Wednesday, November 4, 2009
From Smithsonian.com The test hens responded more quickly to the tidbitting males that had the normal or stationary wattles, less quickly to the one with the extra floppy wattle (….) and slowest to the male lacking wattles. After the hen’s attention was gained, though, she reacted about the same to each of the four animated […]
goes to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider, Jack W. Szostak. “for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase” link to Nobel prize.org link to the press release
Some interesting work here, the full winner list is available from their website: PEACE PRIZE Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or […]
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Dr. William Mak, a good friend and a great role model, has been devoting his career to improving the biotechnology education for primary and secondary students and teachers over the years. He has established the Hong Kong Biotechnology Education Resource center with Sik Sik Yuen Ho Yu College and built a university-level research laboratory to […]
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why. from wired magazine.
They are the same. Here is how your brain done this.
We have briefly touched the subject of stem cell research in the last journal club. The challenge of developing “stem cell” as a useful therapy is three fold: Turning the clock of a differentiated cell back to the very beginning. Guiding the resulting dedifferentiated “stem cells” or any kinds of “stem cells” to develop into […]
The other day we talked about the historical moment when Matt Meselson and Frank Stahl elucidated the semi-conservative mechanism of DNA replication. We briefly discussed the challenges that they faced at that time as a graduate student and a postdoc, which I think would give us insights to face our own challenges. I am still […]
I read several classic papers when I am planning projects with some of you. This is a very good review paper on the fundamental architecture of retina. There are a lot useful histological facts and observations. It has great discussions on how the retinal architecture has evolved and in turn provides the necessary visual functions […]
This is a series of papers from a recent Sackler colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences entitled “In the Light of Evolution III: Two Centuries of Darwin“. You can watch most of the presentations online here. The conference papers are published in a supplemental issue of the PNAS. I read Daniel Dennett‘s paper because […]