FEST ended with a (excellent) keynote lecture by Lawrence Krauss:

One of the important questions in the study of circadian organization is the way multiple clocks in the body communicate with each other in order to produce unified rhythmic output. In the case of mammals, the two pacemakers are the left and the right suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The tow nuclei are anatomically close to each other and have direct nerve connections between them, so it is not difficult to imagine how the two clocks manage to remain continuously coupled (syncronized) to each other and, together, produce a single output, thus synchronizing all the rhythms in the body. In the…

Mighty Microbes: Bacteria Filaments Can Bundle Together And Move Objects 100,000 Times Bacterium's Body Weight: Researchers from The University of Arizona and Columbia University have discovered that tiny filaments on bacteria can bundle together and pull with forces far stronger than experts had previously thought possible. Work Hassles Hamper Sleep, Study Shows: Common hassles at work are more likely than long hours, night shifts or job insecurity to follow workers home and interfere with their sleep. That's the conclusion of a University of Michigan study presented April 17 at the annual…

The podcast of the radio interview with Derek Law and me about Open Access is now available online. Most of the show is in Italian, but if you cannot understand it, our interview is in English and it starts at the 22:07 minute point.

Yup, as soon as I land in Belgrade, I will be giving two lectures about Open Access and the Science Communication in the Age of Internet. The first one, this Tuesday at 11am, will be in the beautiful hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, sponsored by the Serbian Museum Association and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The main target audience are librarians, but I gather that the lecture is open and quite heavily advertised. The second lecture will be on the same day at 2pm in the Decanate of the Medical school at the University of Belgrade, geared more towards the…

Some more pictures.... Saturday dinner: Alessandro interviewed me for the newspapers: We were sitting on the edge of Adriatic: Then I gave another interview, this time about blogging (there will be no podcast - this material will be used for a written text):

The third post in the series on entrainment, first written on April 10, 2005, starts slowly to get into the meat of things...As always, clicking on the spider-clock icon will take you to the site of the original post. In the previous post, I introduced the concept of entrainment of circadian rhythms to environmental cycles. As I stated there, I will focus on non-parametric effects of light (i.e., the timing of onsets and offsets of light) on the phase and period of the clock. Entrainment is a mechanism that forces the internal period (&tau - tau) of the biological clock to assume the…

Professor Steve Steve went to FEST with me yesterday and made many friends (I told his story 50 times at least). Here he is with Lawrence Krauss: And I hope Mrs.Coturnix does not click on the "Read on...." button, as Professor Steve Steve is a well-known and certified babe magnet:

Here are some even better pictures from the panel:

The science blogging session yesterday was really fun. I am wearing headphones as everyone else was speaking Italian, so I listened to the simultaneous translation. The locals also listened to me via the interpreter:

Who can tell whether learning may not even weaken invention in a man that has great advantages from nature and birth; whether the weight and number of so many men's thoughts and actions may not suppress his own or hinder the motion and agitation of them, from which all invention arises; as heaping on wood, or too many sticks, or too close together, suppresses, and sometimes quite extinguishes a little spark, that would otherwise have grown up to a noble flame. - Sir William Temple

One of the assumptions in the study of circadian organization is that, at the level of molecules and cells, all vertebrate (and perhaps all animal) clocks work in roughly the same way. The diversity of circadian properties is understood to be a higher-level property of interacting multicelular and multi-organ circadian systems: how the clocks receive environmental information, how the multiple pacemakers communicate and synchronize with each other, how they convey the temporal information to the peripheral clocks in all the other cells in the body, and how perpheral clocks generate…

Not many people know that James Joyce spent 11 years in Trieste as a lecturer at the University. Now, his bronze statue still walks the bridge across the canal on Ponte Rossa:

I love how many dogs I saw roaming FEST and learning about science....

This is the second in a series of posts on the analysis of entrainment, originally written on April 10, 2005. The natural, endogenous period of circadian rhythms, as measured in constant conditions, is almost never exactly 24 hours. In the real world, however, the light-dark cycle provided by the Earth's rotation around its axis is exactly 24 hours long. Utility of biological clocks is in retaining a constant phase between environmental cycles and activities of the organism (so the organism always "does" stuff at the same, most appropriate time of day). Thus, a mechanism must exist to…

Yes, that is Lawrence Krauss on the left....

Last night, Derek Law and I were taped for about 15 minutes for Radio3, about Open Access and the world of publishing:

Yesterday afternoon, Sely Costa and Derek Law did a fun session, where she pretended to be an unconcerned citizen and he tried to persuade her that OA is a good thing. It was a fun way to demonstrate how OA benefits everyone, not just researchers.

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