apalazzo | November 15, 2006I haven't written about any extracurricular activities in a while (I don't have to as Tulula takes care of that, but don't tell her that I sent you to her blog ... and yes every post is both in English and in Espanol.)
Last night we saw Anne-Sophie Mutter at Symphony Hall.
What can I say?
Mutter is such a strong passionate violinist, she imposes herself upon whatever she plays. Just like Claire Waterman-Storer, Anne-Sophie Mutter is a force of nature. At times you get the impression that she wields her bow like a sword, dripping from the blood of the piece she just slayed.
Don't believe me…
apalazzo | November 15, 2006
Chapters of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) are pushing their local universities to sign Equitable Access Licenses (EAL) that would lift patent barriers on drugs developed by university labs. These agreements would effectively increase the access of medicines to poor countries.
An article in the the June edition of PLoS reports the latest on this movement ... more specifically how Yale recently signed such an agreement for to allow a generic version of Zerit, stavudine, to be used to treat HIV infections in South Africa.
Sol Shulman, a member of the Harvard Medical…
apalazzo | November 14, 2006
This is for cell motility aficionados.
How do cells crawl? Well most in the field would say that actin polymerization generated by the Arp2/3 complex at the leading edge acts to generate an actin meshwork (see pic). The addition of actin monomers right under the membrane (arrows) act as a Brownian ratchet to push membrane forward. But for anyone who has actually monitored cell motility in the microscope, you must think that this idea is ludicrous. First of all, motility is more that pushing membrane, it's about transporting all your organelles and cytoplasmic components forward while…
apalazzo | November 13, 2006Working in a lab for too long and you'll acquire a type of lingo that we call "X-speak". It happens to everyone you borrow words used within one environment and apply them to other situations. With so many members of our lab preparing solutions we (as I'm sure many of you) many here are fluent in X-speak. This is exacerbated by food preparation:
"Do we have any chicken broth."
"Yeah, it's pretty concentrated, it's about a 100X stock."
"I see that would explain why it's sold in such small aliquots and why it is gelatinous at four degrees."
"Right, just remember to add enough water to get the…
apalazzo | November 10, 2006It's that time of the week. Let's try something a bit more challenging. Here is today's mystery campus:
Hint: How proteins get into these organelles.
Leave your answers in the comment section.
apalazzo | November 9, 2006Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."
-Samuel Beckett
apalazzo | November 9, 2006... while I'm waiting for our daily lunch caravan to assemble. My 10 sec analysis:
- A partial change in governance will be good for the country. Hopefully funding will increase for education and science.
- Look at these maps of changes in the house and senate, and they say that the North East doesn't yield any political strength anymore. HA! This part of the country has withdrawn it's remaining support for the GOP. (And Deval Patrick won too, although that wasn't a surprise.)
- I can't beleive that Massachusetts voted against the proposition to extend liquor licenses to supermarkets. (The…
apalazzo | November 7, 2006
Not only funny, but reminds the voting population that we must disregard these ridiculous attack ads.
apalazzo | November 6, 2006One thing I never understood about US colleges is the amount of money pumped into their sports teams. It's an open invitation to wasted resources and (in worse case scenarios) corruption.
From today's NY Times:
College Sports Get a Warning
The National Collegiate Athletic Association's enthusiasm for fighting corruption in college sports is partly driven by the fear of federal intervention. That fear came a step closer to being realized last month, when the House Ways and Means Committee fired off a tough-minded letter demanding that the N.C.A.A. explain how profit-seeking, win-at-all-cost…
apalazzo | November 6, 2006I heard about this paper (Deng and Hochstrasser. Nature (06) 443:827-831) and took a look at it over the weekend. Wow! There are lots of goodies in there. And it showcases how manipulable yeast are. (As you can tell I am really jealous of researchers who use yeast as a model system.)
The premise of the paper is not bad either.
There had been some rumours that proteins could get degraded within the nucleus through the ubiquitin/proteosome pathway. Now to some this idea was heretical but this new paper gives some mechanistic info into how this process occurs.
Doa10p is an E3 ligase, that is…
apalazzo | November 5, 2006Here are some things for you.
If there is one radio show you should listen to every week it's This American Life.
This week: What's in a Number? 2006 Edition. The preview from www.thislife.org:
A new study in the British medical journal The Lancet estimates the number of Iraqi dead since the U.S. invasion at over 600,000. This week, we look at whether that number might be accurate, and return to a in-depth look at a similar study in The Lancet, with similar methodology. That study came out a year ago, and was largely ignored by the press. We also hear U.S. forces dealing with the aftermath of…
apalazzo | November 4, 2006Well, last week we had Frank Zappa comment on the state of the media, now let's hear what Thom Yorke has to say about the political process:
And if you want to sing along:
I will stop, I will stop at nothing.
Say the right things when electioneering
I trust I can rely on your vote.
When I go forwards you go backwards
and somewhere we will meet.
When I go forwards you go backwards
and somewhere we will meet.
Ha ha ha
Riot shields, voodoo economics,
The I.M.F., taking care of business,
I trust I can rely on your vote.
When I go forwards you go backwards
and somewhere we will meet.
When I go…
apalazzo | November 3, 2006I didn't blog about this when it first came out, go see Janet Stemwedel's blog (here, here and here) on how Susumu Tonegawa dissuaded Alla Karpova from taking a position at MIT.
Here's the latest from the Boston Globe:
Susumu Tonegawa , whose actions sparked an outcry from several colleagues, will not be disciplined, L. Rafael Reif, Massachusetts Institute of Technology provost, said yesterday. Reif said several individuals acted inappropriately in the failed effort to recruit neuroscientist Alla Karpova , and there is no need to punish anyone because the real blame lies with the competitive…
apalazzo | November 3, 2006I guess last week's mystery campus was way too easy, congrats to Arrowsmith for his two correct answers. This week will be a little harder.
So here is this week's "campus":
hint: Great place to have a trip, I got more done here than ever before!
Email me or leave your answers in the comment section.
apalazzo | November 3, 2006How much is this botched war costing us?
From the National Priorities Project, who base their data on congressional appropriations, the up-to-the-minute total is $339 billion. As for 2006, the current estimate is $100.4 billion. From zfacts:
The US budget for Iraq in FY 2006 comes to $3,749/Iraqi. This is more than double their per person GDP. It's like spending $91,000 per person in the US. Why not just bribe the whole country?
Let's make some comparisons. All figures are in billions of dollars:War in Iraq FY2006: 100.4NSF budget 2006: 5.6NIH budget 2006: 28.7Department of Education FY2006:…
apalazzo | November 2, 2006I know that we have NCBI etc. but couldn't someone construct something close to the Yeast Genome Data Base for the human genome??? This site rocks.
(P.S. Yes probably ENSEMBL is the best pan genome bioinformatics gateway, I'm exploring it now. Hmm. So is my favorite gene in platypus???)
apalazzo | October 31, 2006... when you finish your experiment at 5:15PM then exit the microscope room and discover that it's pitch dark outside.
apalazzo | October 31, 2006OK sorry for the lack of updates. I've been rereading lots of mlp literature. Mlp = myosin like proteins. These are found on nucleoplasmic face of the nuclear pore complex (NPC) and seem to filter what goes out of the nucleus, specifically unspliced mRNA precursors. It's old data so I won't go over it here. I recently bumped into the latest instalment of the dynamin in the mitochondria saga.
Jodi Nunnari's group has a paper in Cell about how Mgm1, a dynamin like protein found in the inner mitochondrial matrix, is required for inner-membrane fusion in mitos.
I just don't get the whole thing,…
apalazzo | October 31, 2006Some people have asked me why I haven't written anything about Richard Dawkins' new book. To be honest, it's just another manuscript arguing that religions preach ignorance and can promote other societal evils. We've all heard this before. On the other hand, Marc Hauser's book, Moral Minds, is a trully original book, discussing the latest ideas from cognitive science. Just as Chomsky argued that we are endowed with a language instinct, Hauser proposes that we all have a morality instinct. In today's NY Times there is an article on his book:
The proposal, [that people are born with a moral…
apalazzo | October 28, 2006OK one last comment from my trip to western Connecticut. One morning I flipped on the TV, and got bombarded by campaign ads that focused on the congressional race there. Real nasty ads like "so-and-so supports sex-offenders and is a friend of terrorists". I can't believe that people fall for such infantile name-calling techniques. It all reminded me of a Frank Zappa song ... so without further ado here is I am the Slime.