hal.berman's story links

In case you haven't had a chance to boil your blood a bit today, check out yet another article about the plight of grad students and postdocs in Nature Medicine. I don't know about you but I am fed up with reading articles like these that outline the problems but spend little or no time in providing meaningful solutions. I would expect more from a Nature Med editorial. OK, this would be the point at which I emerge from precipice of hypocrisy and offer my solutions ... hypocrite am I.

Not to be too political, but now we have the ability to screen young "potential-conservatives" and intervene before it is too late.

Talk about a cure for head-nodding and auditorium slobber. How many people do you know that need to add a little Pecha Kucha to their presentations? I challenge all of you out there, next time you are up for a 45-min presentation, pull the "PK" card and then spend the remaining 38:20 minutes trying to actually have a little meaningful discussion.

Nice study with a simple approach to an enormously important problem. Amazing someone hasn't done this before. The mechanism(s) behind sustained transcriptional changes should be very interesting to uncover and it is safe to say they will involve both genetic and epigenetic stories.

A great new data visualization java-based web tool has been developed (parntership between IBM and Lenovo) called many eyes. It has a very user friendly interface and can produce some spectacular "visualizations." It is free but what do they ask in return? This is the best part, they require all datasets to be "publicly viewable by everyone." Of course, they obviously have commercial ambitions, but this open source data concept is leading by example. Who knows, maybe sites like these will ulitmately morph into scientific journals. I would propose that Jeffsbench add manyeyes-like functio

You have to love the occasional Science article that comes out of no where and involves relatively simple off the shelf equipment. This one is mind blowing for its implications. For most of us, and for the most part, our sensory perceptions are fairly accurate. And we experience few optical illusions during routine living. But this is now about to change. The day will soon arrive when all of us will be wearing computerized info-goggles. When this day comes, imagine the implications of a "sensory virus." In the short term, this technology may have a lot of commercial implications such as sensory rewiring for those in chronic pain.

Student finds 5000 year old chewing gum that may have been just the thing for those rotting, festering, purulent gums that come with never brushing your teeth. A little phenol probably did the trick and quite possibly came with bonus buzz. Nice field work.

Maybe it is a sign that I'm getting a little long in the tooth, but I am astonished the day has arrived where an undergrad science project can be to sequence a genome. Wow.

Now that is a long distance relationship worth pursuing. Beam me up! And for those a little rusty on their quantum theory, the cliff notes: http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article2611757.ece#2007-06-04T00:00:25-00:00

Unlocking the genetic code was one of the most insightful scientific discoveries in the history of man. It is amazing to think that, in contrast, sequencing every base pair of one who unlocked the genetic code provides almost no insights at all. When you cast aside all of the hype, the sobering truth is that genome sequencing may for years to come provide nothing more than a lot of purines and pyrmidines. It is my belief that trying to extract insights into the genetic basis of human disease from the primary sequence will be a challenge for generations to come.

Imagine your worst nightmare ... drinking a glass contaminated with the urine of Oliver Cromwell might not come to mind, but that would be a nightmare indeed. Of course, the sad part is that is no nightmare at all, rather a probabilistic postulate of the quantum mechanical underpinnings of our strange existence.

Collaborative web documents, instant messaging, open source models of publishing, web 2.0... Current technologies are making it easier to share information real-time and encouraging collaboration amongst scientists. It is only natural to assume that ideas formed in this way will be, by definition, collective. A whole generation of young scientists, fluent in these technologies, are emerging and their collective voice is beginning to be heard. No wonder it feels awkward when they hit graduate school and are told they have to "independent" to succeed. It is as unnatural to ask a young scientist to stop collaborating as it is to tell them to turn off their wireless.

Hey, there might actually be some science behind ground pig bladders and the stimulation of distal limb development. These articles do capture the imagination and stimulate interest in science. Unfortunately, as so often is the case they adhere to the same formula: one part mysticism, a dollop of miracle, and a dash of urban legend. Scientists are tasked with communicating science to the general public, it is this type of awful science reporting that makes this job very hard. Am I being too hard? What do you think?

The broad outline is pretty straightforward. The powder is mostly collagen and a variety of substances, without any pig cells, said Badylak, who's a scientific adviser to ACell. It forms microscopic scaffolding for incoming human cells to occupy, and it emits chemical signals to encourage those cells to regenerate tissue, he said. Those signals don't specifically say "make a finger," but cells pick up that message from their surroundings, he said.