Thursday, November 17, 2011
I just come across with this article in Slate Magazine “The Mouse Trap – The dangers of using one lab animal to study every disease.” that talks in great details about the limitation of using animal model to look for new drugs to treat human diseases. For example, the control healthy mouse can actually be […]
Saturday, November 12, 2011
The other day I shared the story of Douglas Prasher‘s with the medical students in my class. Dr. Prasher’s contribution to the study of Green Fluorescent Protein had ultimately led to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008; however he was not one of the laureates because of life circumstances. During my preparation, I read some […]
Thursday, November 3, 2011
The genome sequence of the naked mole rat is published recently (Kim et al., 2011) ! This is an amazing creature that lives almost up to 30 years in captivity, 9 times longer than mice. At the same time they do not seem to suffer from cancer or a decline in fertility (Buffenstein 2008). I […]
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Development Lander AD. Pattern, growth, and control. Cell. 2011 Mar 18;144(6):955-69. Review. PubMed PMID: 21414486; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3128888. Braendle C, Felix MA. The other side of phenotypic plasticity: a developmental system that generates an invariant phenotype despite environmental variation. J Biosci. 2009 Oct;34(4):543-51. Review. PubMed PMID: 19920340. Noordermeer D, Leleu M, Splinter E, Rougemont […]
Thursday, October 27, 2011
The other day my reading of Three common mistakes in medical journalism brought me to the original blog article How the News Media May Hurt – Not Help – Health Literacy Efforts. The author Gary Schwitzer discusses nicely three issues of data presentation in public media that may lead to distortion of interpretation of the […]
The other day my colleague Don Ready in the department forwarded an interesting news article from The New York Times that describes a very simple mountant to makes tissue samples very transparent without affecting the fluorescence signal. That substantially helps imaging thick samples. The technique, which is called Scale, is published in Nature Neuroscience. The […]
Saturday, October 22, 2011
I have never got a chance to listen to this famous speech by Steve Jobs and have finally listened to it because of all the recently coverages after he has passed away. It is actually quite insightful and I would like to share with all of you. I am actually quite interested in his […]
Thursday, October 20, 2011
It is fair to say that there is still so much to learn about animal behaviour. 🙂
Saturday, October 1, 2011
To find out how useful the student evaluation on a lecture is, an interesting experiment was done many years ago that the researcher found an actor to deliver a lecture that he had no idea about. He only tried to make it sound impressive and confusing. Interestingly, most students, despite being trained scientists from different […]