While science does not produce such big waves at the moment, I spent some time last week at ourlocal surf spot here in Munich while sorting out this weekend about 2,000 shots. For those of you, who have never heard about the Eisbach here is the video trailer of the new movie Continue reading Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst
There are certainly a zillion ways how to do create a nice background for your Mac. Here is my favorite method of a weather forecast, an individual calendar and the most recent emails. I created just three geeklets and loaded them in Geektool. Continue reading A living desktop for Snow Leopard
At the Lindau Nobel site we can submit questions to Nobel prize winners. Most of them are trivial or even boring – basically how to make a career or what rank did you have in your university studentship. My proposal to ask there: “Is another information layer on top of the known DNA sequence?” You may want vote for my question, thanks!
One of the best questions so far is “Many people consider the peer-review system broken. If you share that opinion, do you have a solution?” by Clay Barnard.
Roy Glauber, Nobel Laureate in Physics 2005: The current system is pretty poor. So now it’s not a question of spending a lot of money, as it can be resolved very easily without. Good papers last and bad papers don’t. Individuals should rate the papers, although this may not need to be done in an official way.
Sir John Walker, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1997: The peer review system does have problems, but it is the best we have got and I am very much opposed to replacing it with a numerical assessment system. It is a lousy way of assessing people and the pressure to change this system comes from science bureaucrats. This is because it is scientsists making decisions about scientists’ work and the bureaucrats don’t like that; they want to have control.
Jean-Marie Lehn, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1987: That’s an interesting question! I have been interested in it for a very long time. I think we need to have a control otherwise things get in the literature that should not be there …
Being hit by some recent turns in science politics I remember a quote by Freud
“I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something you can not say aloud, or perhaps even think, though your experience of life can hardly have been different than mine.”
The source, however, is difficult to find – a letter to Oskar Pfister on Oct, 9, 1918 published in: Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, eds. Heinrich Meng and Ernst L. Freud, trans. by Eric Mosbacher. New York: Basic Books, 1963. The German version is being published in Sigmund Freud, Oskar Pfister, Briefe 1909-1939, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1963, 2. Aufl. S. 62.
Continue reading I have found little that is good about human beings on the whole
Music by Annette Focks here in Munich, movie by Chris Kraus, starring Monica Bleibtreu and Hannah Herzsprung.
Here comes the most striking connection between calcium and IgE that updates some earlier posts here
The fact that the regulation of intracellular Ca2+ concentration is different in various T-cell effectors may offer the opportunity to target key intermediates … to inhibit specifically the functions of one given T-cell subset. Continue reading Once more: Calcium and IgE
Here comes my most favorite paper in 2010 so far, clearly written and elegant in it’s simplicity. It is printed in this week’ Nature magazine
One reason for this is that epigenetic factors are sometimes malleable and plastic enough to react to cues from the external and internal environments. Such induced epigenetic changes can be solidified and propagated during cell division, resulting in permanent maintenance of the acquired phenotype.
Petronis sees heritability as multiple layers (like a Russian matryoshka doll) which is a far more appropriate view than the current DNA sequence based view.
The paper touches many points that I will also include in a forthcoming review where I am describing epigenetics as a buffering system before changes are permanently written in the genome, yea, yea.
Most recently I had the idea to use some voice detection technology for speech analysis at science conferences. It seems that also others had this idea before Continue reading $7.99 to detect a lying scientist?
Great tips from Hugh MacLeod
1. Ignore everybody.
2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.
3. Put the hours in. Continue reading Ignore everybody
Two new exciting papers about Jewish ancestry in the AJHG and Nature probably missed some of the background. As another blogger noted
It is remarkable that Jews have maintained a tangible cultural identity through those 26 centuries of dispersion, and perhaps even more remarkable that genetic studies now show they have maintained a substantial genetic identity as well.
Here is the answer – sharing faith and music. Continue reading Hallelujah
I need to refer here to a post 3 years ago and the medical literature that genes frequencies may have changed rapidly between generations.
Any empirical proof of this hypothesis, however, is scarce so far. Or I have to say, until this week, when I found a study published earlier in PLoS ONE that tackles this problem: Selection for Genetic Variation Inducing Pro-Inflammatory Responses under Adverse Environmental Conditions in a Ghanaian Population Continue reading Genes on the fast lane
Playing For Change: Song Around the World “Stand By Me” from Playing For Change
Filevault is too much of a good thing but slowing down your system and making Time Machine backups difficult if not impossible. No security is also no option, so I thought about creating a sparse image for just a few selected datasets, like mail, calendar, passwords and adressbook. Why should I encrypt 120 Gig when only 8 Gig should be encrypted? The sparsebundle is mounting automatically using a password from the keychain.
I found it, however, difficult to create the correct links that replace the original files.
A Mac OS X hint fortunately explains, how to do that Continue reading Optimized data security under Snow Leopard
Two recent studies used food frequency questionnaires to predict vitamin D status and later allergy (Devereux 2007 and Camargo 2007) probably the only two studies that seem to contradict the vitamin D hypothesis.
New research now reported at the ATS congress [Poster Board # A84] “Measurement of Vitamin D Levels Utilizing Laboratory and Dietary Recall Information from the Tennessee Children’s Respiratory Initiative” and published in Am J Respir Crit Care Med 181;2010:A1890 shows that FFQs don’t predict vitamin D status Continue reading Why FFQs don’t predict vitamin D status
Last week, I received by mail order a new paper by a researcher who has written about 30 papers so far, mainly about T reg cells and Il-10. She concludes Continue reading The desperate struggle for consistency