science & society
apalazzo | August 8, 2007Technology is neutral until human beings do things with it. The moral value of technology, I think, has to do with what we do with it, and not what it is, or what it's potential might be.
- William Gibson
The author of Neuromancer was interviewed yesterday on NPR's OnPoint. To hear the show click here.
Also, Gibson's blog.
apalazzo | July 23, 2007Yesterday I saw this graph in the NYTimes:
Click here for a larger version.
On the bright side (no pun intended) the numbers are better then what they used to be (does anyone have the numbers from the 2000 election?)
Then today I read this.
Sheesh!
I'm not going to say anything more ...
apalazzo | July 12, 2007A couple of days ago I had a nice conversation with Mitch Waldrop who suggested that I check out a book by Jean-Claude Guedon entitled In Oldenburg's Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing.
This analysis of the history and future of scientific publishing has some very interesting factoids in it. I've only gone 1/5th through the book, but from the bit that I've read I can tell you that Guedon does not like the publishing industry and their aristocratic precedents. Also I find that the view of scientists is a little skewed, here is an…
apalazzo | July 12, 2007
(Fresh water rotifer feeding among debris (200x). First prize 2001, Harold Taylor - Kensworth, UK)
Now in it's 34th year, this microscopy competition is one of the most popular around. This year the general public is invited to vote for the winner. Click here for more details.
apalazzo | June 29, 2007Although I do not own a television set, my wife and I watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report every night, online. A couple of days ago Colbert had Daniel Gilbert on. Gilbert is a professor of Psychology at the Harvard main campus and has recently written a great book, Stumbling on Happiness. I had met Gilbert last year at a Seed dinner and saw him speak at an Edge/Seed sponsored round-table. His studies into happiness and affective forecasting are very insightful. To read previous posts on this subject click here, here, here and here.
(The clip from the Colbert Report is bellow the fold…
apalazzo | June 15, 2007This story sounds like it comes from the plot of a bad movie.
A couple of days ago the Globe reported that FBI agents will be visiting labs in the New England area.
I'm not kidding. They've already visited MIT, U Mass and BC. From the article:
Agents plan to visit many more New England colleges in the coming months and are offering to provide briefings about what they call "espionage indicators" to faculty, students, or security staff as part of a national outreach to college campuses.
Why?
The FBI's website says universities should consider the possibility of foreign spies posing as…
apalazzo | June 14, 2007
When I was a lowly grad student at Columbia U, I was part of a small and cozy department headed by Michael Gershon. Now Professor Gershon is an expert of the enteric nervous system, or the nerve system of the gut. He gained celebrity status due to the fact that he had written a book called The Second Brain, which describes the history and current research on this curious feature of the nervous system. This entity, the enteric nervous system, is pretty remarkable in that it does in fact work quite independently from the rest of your body. Neurons within the gut form a highly connected network…
apalazzo | June 12, 2007I heard this last night. With Marius, John Gearhart, and William Hurlbut.
Or if you like stupid conspiracy theories, read Larry Moran's summary of the stories spun by people with too much time on their hands. (BTW there is no way that the timing of the three stem cell papers had anything to do with the stem cell legislation, here's why.)
apalazzo | June 7, 2007I got in this morning and the place is buzzing with yesterday's news. So the big question is whether this technology will be useful for stem cell therapy?
One professor was willing to wager that these new findings will not lead to therapeutic stem cell therapy. In the lab, we were actually split down the middle on this issue. You see the problem is that cancer and stem cells share a lot in common. This technology involves introducing four transgenes (two of which are proto-oncogenes) into cells. This protocol may increase the likelihood that these induced stem cells turn into teratomas after…
apalazzo | June 4, 2007Last night we hosted another instalment of our monthly "book"club at our place. It's an excuse to meet up for a nice evening of food and drink. Note that the word "book" is in quotes because we alternate each meeting between reading a book and watching a movie. As you can tell from the photos, last night we watched a Russian movie entitled Ballad of a Soldier.
Capping a growing trend, members of the Whitehead institute outnumbered the folks from the Harvard Medical Campus for the first time in our bookclub's three year history.
Now not only are most of our club members biomedical scientists,…
apalazzo | May 30, 2007This past weekend in a review of Natalie Angier's new book Steven Pinker wrote something I'd like to share with you (below the fold):
A baby sucks on a pencil and her panicky mother fears the child will get lead poisoning. A politician argues that hydrogen can replace fossil fuels as our nation's energy source. A consumer tells a reporter that she refuses to eat tomatoes that have genes in them. And a newsmagazine condemns the prospects of cloning because it could mass-produce an army of zombies.
These are just a few examples of scientific illiteracy -- inane misconceptions that could have…
apalazzo | May 26, 2007Here is an amazing clip from BBC's Planet Earth demonstrating the life cycle of a member of the Cordyceps family of parasitic fungi.
For more, here is the Wikipedia entry on Cordyceps.
apalazzo | May 23, 2007Stanley Miller, of the famed Urey-Miller experiment, died Sunday (NYTimes Obit).
Here's an entry from over a year ago that was catalyzed by a conversation with a former member of the Miller lab:
Last night, my wife and I had dinner with a friend of ours from the Szostak Lab (yes at Buddha's Delight - I had the "beef" taro stirfry).
There we discussed Capote (we just saw the movie) and the existence of ribose in a pre-biotic earth. Apparently it is unlikely that sugars, such as ribose, would have been in high concentrations in the hypothetical chemistry of primitive earth (see her PNAS…
apalazzo | May 19, 2007Lab work made sexy on primetime?
Don't you hate it when your BLAST searches turn up nothing!
apalazzo | May 18, 2007This is part 5 of the biomedical science serries on Charlie Rose, enjoy.
(P.S. Keep your eyes open, in a couple of months there will be a major revolution in this field.)
apalazzo | April 19, 2007Lots of little interesting tidbits in here like
-the expansion of the use in tobacco products in Asia
-cervical cancer is a big problem in India
-lots of other stuff on recent cancer research and ideas like cancer gene addiction and cancer stemcells
-collaborative research
-plus a plea to increase the NIH budget!
apalazzo | April 13, 2007I got an email from an old friend (the perfect way to distract from my assembling the figures for my manuscript) about this ... Quantum secrets of photosynthesis revealed. Check this out:
"We have obtained the first direct evidence that remarkably long-lived wavelike electronic quantum coherence plays an important part in energy transfer processes during photosynthesis," said Graham Fleming, the principal investigator for the study. "This wavelike characteristic can explain the extreme efficiency of the energy transfer because it enables the system to simultaneously sample all the potential…
apalazzo | April 4, 2007Apparently Reed Elsevier, publisher of countless academic journals such as Cell, Neuron, Current Biology and the Lancet, is also organizing arms exhibition shows.
In a bizarre development, the editors of the Lancet agreed with researchers who want to start a boycott of their journal.
To read more:The Lancet's terrible dilemma (Effective Measure)Should Elsevier journals be boycotted? (Evolving Thoughts)MDs, Scientists Call For Elsevier Group Boycott (Living the Scientific Life)MDs Urge Publisher to Sever Weapons Ties (AP)Leading doctors criticize medical journal's link to arms industry (…
apalazzo | April 3, 2007It's nice to see scientific fighting discourse from the outside. I say this as a spectator wanting to see a fight, but as a scientist it makes me worried.
Yesterday I mentioned the John Hogan/George Johnson vlog about the Greene/Krauss debate on string theory on Bloggingheads.tv ... well there are quite a few commentaries about the whole recent episode.
Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variances is upset. I do agree with his view that public debate is good, but I have to say that he utters outrageous statements that as a scientist make me cringe.
I have a long-percolating post that I hope to finish…
apalazzo | April 2, 2007Finally. NPR has been providing almost all their content online for quite a while.
First you can watch Charlie Rose ... for free! (It use to cost 1$ a show, now you can watch the last week no charge.)
Now NOVA has some videos. Great!
Then if you want more see John Hogan (The End of Science) and science writer George Johnson talk about the Greene/Krauss debate on string theory they are on Bloggingheads.tv.