While we all await Marty McFly coming back to the future on 21 October 2015, we can gaze upon Alex Jones’ (Orion Pax) lovely Lego diorama of the future Hill Valley.
My trip to Science Online 2012
Here is an incomplete list of my impressions:
- Jeremy Irons
- John Wayne
Sorry, wrong impressions list. Here we go now. My impressions from Science Online 2012:
- My friends from cyberspace are cool people and not Turing AI computers.
- The depth and complexity of online interactions in science communication means these individuals act the same online and off.
- It was pleasant to go to a conference that did not involve getting lectured at or deal with posturing competitors.
- The correct spelling of the Canadian pronunciation of “about” is ab00t[1]. Continue reading “My trip to Science Online 2012”
The NCI wants to fund the non-obvious
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.
Single cell gene expression linkfest
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”
Thomas Pynchon understands the basic ingredient of lab work
Electrical arcs stabbed through the violet dusk. Heated solutions groaned toward their boiling points. Bubbles rose helically through luminous green liquids. Miniature explosions occurred in distant corners of the facility, sending up showers of glass as nearby workers cowered beneath seaside umbrellas set up for just such protection. Gauge needles oscillated feverishly. Sensitive flames sang at different pitches. Amid a gleaming clutter of burners and spectroscopes, funnels and flasks, centrifugal and Soxhlet extractors, and distillations columns in both the Glynsky and Le Bel-Henninger formats, serious girls with their hair in snoods entered numbers into log-books, and pale gnomes, patient as lock-pickers, squinting through loupes, adjusting tremblers and timers with tiny screwdrivers and forceps. Best of all, somebody in here somewhere was making coffee.
– Thomas Pynchon, Against The Day p. 235
The Finch and Pea 