts from last year on a taxonomy of scientists for the layman. I'll repost each entry and the author (below the fold):
THE LIFE SCIENCES
Biochemist:
Basically biochemists play with proteins. Usually this involves fancy machines that cost a ton of money. Proteins are subjected to centrifugation, electrophoresis, fast protein liquid chromatography, gel exclusion chromatography .... Incidentally these techniques are just sophisticated ways of pushing and shoving…
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 | March 14, 2007Each lab is like a tribe, it has its own particular traditions and rituals. X is stored here, Y is stored there and Z is made up fresh. We share reagent A, we make our own reagent B, we buy a kit for reagent C. It's hard when you enter the tribe, you have to learn all of these unwritten rules.
- A good friend (who just started working in a new lab).
apalazzo | March 11, 2007Yesterday we visited MIT's List Visual Arts Center (LVAC) to see part II of the exhibit Sensorium (for part I see Tulula's post, scroll down for the English version.) What is Sensorium? From the LVAC website:
This two-part exhibition organized by the MIT LVAC, explores various ways in which contemporary artists address the influence of technology on the sense. The impact of new technology has reshuffled the established hierarchy of the senses and radically changed people's lives. Remote sensing via telephones and screens are fundamental parts of the daily sensorium (a Latin term that connotes…
apalazzo | March 8, 2007... finally. Sign up http://www.cellpress.com/misc/page?page=podcast> here. Or enter http://podcast.cell.com/cell.xml into your podcast subscription.
It has a nice summary of a new Hannon paper on the role of piRNA in suppression of transposons in germ cells, another summary of how WASP is anchoring actin in the lamellipodium to the membrane at the leading edge (and which fits in to the model of membrane buckling postulated in the paper that I eluded to a couple of days ago), and a paper from Gerhard Wagner's lab on a new small molecule inhibitor of eIF4E, a factor involved in the…
apalazzo | March 8, 2007There's a new paper in Dev Cell with a nice reconstruction of a fission yeast cell (S. pombe) with all its microtubules.
From the abstract:
Here, we describe a large-scale, electron tomography investigation of S. pombe, including a 3D reconstruction of a complete eukaryotic cell volume at sufficient resolution to show both how many microtubules (MTs) there are in a bundle and their detailed architecture. Most cytoplasmic MTs are open at one end and capped at the other, providing evidence about their polarity. Electron-dense bridges between the MTs themselves and between MTs and the nuclear…
apalazzo | March 7, 2007Well I got an email from the Journal of Visualized Experiment (JoVE). Here's the key pitch:
JoVE is a new open-source publication that allows free access to the latest biological research and experimental techniques in video format.
Video-articles published in the second issue include a variety of complex experimental approaches ranging from stem cell transplantation to behavioral studies in Drosophila. These include experiments from the leading stem cell laboratories.
Included in it's second issue is a video entitled Studying aggression in Drosophila (fruit flies) where you'll learn how to…
apalazzo | March 6, 2007In the Februray 6th issue of Cell there is an indept study by the Borisy & Sheetz labs that describes how crawling cells push and ruffle and bend the membrane at the very front with the aid of actin dynamics. Very cool stuff, very cool movies. I'll blog (or attempt to blog) about the actual paper in the near future. For today I have some background on actin dynamics in migrating cells.
Just to remind you what we're talking about, here is a movie of a migrating keratinocyte (skin cell) from the Borisy lab webpage.
Note that at a certain point the cell is fixed and lysed. We then zoom…
apalazzo | March 5, 2007Over the weekend I posted a link to the Postdoc Carnival ... lots of good stuff in there including this entry from The Unbearable Lightness of Being A Postdoc on the woes of postdoc-hood. I also saw a nice post at Sunil's blog on What does it take to be a pioneering scientist? And there is a bit that is interesting, but while you read it I'd like you to think about the fine line between doggedness and dogma, it is one of the biggest chalenges that one faces as a scientist. How do you know when to give in and accept the death of your pet theory, and when should you ignore your negative result…
apalazzo | March 3, 2007Through our newest blog Highly Allochthonus I've learned that there is a Postdoc Carnival. Check out what blogging postdocs have to complain about say at Post Doc Ergo Propter Doc.
And I've discovered that The Daily Transcript has been reviewed (about a month ago) at BlogCritics.
Here's what they have to say:
The Daily Transcript is a blog by Alex Palazzo, a "postdoctoral fellow working in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School." The material is highly focused on what it's like to be a functional research scientist. Posts rarely stray from the central theme of lab life…
apalazzo | March 2, 2007After bitching about how postdocs (and grad students) are treated like slave labor I stumbled onto these videos over at Omni Brain:
and
apalazzo | March 2, 2007After a one month hiatus, it's back.
I now present this week's mystery campus:
hint: He once built a table here.
Know the answer? Don't be shy, you can either leave a comment or if you don't want to ruin it for others, email me.
apalazzo | March 1, 2007OK it's time for a rant. (It's been a while.)
Lets have a discussion about competitiveness in the lab-space. Yesterday over lunch, we had a discussion of all the nastiness going on within labs here at the medical campus. You know, people in the same lab competing against each other. This can escalate to overt hostility and even sabotage. These problems are very abundant, especially in a highly competitive environment like Harvard Medical School.
The academic science establishment acts like a pyramid scheme where lots of grad students and postdocs work for almost nothing on risky projects…
apalazzo | February 27, 2007Well last night I was invited to dine at Clio's with our Seminar Speaker, James Manley and some of the local transcription gurus, Kevin Struhl, Danesh Moazed, Steve Buratowski and Miriam Bucateli, a postdoc in the Buratowski lab. Unfortunately Dr. Manley had to leave early to catch a flight back to NY. But the rest of us had a nice conversation about that 70% of the genome being transcribed. (For past discussions click here and here).
So all the transcription guys firmly believed that the whole bit about 70% of the genome being transcribed is true. In fact Kevin Struhl pointed out a review…
apalazzo | February 25, 2007Visualizing sound waves using a PVC pipe, gas and a lighter in some guy's garage. Now this is how physics should be taught!