Maybe you discovered also this nifty little arrow that appears in OS X Snow Leopard Mail indicating that a date is being recognized (and can be moved to ical) or an address (ready for transfer into the address book). Continue reading Mail me!
I confess, yea, there is a misunderstanding (sometimes) between generations. A new mindset list like the Beloit College List is therefore very handy as it explains
Most students entering college for the first time this fall […] were born in 1992.
2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail. […]
7. Caramel macchiato and venti half-caf vanilla latte have always been street corner lingo. […]
20. DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed. […]
46. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station. […]
52. There have always been women priests in the Anglican Church. […]
65. They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus. […]
Maybe I should reserve some time to rewrite that in German with my children, yea, yea.
I have no idea where genetics is heading now. A Nature paper last week on the “population relevance of 95 loci for blood lipids” at least ends somewhere in the nowhere. Take not only 100 thousand participants but 100 million participants and you will get 95,000 loci – sorry to all my friends on the author list – that’s crap. Another, more interesting development during my recent absence in the Alpes comes by the Royal Society
In 1993 the world’s population was 5.5 billion; it is now 6.8 billion and is due to hit 7 billion by early 2012. A major new study looking at the implications of the changes in global population is being launched by the Royal Society with an expected conclusion in early 2012. […] Continue reading Does population matter?
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I am a blogging researcher: Motivations for blogging in a scholarly context
Sara Kjellberg
The number of scholarly blogs on the Web is increasing. In this article, a group of researchers are asked to describe the functions that their blogs serve for them as researchers. The results show that their blogging is motivated by the possibility to share knowledge, that the blog aids creativity, and that it provides a feeling of being connected in their work as researchers. Continue reading Blogs aids creativity
It drives me crazy – the new JACI review with a detailed explanation how VDD (vitamin D deficiency) induces food allergy (FA). Unfortunately, it has never been show that FDD is related to FA – while the opposite may be true… Continue reading What the #$*! Do We Know!?
I wasn’t sure whether to continue here the 2008 dung hill blog post or just opening a new thread as a colleague just entered my office with some news. Continue reading More dung hills
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?