apalazzo
Posts by this author
September 14, 2006
Why am I making all this fuss over the latest stats on acceptance rate of general RO1 grants distributed by the National Institute of Health (NIH) ? This is the money that keeps the biomedical/life sciences alive in the US. The numbers indicate that fewer grants are aproved on the first submission…
September 14, 2006
One 18 year old girl is dead. Eight others are in serious condition. It could have been worse, but I think that the Montreal Police learned from the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique massacre that you should try to confront and disable anyone who walks into a public area and intends to commit mass murder.…
September 13, 2006
I just heard about this. A guy started shooting at random people in the cafeteria, and then shot himself. (I was a student there in the early 90s.)
I don't get it, the murder rate in Montreal is low, but at educational institutions we've had quite a few horrible events (the Ecole Polytechnique…
September 13, 2006
... (or where did all the funding go???)
From The Scientific Activist, Mike the Mad Biologist (and Science Mag, where the article was published - I must have missed this). And now PZ Myers and Orac have commented as well.
Look at the drop in total first time RO1s and the drop in the rate of funding…
September 13, 2006
I gave lab meeting yesterday and I'm exhausted. Here something I presented.
(First the images then the explanation)
Image 1:
Image 2:
Signal sequences are short stretches of protein that are recognized by the signal recognition particle and direct the protein to be inserted into the endoplsmic…
September 12, 2006
A web based survey developed by Marc Hauser and coworkers Try it. Then read more about it at Gene Expression. Click here to read about Marc Hauser's book Moral Minds.
September 12, 2006
A good friend Claudia, posted a picture on her photoblog (aroundaboutme) that reminded me of something ...
One day, summer of 2002 I think, I decided to take the day off and walk down the Hudson River by myself from the Upper Westside to ... well as far as I could go. It was a time in New York…
September 11, 2006
It does not seem like 5 years have gone by.
I remember waking up that morning in our apartments in Washington Heights. I was washing the dishes and there were all these sirens. I looked out the window and saw police cars, firefighters and ambulances going down the Henry Hudson Parkway. I was…
September 11, 2006
This would be an appropriate summary of Matthew Scully's review of E.O. Wilson's latest book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth for the NY Times book review.
So here we have Professor Wilson, writing to his intended audience, a southern baptist minister. He asks the minister to join him…
September 8, 2006
That time again.
Here is this week's mystery campus (and it's not Northwestern!):
Hint:Neutron blast!
Leave your answers in the comments.
September 8, 2006
The greatest myth within religious communities is that religion is the basis of all morality. Unfortunately for them, science is catching up. Just as Chomsky argued that humans have a language instinct, Marc Hauser from the main campus (Harvard) is arguing that humans have a morality instinct. This…
September 7, 2006
Here is the September Issue:
Besides the "What Makes you Sexy" feature, there is
- THE REDUCTION OF SEDUCTION
- EAT YOUR WAY TO BETTER DNA
- IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH (Making marriage work at the job can be challenging for couples as well as colleagues.)
What's next? "37 ways to turn on your PI…
September 7, 2006
Yesterday:- What happened to your blog?
- What do you mean?
- It was full of angst, I remember reading that Explorers and Crusaders entry. Venting about all the bullshit in science, where is that pissed off guy?
- Maybe because my work is just dominating my life, and I don't want to blog about my…
September 6, 2006
and I don't mean Katherine Harris.
You probably read about the new Scripps Institute that is to be built in south Florida in the may edition of Science Mag. Now it looks like many other biomedical institutes are going to open branches there. The newest one? Torrey Pines. From the San Diego Union…
September 5, 2006
Here is a link to an awesome animation (via Pure Pedantry). You have your membranes, actin and microtubule cytoskeleton, kinesin based vesicular transport, mRNA nuclear export, protein synthesis and coinsertional translocation into the ER, and membrane traffic from the Golgi to the plasma membrane…
September 5, 2006
I discovered this wonderful website: Peoples Archives. In it you'll find interviews with some of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. I just finished listening to Sydney Brenner and Francis Crick and am now listening to Renato Dulbecco.
Dulbecco, a protege of Giuseppe Levi, moved to Salvador…
September 4, 2006
(Again from the archives)
After having written about the worst, why not write about the best things about science? Here goes:
1 - Discovery. One of the greatest feelings I've ever had as a researcher was peering down at the microscope and seeing something that I know has never been seen in the…
September 4, 2006
From the archives, in honor of Labor Day.
1 - Being scooped. There is nothing worse than working your ass off for 4 years (much of it in the coldroom) when BANG! a paper comes out making all your work useless.
2 - Begging for money. When scientists are not working, eating, sleeping or at some…
September 2, 2006
Just a quick lab advertisement, my bay mate Yoko and my boss Tom have a review article in Cell about how morphological differences between various regions of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) are representative of functional differences.
You can divide the ER into 3 morphological parts.
- The Nuclear…
September 1, 2006
Ready for this week's mystery campus?
What could it be? A space ship?
Some things heard from it's interiors:"It's not protein, it's some other filtrate that transforms them."
"Let's just fire a bunch of electrons at the cell and see what we get."
"The proteins must contain a signal."
Where is…
September 1, 2006
See this entry for background on inositols. Inositol-6-phosphate (aka Inositol hexaphosphate, phytic acid, phytate) is a strange compound.
Apparently plants make loads of it, and it is thought that they use this molecule to store phosphate. Also it would seem that lots of cancer researchers have…
August 31, 2006
A couple of days ago I wrote a rant about how painful it was to deal with the Massachusetts and the federal government. In contrast, civil servants in the Quebec and Canadian governments have often gone out of their way to help me out ... and boy did I ever need their help (maybe someday I'll write…
August 30, 2006
I have mixed feelings about Dennett. I really liked his book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, but in public appearances he tends to give off a patronizing air. But earlier today I heard him on WBUR (NPR in Boston) and he did an excellent job of explainning why we, the science community, must begin to…
August 29, 2006
A couple of comments.
I totally agree with Richard Dawkins, but I feel that in many instances he confronts the interviewee too abrasively, in an unproductive way. On the other hand I enjoyed Ian McEwan's two minutes and Dawkins' monologue at the end.
All this battle of Science and Religion ... it'…
August 29, 2006
Well I was reading BK's excellent blog Life of a Lab Rat (an opinion piece from the Guardian "Only biology is safe and, as everybody knows, biology is science for girls." WTF?)
When I came upon a link to this great entry on x-ray crystallography (here is some background on what the hell x-ray…
August 28, 2006
(This is an intro to a n upcoming entry.)
When I was an undergrad, working in a lab at McGill, my then boss Morag Park would joke that Phosphoinositides were at the center of the universe.
What did she mean by that? Well inositol metabolism seemed to be involved in everything, including oncogenesis…
August 28, 2006
Yesterday's video clip was taken from "The Root of all Evil". So without further ado, here's the whole show (I'll post part II tomorrow).
[HT: Simon]
August 27, 2006
This is the newest from the Blobel lab.
Note to all "they've discovered everything" types: this finding shows how much we know about how cells operate.
Background: As I've described before the nucleus and the cytoplasm are two cellular compartments that are kept apart by the Nuclear Pore Complex…
August 25, 2006
OK I live 30min away from the Longwood Medical Center by foot. Most days I walk to and from work but on rainy/blizzard days I take the M2 Shuttle, a free service provided by Harvard to ship people between the Medical Campus here at Longwood and the Main Campus in Cambridge. It's dependable and well…