There is a door, in a wall. This wall is located in my place of work. It helps define a room I usually need to pass through in order to get to my bicycle. This door and I do not get along. It tries to break my nose. Not actively. It’s more of a passive aggressive refusal to meet my perfectly reasonable expectations of doors, especially those attached to post and lintel constructs. This diagram should make my perfectly reasonable expectations perfectly clear:
Here is an incomplete list of my impressions:
Sorry, wrong impressions list. Here we go now. My impressions from Science Online 2012:
The National Cancer Institute wants researchers to start asking non-obvious questions.
I suppose that’s good, because the NIH’s very conservative funding process is one reason why so many researchers focus on the obvious questions. On the other hand, it’s not so clear that answering non-obvious questions lead to more insight than answering obvious questions. The question can be obvious or non-obvious and still generate that key to scientific progress, the unexpected answer.
Gene regulation is an old field, but gene regulation at the single cell level is a whole new ball of wax. Some of us in the lab are trying to get up to speed in this field, and I need to pick out five good papers for consideration.
The place to begin is with this great review, and then work through the references:
Central dogma at the single-molecule level in living cells, Gene-Wei Li and X. Sunney Xie, Nature 475, 308–315 (21 July 2011)
Picking selectively, I ended up with the list below, and unfortunately I need to somehow narrow this down to five… and preferably all five won’t be from Sunney Xie’s group. Any suggestions?
Quantifying E. coli Proteome and Transcriptome with Single-Molecule Sensitivity in Single Cells, Yuichi Taniguchi, Paul J. Choi, Gene-Wei Li, Huiyi Chen, Mohan Babu, Jeremy Hearn, Andrew Emili and X. Sunney Xie, Science 30 July 2010: Vol. 329 no. 5991 pp. 533-538 Continue reading “Single cell gene expression linkfest”
Cool Life pictures of science’s post-WWII golden age. These pictures are probably best viewed while listening to someone read Vannevar Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier*, in a room wallpapered with vintage 1950’s sci-fi covers.
Hat tip to io9.
* a clip of Gingrich pushing his moon colony would be an acceptable alternative.
The Finch and Pea 