We already talked about academic salaries in Germany. “Academics – Das Karriereportal der Wissenschaft” now has some figures on extras. You may expect 250,000€ – 260,000€ in biosciences for your first professorship with annually 48,000€ for consumables. You will get 6 rooms on average and ~2 technical positions, yea, yea.
A new nature medicine review is listing clinical trials targeting Toll-like receptors. These include 3 preclinical studies all using cpG-ODNs against TLR9 by Dynavax Astra-Zeneca, Coley / Sanofi-Aventis and Idera / Novartis. Lets wait and see…
The recent ATS congress in San Francisco had a nice session of “Just so stories“. The stories written by Rudyard Kipling three years after the death of his six year old child from pneumonia these are still some of the best questions ever asked. Answers at the ATS were by provided (by Powel) “How the birds got air sacs”, (by Loring) “How the elephant lost his pleural space” and (by Sieck) “How the diphragm got its dome”. The best session at the ATS!, yea, yea.
Have you ever wondered why Google Scholar gets so many more scientific PDFs than you? The reasons is that journal webmasters allow spider with legitimate names and/or legitimate IPs to enter their site. So you are outside fence if you have the wrong “User Agent” set in your browser, yea, yea.
I have now used the PLINK software package also for analysing family data. Again it is an excellent program that allows many new views on old data. I could run >20 traits all together on ~1000 SNPs in just a few seconds. There are only a few tweaks that I have already emailed to the author Continue reading Tonk, Plonk and Plink
Nature had some good recommendations —
… there are challenges to making data on individual research participants available to other investigators, every effort should be made to provide researchers with an opportunity to reproduce the reported results and to investigate new hypotheses and methods.
accompanied by a bullet list
* Statement on availability of results and data so that, as far as possible, others can analyse them independently
The new expression paper published 3 days ago, however, ignores that largely Continue reading Castrated data
A new plugin lets you immediately verify the sender by comparing the From: line and sending IP of emails against the published Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DNS-based reputation lists. Verifying addresses Continue reading Thunderbird security improved
I have always been amused by the fact being listed at the HUGO meetings immediately after a Nobel winner as WJ–ST follows WA–TSON. Not so amused by his many ignorant, Continue reading Avoid boring people
courtesy of Craig Venter – whom else? It is also one half of the genome of his only son (the individual denoted 3.5 Continue reading First individual human genome
A quick update of my DNA pooling studies: The Affymetrix Genotyping Console 1.0 now includes a parameter CONTRAST Continue reading And now all together
Embedded in the tragic history of Henrietta Lacks – a 31 old mother of five small children – the authors of a new Nature review show how closely both processes are being related. The main culprit seems to be genomic instability as shown by loss of heterozygosity. What has been particular new to me were the cross links to autophagy – the waste management of the cell that came into focus only recently in Crohns disease. Yea, yea.
Edge has an obituary of Alex, the worlds most famous talking bird.
What the data suggest to me is that if one starts with a brain of a certain complexity and gives it enough social and ecological support, that brain will develop at least the building blocks of a complex communication system.
This note should probably start with a smile ;-) as you may already know about my interest in parthogenesis, microchimerism, siRNA transmission and other epigenetic wonders. We already know about preferential transmission of allergy by the allergic mother Continue reading More on paranormal inheritance of allergy
A new review paper about online genetic databases nicely summarizes the current state of the art (including my own efforts). There are only 13 databases Continue reading Genetic databases – the tragedy continues
but repeats in the human genome are not such impressive. Instead they create a lot of trouble when situated in the close proximity to genes. Think of Huntingtons disease, myotonic dystrophy, fragile X or some ataxias. The human genome sequence paper already had a chapter Continue reading Repetitio est mater studiorum