apalazzo | February 25, 2007This week, many things have been happening up north. The most important being ... from the NY Times, Canadian Court Limits Detention in Terror Cases :
Canada's highest court on Friday unanimously struck down a law that allows the Canadian government to detain foreign-born terrorism suspects indefinitely using secret evidence and without charges while their deportations are being reviewed.
...
The decision is also the latest in a series of events that has seen Canada reconsider some national security steps it took after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Last September, a judicial inquiry…
apalazzo | February 24, 2007Last week I attended a seminar by Dr. Yamada who is now president of the Bill and Melinda Bates Foundation.
Here's a couple of interesting points from his talk:
- The pharmaceutical industry has developed and patented almost 15,000 drugs, only 30 of which are directed towards diseases that exclusively afflict the third world. You might be thinking "well what do you expect, in a capitalist economy, drugs go to those who can pay for them." However things are changing. Several of the big pharmas are developing drugs and vaccines directed against Malaria, TB and other tropical diseases. But…
apalazzo | February 24, 2007OK a good friend and former colleague has induced me to get a Connotea account ... and I have to say that it's great. It's like a cross between Endnote and your bookmark page ... on steroids. If you don't know what Connotea is, it's a social bookmarking tool that lets you keep track of websites, files (such as online pdf files of scholarly articles) all while giving you the power of organizing these bookmarks with a single click of the button. One great feature is the ability of Connotea to extract all the info you need for any online publication simply by either adding a button to your…
apalazzo | February 23, 2007I guess prokaryotes are looking more and more like eukaryotes.
It turns out that their DNA is moved around by cytoskeletal filaments. The most recent (and one of the most dramatic) examples can be seen in a recent article in G&D where Fogel and Waldor describe how ParAI polymers yank the DNA around by being attaching to ParBI proteins that are anchored to specific sites called parSI sites. Although ParAI is shares structural features with MreB and thus actin, it is the functional analogue of our microtubules, ParBI would be like our kinetochores and parSI is the equivalent of our…
apalazzo | February 20, 2007Yes it is the Fire Golden Pig. Welcome to the economic based renaming of our current astrological year.
I was just told this funny story by Dr J.
This is the year of the Gold Pig in the Chinese calendar. The calendar is based on a repeating cycle of twelve animals ... so that last year was year of the dog and next year is year of the rat. Then superimposed on that cycle is a "heaven cycle" consisting of ten symbols, two symbols for metals, two for wind, two for wood, two for earth and two for fire. Each year the calendar advances by an animal and a heaven symbol. So if one labeled the animals…
apalazzo | February 20, 2007I wasn't around for a bit - as you can tell I was overloading. Thus it was time to head down to the city. So Friday we packed our bags and headed down to NYC.
Highlights from the trip:
Although I thought that it was fading, the gallery scene in Chelsea was alive and well. On Saturday we not only gallery hopped, but attended 3 vernisages, all in the 22nd street area. A highlight of our outing was Boyd Webb's surrealistic photos of people trapped in a carpeted sea. Other notable exhibits are Wayne Atkins at the Taxter & Spengemann, and Darren Almond's large "digital" clock.
We didn't go…
apalazzo | February 16, 2007Not only is the acclaimed Darwin exhibit comming to Boston's Museum of Science starting this Sunday, but there will be a series of lectures by local researchers to accompany the show:
Evolution as a Tool Kit for Understanding Human Disease (Lecture)
March 13, 2007 This is the first event in The House that Darwin Built series. Darwin's theory of natural selection has transformed our understanding of the living world, down to the smallest molecules.
With: Harvey Lodish, Whitehead member.
Evolution in a Test Tube (Lecture)
March 16, 2007 Join us for a look at how studying molecules like RNA can…
apalazzo | February 14, 2007This was sent by MF (initials are meant to keep my source out of trouble, I hope that I won't be subpoenaed on this one):
Menstrual cycle phase modulates reward-related neural function in women
In other words, giving roses at the wrong time will do nothing for you!
Ref:
Jean-Claude Dreher , Peter J. Schmidt , Philip Kohn , Daniella Furman , David Rubinow , and Karen Faith Berman
Menstrual cycle phase modulates reward-related neural function in women
PNAS (07) Advanced Online Publication 10.1073/pnas.0605569104
apalazzo | February 12, 2007198 years old today.
I would type something up, but after a frustratingly bad day, full of horrible microinjection needles and an hour of playing soccer with this out of shape body of mine, I feel selected against.
For a gadzillion links to various Darwin Day posts go checkout Coturnix' post.
apalazzo | February 12, 2007In biological labs, the term junk DNA is commonly used to describe portion of the genome which have no described function. When I first moved my blog to Scienceblogs, I wrote a little summary of a great theory advanced by William Martin and Eugene V. Koonin on the origin of the eukaryotic nucleus. (Basically the nucleus developed to separate RNA processing from RNA translation, due to the multiplication of introns which made the process of RNA processing that much more complicated.) Well the ID-ots jumped on my little blog entry and accused me of knowing nothing because I called introns "junk…
apalazzo | February 12, 2007In the 90s there was a severe brain drain out of Canada, I should know, I left Montreal in '97 to get a PhD at Columbia University. This trend was halted and even reversed in the earlier part of this decade.
But the stagnation in research funding that has plagued science in the US is being repeated north of the border. From the Globe & Mail:
Dr. Pack was recruited in 2005 from Harvard University [to the Montreal Neurological Institute], wooed with the new lab and state-of-the-art equipment (courtesy of the Canada Foundation for Innovation), a good salary (thanks to the Canada Research…
apalazzo | February 11, 2007Last night we hosted a meeting of our Boston based bookclub. We discussed Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow. Next up is Pirandello's The Late Mattia Pascal.
I posted some pics at the Boston Bookclub blog. You can guess from these photos that our bookclub is just an excuse to get together and have a culinary based social event.
BTW One photo that I did not post was my homemade bread:
Yes, I have an obsession with homemade bread. If you're ever in the neighbourhood and have a good bottle of wine, you can come over and you can try some of my bread along with olive oil from my grandparents olive grove.…
apalazzo | February 10, 2007I haven't done one of these in a while. Last Thursday, Stephan and I "imaged" some macrophages being infected with a vicious strain of vibrio, here's a cool image of one of the poor suckers:
The macrophage is on the top right, a few vibrio cells can be seen on the lower left. Note that the macrophage has all these funky tubes coming out of it.
(Yet again tubes ... my thesis adviser's lab would refer to microtubules as "tubes" too. They're everywhere!)
apalazzo | February 10, 2007First female president in Harvard's history.
Article here in today's NY Times.
My only complaint - she's not a scientist (she's a civil war historian). Here's something I hadn't heard:
Dr. Faust emerged in recent weeks as a finalist among the candidates being considered by the university's search committee, particularly after Thomas R. Cech, a biochemist who is the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Nobel Prize winner, took the unusual step of announcing publicly that he had withdrawn from the competition.
(Karl you went to lunch with the guy ... you didn't know this?)
apalazzo | February 9, 2007Overheard in the lab:
You can't just dump stuff into it. You know, it's not a truck. The ER is a series of tubes!
If you have no idea what we're talking about, where have you been! OK I'll be a little less facetious ... watch this instructional video on the internet and tubes:
And if you are wondering what was that from, it's a remix of this speech that Senator Ted Stevens gave sometime last year.
apalazzo | February 9, 2007This one was a sent over by Jeff Lanam:
Hint: Next week, let's all collect some data.
Leave your answers in the comment section.
apalazzo | February 8, 2007MDR: Multi Drug Resistance Protein. It's an ABC (ATPase Box Cassette) Transporter. In other words, this gene encodes an energy utilizing pump that sits on the plasma membrane and actively transports (mostly hydrophobic?) compounds out of the cell. As I wrote yesterday, a silent change in this gene at the nucleotide level alters the transporter's specificity. According to a paper in the Jan 26th edition of Science, the altered MDR protein is just fine at transporting most compounds but is defective in the transport of a particular compound. The silent mutation does not affect mRNA levels or…
apalazzo | February 7, 2007This is prompted by two emails. Both from good friends. Email #1 is from a friend who got Shingles, I think - (hope you get better, we'll all drink to your health Saturday during food-orgy ... I mean bookclub). The second email I received yesterday from a friend down in NYC asking me if I was still alive. It's good to know that I have at least two regular readers, although they are good friends first.
So what is happening?
I'm undergoing a severe case of last-experiment syndrome. (See this post, item #9).
Friday: Injected my brains out in the morning. In the afternoon, after intense…
apalazzo | January 31, 2007A number of cells were bidirectional, in that they did not a have a peak firing rate in a preferred direction that was at least doubled that in the opposite direction, raising the possibility that apparently reverse replay events merely reflected forward replay of neurons in the opposite direction.
Foster & Wilson Nature (06) 440:680-683