apalazzo | October 27, 2006Last night I saw Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God at the Sander's theatre. It was a great show. I won't go into too many details, but just to let you know, it's a longer version of the monologue that appeared in This American Life last year. Here's a review of the NYC performance in the NY Times.
There are a couple of things that I found interesting:
- Beginning from a person of moderate faith, she started questioned everything she had always assumed in an attempt to reconnect with her faith. Her investigation and critique of faith is likely than the confrontational approach employed by some…
apalazzo | October 27, 2006What type of biomedical research costs the most? That is an interesting question. With the NIH asking for a 20% cut in everyone's grant, our lab has been looking into who spends what, and where can we cut costs. An interesting number set fell out of this internal audit: how much each postdoc in the lab spends ... and there is an interesting trend.
We have basically 3 types of postdocs:
1) Structure biologists.
2) Biochemists.
3) Cell biologists.
So who do you think spends more money each month?
Structure Biologists. Between all the specialized detergents and many little consumables that they…
apalazzo | October 27, 2006Yes, it's back. And for the 20th edition we have a nice pair for you.
So here THEY are:
X: What could it be?
x: I'm sure we'll find it, we just need to focus.
X: You know, I've never seen you in a modest mood.
x: Look we need to go over the evidence. There are others who are hot on the topic.
X: Yes but fortunately their first guess was a bit off.
x: To recapitulate, there was that first interesting finding here.
X: And now we have the diffraction data from our collaborators.
x: Yes and don't forget about the ratios.
X: All very suggestive. I say we head down to the pub and talk about in the…
apalazzo | October 26, 2006That is this week's question from the Seed mothership.
Born and raised in Canada, I have to say that there is one obvious choice: The Nature of Things. Almost every Canadian in my age group has a picture of David Suzuki seared onto some part of their neocortex. Now some folk try to diss Dr. Suzuki ... all I can say is to leave the guy alone. When it comes to popularizing science for the mass market, no one comes close.
P.S. Since I've moved to the US I've basically lived life without TV, and I can't say that I miss it.
apalazzo | October 26, 2006At that same meeting over the past weekend, I heard Tim Mitchison give an interesting talk about mitosis and pharmacogenetics. For any of you who don't know, Tim's lab has been at the fore front of analyzing how the mitotic spindle operates. Tim was the first to visualize microtubules, the major constituents of the spindle, in a live cell. In his seminar, he led us on a tour of 20 years of thought about mitosis. In the past 5 years Tim had been involved in developing drugs that would inhibit mitosis and thus be used as a treatment against cancer. He was responsible for setting up the ICCB,…
apalazzo | October 25, 2006Does this type of expression profile look familiar?
From my limited experience from these types of pan-tissue blots, it would seem like every damn protein is expressed in testes.
Why?
All they do is make sperm (i.e. swimming machines). I mean sure these little guys are complicated, but compared to the liver which plays the role of the body's pharmacist, or the brain with it's supposed unquantifiable complexity, you'd expect that testes should be relatively simple. And as for "making a new human", sperm provide DNA and little else. Most of the important stuff is found in the oocyte. Face it…
apalazzo | October 23, 2006Again some interesting thoughts about problem solving in biological systems ... ripped off of a seminar intro from this weekend's retreat. Here goes ...
Scientists are tinkerers. We need tools to get inside a system and manipulated it to understand what is going on and to ultimately test our theories. So what are our tools? And what are the major parameters that we must consider when using our tools.
This weekend I heard a great talk by Kevan Shokat of UCSF. In his intro Dr Shokat made a great point in detailing the two most important features in manipulating biological systems: specificity…
apalazzo | October 20, 2006Well I'm packing up to go off to western Connecticut for my fellowship retreat. Oh yeah, about that last minute experiment ... I nailed it! Not only did the experiment work but I also got the anticipated result confirming my pet theory.
Ain't that a pretty image of a cell! The cell was injected nuclearly (see inset) with XXXXX and the freakin' XXXXX not only got out but got targeted to the XXXXX. I'll tell you about the experiment some day, for now it's sensitive info.
As for Map that Campus, it'll be delayed until next week when I have more time.
Have a nice weekend.
apalazzo | October 18, 2006Thank God ... um I mean The Flying Spaghetti Monster ... for Youtube.
(Update: the frantic last minute experiment seems to be going well, I'll know the results domani.)
apalazzo | October 17, 2006Sorry I'm not updating often. I've got a meeting this weekend and I'm trying to get that last piece of data (I know it sounds cliche, but face it, we all do it). What makes it worse is that my wife is out of town so now I have no excuse to come home at a decent hour. So instead of going on about RNA export or the joys of SDS-PAGE here's a little video brought to you by The Little Tetrad Swimming Achievers:
apalazzo | October 16, 2006It's not one of mine, waiting to be completed.
It's not from a competitor, scooping my precious results.
It doesn't even have much impact on my own work.
No it's a paper I once printed, and have heard about from others. It sits on my cluttered desk staring at me every day, and I just simply refuse to read it. Like an old rival we glimpse at each other every day, I pretend to ignore and it pretends to ignore me ... but the more I refuse to admit it's existence, the more it impose itself on my subconscious.
(and now with a Nobel given to the field ... this is obviously an important paper - if…
apalazzo | October 13, 2006Face it, they're unicellular ... they don't like groups (i.e. they are not urbanites). And even when they do grow together in a colony they have no real central control (like a brain) ... in other words they are anti government.
With their cell wall they are clearly isolationist. (I guess they're not neocons!)
They've shed many cellular functions ... such as nuclear envelope break down, microtubule based vesicular transport, centrosomes and most introns ... they are clearly not progressives. Note that these cellular characteristics were retained in more distant relatives of ours and thus it…
apalazzo | October 13, 2006One of the problems in modern day biomedical research is turning on/off protein expression.
In order to control in vivo protein levels, many researchers have reverted to genetically tractable organisms such as yeast and worms. In the September issue of Cell, there's a cool paper by Banaszynski et al., who developed reagents so that you can pharmacological manipulate the expression of any protein in the cell.
They take advantage of the FKBP-rapamycin-FRB system, where the addition of a drug (rapamycin) promotes the association of two proteins (FKBP and FRB). Using Yellow fluorescent protein-…
apalazzo | October 13, 2006In keeping up with "numbers week" here is today's mystery campus:
hints:85, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, (99), (100), 101, 102, 103, controversy for 104-106, 116 and 118 (the last one being retracted)
This should be an easy one. Leave your answers in the comments (or email me).
(PS Michael, this one's for you!)
apalazzo | October 12, 2006OK this is officially quantitation week on The Daily Transcript.
Today's number is provided by Gilbert Burnham's group at The John Hopkins: 655,000 deaths due to the Iraqi war. From the Globe and Mail:
Mr. Bush has previously put the number of Iraqi deaths at 30,000. He reaffirmed that number yesterday.
"I stand by the figure," he said. "Six hundred thousand or whatever they guessed at . . . it's not credible."
Even some less self-interested and partisan bodies are skeptical of the numbers, partly because they are many times higher than other apparently independent estimates. For example,…
apalazzo | October 11, 2006Why stop now!
The latest stats for you: Top 10 cities in university research spending in the US.
[From Network Boston.]
City -- R&D expenditures by the city's universities and colleges in 2004 (dollars in thousands)1
1. Baltimore, MD--1,750,9042
2. Los Angeles, CA--1,527,602
3. Boston, MA--1,521,001
4. New York, NY--1,512,632
5. Philadelphia, PA--1,475,536
6. San Francisco, CA--1,388,2183
7. Chicago, IL--1,105,317
8. Houston, TX--1,099,652
9. Durham/Chapel Hill, NC--937,598
10. Atlanta, GA--784,330
1Includes universities and colleges within a 20-mile radius of each city center
2Includes…
apalazzo | October 11, 2006For some reason I have this irrational love of statistics. It could be due to the fact that as a microscopist I am very weary of qualitative data ... it's easy to see what you want to see. Quantification is the attempt to provide a more objective assessment of the world.
This fascination of statistics could also stem from the fact that as a kid growing up in North America, you are bombarded with numbers. From sports (who scored the most goals for the Canadiens in 1983?), to the Almanac with all of it's lists, to pop culture (I can hear Casey Kasem now "and the top song of the week is..."),…
apalazzo | October 10, 2006Just came back from Montreal. We attended a wedding, a thanksgiving feast, and countless outings. Basically lots of eating and drinking. I just read at ScienceSampler that interfering with actin polymerization enhances ethanol tolerance. If only I knew. The only question left is that will it cure your hangover?
(Actually it shouldn't as hangovers are produced mainly from sulfide consumption + dehydration.)
Ref:Increased Ethanol Resistance and Consumption in Eps8 Knockout Mice Correlates with Altered Actin Dynamics
Nina Offenhäuser, Daniela Castelletti, Lisa Mapelli, Blanche Ekalle Soppo,…
apalazzo | October 6, 2006
This week lo tendremos en espanol.
(without the accents - for some reason the default ScienceBlog font screws them up!)
Aqui esta su pista:La institucion mas grande de esta region.
Si usted sabe la respuesta, digame.