popular story links

It is well known that cancer cells' have an altered metabolism--here's an article about a study that is trying to take advantage of this difference to selectively target melanoma.

Cool new paper from the Mullins lab at UCSF. Be sure to check out the supplementary movies.

UC Berkeley has a number of courses available as webcasts or podcasts. This looks like a really great resource.

Zotero is a new extension for Firefox that looks like a great new challenger to EndNote. It is a free, open-source, platform-independent reference mananger that looks like it has a lot of great features. I haven't played around with it much yet, but when I do I will post a review in the blog section. I'd be interested to hear an opinion from anyone who has tried it.

I found this in the NY Times...a good description of some of the basic prinicpals underlying statistics. And, an interesting read about the end of humanity. What's not to love?

What does society get for the billions it spends on science?

The New Scientist has an article, with an interactive Google map, about the last places on earth in a whole bunch of categories.

Nature has a news article about a paper in their latest issue. The paper is from the ENCODE consortium and is attempting to map functional elements of the genome. The problem is that their assumptions didn't prove true. Functional elements weren't necessarily conserved and conserved regions weren't necessarily functional. There are a number of possible reasons for this that the news article gets into. I expect that this paper will be discussed for quite a while, so it's probably worth a read.

I'm always interested in how science is protrayed in the media (typically not well). This is an article from News Week about synthetic biology. Its an interesting field and read, albeit sensationalized.

The link between BRCA1 & 2 and familial breast cancer is well known, now for the first time a group describes mutations that are associated with "common" breast cancer. They identifiy FGFR2 mutations in up to 60% of women--a stunning number. I've attached the news link in this week's Nature since this content is free. The article is in the same issue.

Researchers at the Salk have identified a gene that may be responsible for the longevity benefit of caloric restriction.

A proof-of-concept mini PCR machine was created that runs of AA batteries. It may not be great for lab experiments, but it could be useful for diagnostics.

I found this pretty depressing, but also full of useful information about funding at the NIH. In considering career choices, its best to be well informed.

The AACR annual meeting is taking place this week and they have webcasts for many of the talks. The AACR homepage also has breaking news from the meeting.

This article discusses some new data that, if validated, could cause problems to the standard model of physics.

This is a very good opinion piece about framing scientific discussion with the public.

Reconstitution of DNA Segregation Driven by Assembly of a Prokaryotic Actin Homolog
Starting Mon, April 19, we will be featuring the recent Science paper from the Mullins lab. Ethan Garner, the first author, will be answering your questions and responding to your comments all week. Please read the paper and start posting your questions and comments.

Here is a great resource for everyone. MIT posts a lot of their course materials online for everyone to use. It's free. Check it out.

A consortium has been formed to knock-out every gene in the mouse. Wow.

For all the environmentalists, San Francisco has finally banned plastic bags from major chain stores. This NY Times article gets into some details behind this issue. The bottom line is that it should be good for the environment.

A new immunotherapy for prostate cancer received a favorable review at the FDA. They seem to have fairly week survival data from a small trial, but the technology is exciting.

J. Craig Venter is at it again. He just took an expedition on his yacht and collected samples of bacteria from all over the ocean. He then sequenced it all. The amount of data is almost overwhelming. The published a few papers in PLoS to describe it. This link is to the synopsis. This could be one of the most important papers in a long time, but I don't know field very well to be able to tell.

This paper looks at the leading edge of invasive basal cell carcinomas and finds increased p16 expression. This is most interesting because the p16 promoter is methylated in the center of the tumor but not at the leading edge.

Newsweek has an article about the doubt behind the Cancer Genome project. Is it worth it?

The British version of AAAS is having it's annual science week. One of the events is a vote for the nation's favorite science experiment. This site has some pretty funny videos of Brits doing fun science experiments, like mentos in diet coke and a LN2 banana hammer.