Free Lantern

A few days ago a friend of mine send me an article by an American University professor Jonathan I. Katz with the title “Don’t become a Scientist!”. It is very interesting point of view.
In the last few days I have been thinking a lot about this article. Of course for me is rather late now as I have done my PhD and am doing a Post Doc but maybe it is not too late. Well I’m still leaving all options open and see what is coming next…
Talking about scientists and grad students many of you might have been wondering if the economy crisis will have an effect on grad students or not. Here is the ultimate answer by PhD comics:
The Economy Meltdown: Should you be concerned?

Ca ; De ; UK

A colleague of mine was searching for an article in Pubmed today and because of typing mistake she found this article. This is an article in Physics Journal (PDF original paper), and the reason I’m writing about it is the number of authors (I did not count but definitely more than 200 authors) and these authors are are from 74 institutions. I don’t know anything about the field of this paper but as a biochemist this number of authors was funny and surprising for me!

In the recent volume of Lab times I read about the (bad) effect of beer on number of publications by scientists! (You can read the online version here Page 14). Well, honestly sometimes if there was no hope of one (or a few) cold beer after work scientific work could’ve been much more difficult don’t you agree? So Cheers! ;))

Original article

New York Times article discussing this

P.S. The picture is the German Hefe Weizen (wheat beer) which is my favorite “publication reducing” agent.

Sometimes my friends who are not in the field of science ask me what is a PostDoc! Well I finally found the perfect answer for these questions!

Watch the series of PostDoc comics in PhDcomics to see what I mean comic1; comic2; comic3; comic4. I had also previously posted a comic from PhD comics here.

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Well it seems that this comic explains why DNA, Collagen and alpha helix are all right handed.

Take a look at Madeline’s comic page you can find other funny scientific comics.

Those of you who have something to do with biology know the importance of PCR in molecular biology today, for those of you who don’t know what Polymerase Chain Reaction is (or don’t care), in short one can say PCR did the same thing to Molecular Biology research that Transistor did to electronics! This is a video-song called PCR song, watching it you can also know a bit more what PCR can do! The song was made as an advertisement for Bio-Rad PCR machines and similar to USA for Africa song! In the rest of this post I also attach the Lyrics. Here you can find the original video and download it. I like it when at the end one of the guys is dancing with a PCR machine! ;))

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• The first Biodiesel powered Jet:
  Scientific Americal: A 1968 L-29 Czechoslovakian jet—dubbed BioJet 1—flew up to 17,000 feet
  (5,180 meters) over 37 minutes powered 100% on cooking oil. A three minute, 15-second test the day
  before was the world’s first flight entirely fueled by cooking oil.
• Talking about Fuel and alternative energy sources, in Nature collections, you can find Energy collections (Accessible for free), which is a collection of articles on different sources of energy. I’m sure you can find useful information there. These collections are really valuable one just has to find the time and surf through them.

Nikon has an annual competition called International Small World Competition which is meant for those involved in photography through the light microscope. The following picture is the second place winner. Real beauty, isn’t it? The picture is a fluorescent picture of a 3 day old embryonic zebra fish brain. Michael Hendricks, has taken this picture as part of his PhD work.

Michael Hendricks, © 2007 Nikon Instruments Inc

For more great pictures go to the web page of this competition and watch these amazing photo’s. On the other hand some of my colleagues might wanna take part in the next year’s competition.

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As I was surfing in the internet I saw these beautiful pictures of Mobula Ray, in the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. In this page you can read about them and see some more pictures.

Talking about fishes and ocean, a while ago I was discussing with a colleague that how few is our knowledge about ocean and the living things in it. Although ocean is accessible (or at least more accessible than space) we still don’t know many things about it (even less than what we know of space).
I just read in “The Gear Beyond” (Nature’s blog) that an international group of marine scientists met at the weekend to ask for $3 billion. Good luck for them as this money will boost up the research in this field.

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1- Simpson’s Avator! In the webpage of the new Simpson’s movie you can build your own Simpson’t avator! (There is a link on top of the page). It is really funny, even if you’re not a fan of Simpson’s. Here is the one that I made of myself…

2- “Google controls your e-mail, your videos, your calendar, your searches… What if it controlled your life? “ SCROOGLED is a great fiction novel by Cory Doctorow, which is published in 5 parts in Radar magazine. (for the other parts see 2, 3, 4, 5) My good friend Jadi has also translated it to Persian, you can read it here.

3- Dr. Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University is building organs in his lab. Watch this video, he gets the bladder cells from the patients and cultures them in incubator and creates a new bladder that can be transplanted back to the patients without the problem of rejection. It is a pity that his homepage in the university is very brief.