Posts
April 18, 2013
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For over a decade, cardiologists have been conducting trials in patients using cells extracted from the bone marrow and infusing them into the blood vessels of the heart in patients who have suffered a heart attack. This type of a procedure is not without risks, because it involves multiple invasive procedures in patients who are already quite ill, because they are experiencing a major heart attack: 1) Patients with a major heart attack (also referred to as ST-elevation Myocardial Infarction...
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Surder, D., Manka, R., Lo Cicero, V., Moccetti, T., Rufibach, K., Soncin, S., Turchetto, L., Radrizzani, M., Astori, G., Schwitter, J. & Erne, P. (2013). Intracoronary Injection of Bone Marrow Derived Mononuclear Cells, Early or Late after Acute Myocardial Infarction: Effects on Global Left Ventricular Function Four months results of the SWISS-AMI trial, Circulation, DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.112.001035
Rehman, J. (2013). Bone Marrow Tinctures for Cardiovascular Disease: Lost in Translation, Circulation, DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.113.002775
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April 17, 2013
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I remember the first time I realized just how easily false information gets spread about.A terrifying starry nightI was in French class in high school. Our homework had been to find out 1 interesting fact about Van Gogh and tell it to the class. When it was my turn, I said some boring small fact that I no longer remember. My friend sitting behind me, however, had a fascinating fact: When Van Gogh was a young child, he was actually afraid of the moon.The teacher and the class were all quite […]
Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U., Seifert, C., Schwarz, N. & Cook, J. (2012). Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13 (3) 106-131. DOI: 10.1177/1529100612451018
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On the final day of the annual 2013 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in Washington DC,…
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2:21 AM | Crowd4Discovery March update
The pace of a basic biomedical research project at the outset can be slow. For us, March was a month of...
April 16, 2013
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. Last week I posted a summary of the first half of a full day Communications for Scientists workshop organized by the Stem Cell Network. This post picks up where I left off, with a description of a “Dragon’s Den” style pitch session intended to introduce trainees to necessary communications skills within a commercialization context. The...Read more
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12:28 PM | Stem Cells Wanted: Alive Not Dead
Stem cell therapies are taking off, in a surprisingly unregulated way. While most humans have to go to places like South Korea to receive them, horses, dogs, cats, pigs and tigers are already being treated in North America. The most … Continue reading →
Corselli, M., Chin, C., Parekh, C., Sahaghian, A., Wang, W., Ge, S., Evseenko, D., Wang, X., Montelatici, E., Lazzari, L. & Crooks, G. (2013). Perivascular support of human hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells, Blood, 121 (15) 2891-2901. DOI: 10.1182/blood-2012-08-451864
Glettig, D.L. & Kaplan, D.L. (2013). Extending Human Hematopoietic Stem Cell Survival In Vitro with Adipocytes, BioResearch Open Access,
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April 15, 2013
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One of the interesting themes for that emerged for me at AACR this year was the amount of effort that…
April 13, 2013
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2:54 PM | Seeing Inside Cells: Array Tomography
I wrote a lot about dopamine and its complicated nature last month after coming back from the IBAGs conference, so for a change of pace, I'll talk about some truly amazing new techniques that allow us to see inside cells with unprecedented resolution and at unprecedented volumes.I've previously discussed some traditional techniques for visualizing specific details in neurons, and this month I'm going to talk about some of the newest fanciest ways to look at cellular scale information. […]
Micheva KD, Busse B, Weiler NC, O'Rourke N & Smith SJ (2010). Single-synapse analysis of a diverse synapse population: proteomic imaging methods and markers., Neuron, 68 (4) 639-53. PMID: 21092855
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April 12, 2013
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7:53 PM | King for a Day, President All Year
Grand strategy or wish list? The President makes a big move in the chess game of DC budgeting. Photo by John Fleischman
Even in a good year, the document commonly called “the President’s budget” is really just a detailed outline of what programs the President would support if he were king and not president.
This year is not a good year. President Obama’s FY14 budget proposal was delivered to Congress Wednesday (April 10), almost two months late. Tired of waiting, the House of
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10:05 AM | Right Turn: Biting into some incredible art
Developmental biologists among you may be aware that voting in the Node’s image competition wrapped this week. Five wonderful images were in the running for the cover on a future issue of Development – and bragging rights, of course. I discovered the contest too late to cast my own vote, but thought I’d include my...Read more
April 11, 2013
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This year’s American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting grew by 8% to approximately 18,000 attendees with 25% from…
April 10, 2013
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9:32 PM | The human machine: setting the dials
The previous post in this series can be found here.
It may seem sometimes that nature is a cruel mistress. We are all dealt our hand from the moment of liaison between our lucky gold-medalist sperm and its egg companion. We are short or tall, broad or skinny, strong or weak because of the haphazard combination of genes that we wind up with, and that should be the end of the matter. Yet, as any seasoned card player will tell you, it is not the hand that matters, but how you
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Barrès, R., Yan, J., Egan, B., Treebak, J., Rasmussen, M., Fritz, T., Caidahl, K., Krook, A., O'Gorman, D. & Zierath, J. & (2012). Acute Exercise Remodels Promoter Methylation in Human Skeletal Muscle, Cell Metabolism, 15 (3) 405-411. DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2012.01.001
Hackett, J., Sengupta, R., Zylicz, J., Murakami, K., Lee, C., Down, T. & Surani, M. (2012). Germline DNA Demethylation Dynamics and Imprint Erasure Through 5-Hydroxymethylcytosine, Science, 339 (6118) 448-452. DOI: 10.1126/science.1229277
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. If Edward Bulwer-Lytton were a biologist two centuries ago, he might have quipped that the pen is mightier than the pipette instead of immortalizing the sword in his expression. Yet phrases emphasizing the power of words have been around for nearly three thousand years and are more relevant to your science than you might...Read more
Phillips D.P., Kanter E.J., Bednarczyk B. & Tastad P.L. (1991). Importance of the Lay Press in the Transmission of Medical Knowledge to the Scientific Community, New England Journal of Medicine, 325 (16) 1180-1183. DOI: 10.1056/NEJM199110173251620
Eysenbach G. (2011). Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 13 (4) e123. DOI: 10.2196/jmir.2012
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Un estudio internacional en el que ha participado la investigadora del CNB Cristina Risco ha publicado en la revista PNAS la estructura de la ribonucleoproteína del virus Bunyamwera, modelo de estudio de los integrantes de la familia Bunyaviridae, a la que también pertenecen los virus que provocan la fiebre hemorrágica de Congo y Crimea y la fiebre del valle del Rift.
"Uno de los principales resultados de esta investigación es que la flexibilidad de la nucleoproteína que envuelve el ARN
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2:18 AM | The Trenches of Discovery
Hello. Our audience here has grown a little over the Planck release period. Welcome to the blog. You might be surprised to learn that there are actually three of us here. The others are James, the biochemist and Michelle the English student/artist/museum curator. Michelle is on sabbatical as she finishes her doctoral thesis, but James is still very much active. In fact, a new post from him should be appearing later today.
I'm guessing that if you arrived over the last few weeks, your primary […]
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Among the thousands of researchers rallying in support of medical research on the streets of Washington this week was former ASCB President Tim Mitchison. Photo by Kevin Wilson
Stalled traffic and stalled legislation are facts of life in downtown Washington, DC, and yet on Monday (April 8), K Street was blocked off for hours by an unlikely protest group— medical researchers. Over 10,000 scientists, physicians, patients, and science advocates sealed off this major downtown traffic
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12:01 AM | Primary Sources
"Secret of Life" letter goes under the hammer: Life comes from life. Photo courtesy of Christie's
Those with a million or two in loose change might want to sign up for a paddle this week at Christie’s in New York for the auction of a 60-year-old, seven-page, handwritten, and illustrated letter from a father to his 12-year-old son away at boarding school. The father was Francis Crick, the son Michael Crick. Now 72 and a noted computer scientist who lives in Seattle, Michael Crick and
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CellTweets #9 A Look Inside the Nuclear Actin Black Box
Belin BJ, Cimini BA, Blackburn EH, Mullins RD. (2013). Visualization of actin filaments and monomers in somatic cell nuclei. Mol Biol Cell 24(7), 982-994
Actin's role in the nucleus comes packed in its very own black box. The cell nucleus is a very small and complex place but given how much is known about actin in the cytoplasm, it can be startling to hear how little agreement there is about actin in the
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Newly appointed NIGMS Director Jon R. Lorsch.
Jon R. Lorsch knew it was coming but he still wasn’t prepared for the email explosion at his Johns Hopkins lab when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced on Monday that Lorsch would become the new Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), starting this summer. “You can’t imagine how many emails I’ve gotten in the last few hours,” Lorsch reported by early afternoon. “It’s
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April 09, 2013
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3:03 PM | Oldies but still goodies: how we continue to transform the field of haematopoietic stem cells
“A Rat’s Past Lives, a Giraffe and Bull” depicts the interaction between the extracellular matrix and differentiated hematopoietic stem cells. Image by Elizabeth Cambridge from the Cells I See library . If you Google the term “stem cells”, you will be inundated by search results that range from the expected to the truly bizarre. For...Read more
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MetaPath, a metabolic pathway visualisation and analysis tool I’ve developed as part of my PhD, has been released today via PyPi and github. A Mac .app bundle is also available.
Download Mac OS X Mountain Lion .app • Github • Python .egg or .gz.
MetaPath requires installation of Graphviz for pathway drawing.
Who’s it for?
MetaPath is developed as an ongoing part of my PhD to build analysis software for metabolic pathways that is user-friendly, intuitive,
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[Continued from yesterday...]
In the first piece of this post I covered the implications of Planck for the paradigm of inflation. This piece covers the rest.
The anomalies
This is what the CMB would look like in an unphysical Bianchi universe. A worry for our physicality is that ths unphysical Bianchi universe seems to fit the data better than a physical \(\Lambda\)CDM universe.
It would be impossible to provide an overview of this conference without mentioning the features and anomalies […]
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MetaPath, a metabolic pathway visualisation and analysis tool I’ve developed as part of my PhD, has been released today via PyPi and github. A Mac .app bundle is also available.
Download Mac OS X Mountain Lion .app • Github • Python .egg or .gz.
MetaPath requires installation of Graphviz for pathway drawing.
Who’s it for?
MetaPath is developed as an ongoing part of my PhD to build analysis software for metabolic pathways that is user-friendly, intuitive,
[…]
April 08, 2013
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Sorry for the delay on this. I was pretty tired on Friday, travelling home on Saturday and doing physics on Sunday. I figured it would be better to write something with a little more care today.
Those who were following last week will know that on March 21 ESA finally released some cosmological results from the measurements they were taking with the Planck satellite. And, last week, they had their first scientific conference. I decided to blog about this. I had the initial ambition of one post […]
April 07, 2013
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6:11 PM | LMAYQ: Scales
The word "scale" can mean many things, and The Internet can't yet use context to tell the difference. So for this issue of Let Me Answer Your Questions, here are questions about scales that The Internet thinks The Cellular Scale can answer. As always these are real true search terms, and all the posts in the LMAYQ series can be found here. A Question of Scale (source)1. "Can you give a rat scales?" I have never thought to ask this question, but it is an interesting one. If you can […]
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8:00 AM | Pelicans on Webfaction
As mentioned in the previous post, I recently migrated this site over to the very clever Pelican. Setting it up was relatively straightforward using a combination of the
official docs, this post and linked github repo from Dominic Rodger. That said, there were a few things that I stumbled at and non-obvious decisions that I’ve documented below.
Setting up
Before starting you need to install the packages. Thankfully everything you need is available via the python packaging
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7:00 AM | Pelicans on Webfaction
As mentioned in the previous post, I recently migrated this site over to the very clever Pelican. Setting it up was relatively straightforward using a combination of the
official docs, this post and linked github repo from Dominic Rodger. That said, there were a few things that I stumbled at and non-obvious decisions that I’ve documented below.
Setting up
Before starting you need to install the packages. Thankfully everything you need is available via the python packaging
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April 06, 2013
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2:55 PM | Now with 100% more Pelican
Regulars among you will have noticed that the site is different, very different.
The Game of Life Science site has a long and convoluted history. Back in 2009 while an undergraduate I had the bright idea to create an online education site to bring together online materials and a neat method for testing progress. That got reasonably far, through numerous re-writes and re-organisations (github here) before petering out under the weight of content creation, community building and final
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1:55 PM | Now with 100% more Pelican
Regulars among you will have noticed that the site is different, very different.
The Game of Life Science site has a long and convoluted history. Back in 2009 while an undergraduate I had the bright idea to create an online education site to bring together online materials and a neat method for testing progress. That got reasonably far, through numerous re-writes and re-organisations (github here) before petering out under the weight of content creation, community building and final
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April 05, 2013
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How many university students can say they invented a product that people around the world will want to use? For that matter, how many people have ever invented a product that made it to the market?! Joe Landolina is CEO and Co-Founder of Suneris, Inc. and a student at the Polytechnic Institute of New York...Read more
