In case you haven't had a chance to boil your blood a bit today, check out yet another article about the plight of grad students and postdocs in Nature Medicine. I don't know about you but I am fed up with reading articles like these that outline the problems but spend little or no time in providing meaningful solutions. I would expect more from a Nature Med editorial. OK, this would be the point at which I emerge from precipice of hypocrisy and offer my solutions ... hypocrite am I.

This article is from June, but I had missed it. It's a very in depth article about what makes a good mentor. It's a bit of a long read, but it has lots of good information to think about.

I was recently alerted to this paper from PLoS about the deletion of ultraconserved elements. The researchers knocked out four different ultraconserved elements and it had no effect on the mice. Under normal conditions these sequences of DNA don't seem to matter, so why has there been enough evolutionary pressure for them to be so perfectly conserved?

Here's a new review about the functions of p53 mutations that also discusses the role of genetic background and cell type on the outcome of certain mutations. This review really exposes the complexity of p53 biology. I wonder if this much complexity is unique to p53 or just known about p53 because there have been so many studies?

It is well known that cancer cells' have an altered metabolism--here's an article about a study that is trying to take advantage of this difference to selectively target melanoma.

Interesting article on a novel way of selectively killing cancer cells based on homozygous deletions. There are some interesting ideas in this paper, but what is really unique is that ideas are all that is in the paper. I think the "idea" paper is becoming more and more rare, but even as recently as a few decades ago, these sorts of papers were an important part of moving science forward. I'm glad PNAS will still publish this type of paper.

The Economist has an article about "Health 2.0". They discuss online forums for discussion of health issues.

Talk about a cure for head-nodding and auditorium slobber. How many people do you know that need to add a little Pecha Kucha to their presentations? I challenge all of you out there, next time you are up for a 45-min presentation, pull the "PK" card and then spend the remaining 38:20 minutes trying to actually have a little meaningful discussion.

Nice study with a simple approach to an enormously important problem. Amazing someone hasn't done this before. The mechanism(s) behind sustained transcriptional changes should be very interesting to uncover and it is safe to say they will involve both genetic and epigenetic stories.

A great new data visualization java-based web tool has been developed (parntership between IBM and Lenovo) called many eyes. It has a very user friendly interface and can produce some spectacular "visualizations." It is free but what do they ask in return? This is the best part, they require all datasets to be "publicly viewable by everyone." Of course, they obviously have commercial ambitions, but this open source data concept is leading by example. Who knows, maybe sites like these will ulitmately morph into scientific journals. I would propose that Jeffsbench add manyeyes-like functio

You have to love the occasional Science article that comes out of no where and involves relatively simple off the shelf equipment. This one is mind blowing for its implications. For most of us, and for the most part, our sensory perceptions are fairly accurate. And we experience few optical illusions during routine living. But this is now about to change. The day will soon arrive when all of us will be wearing computerized info-goggles. When this day comes, imagine the implications of a "sensory virus." In the short term, this technology may have a lot of commercial implications such as sensory rewiring for those in chronic pain.

Zotero is a new extension for Firefox that looks like a great new challenger to EndNote. It is a free, open-source, platform-independent reference mananger that looks like it has a lot of great features. I haven't played around with it much yet, but when I do I will post a review in the blog section. I'd be interested to hear an opinion from anyone who has tried it.

Student finds 5000 year old chewing gum that may have been just the thing for those rotting, festering, purulent gums that come with never brushing your teeth. A little phenol probably did the trick and quite possibly came with bonus buzz. Nice field work.

Big tech players are starting a big push into healthcare. It may take some time, but overall this is a very good outcome for patients.

Funny blog post about people "borrowing" reagents in the lab during grad school. My favorite experience with this was discovering that the "lab stock" of protease inhibitors was actually a post doc's private stock. This was discovered after I asked her if I could borrow some since the lab stock was gone. She promptly went to the same box I had been looking in (and taking from) and found that it was gone. My famous last words were, "Oops, I thought that was the lab stock......."

This is an interesting editorial in Nature about performance enhancing drugs in sports. They basically comment that maybe it would be better if they just let athletes use performance enhancing drugs. I have brought this up a few times as well just to get a rise out of people, but the author makes some valid points. The idea does bring to mind the old Saturday Night Live sketch, the All Drug Olympics.

This link references quite a few studies about intelligence and sex. In short, smart and dumb people have less sex. The article discusses the possible reasons, both obvious and not so obvious.

On another note, the NY Times has an article about 237 reasons to have sex.

This is great news! I don't need to diet, I can just hang out with skinny people. Curtis has volunteered for anyone in need of skinny friends.

Here's a very nice article about p53 and aging. This group has crossed a mouse with 3 copies of p53 to a mouse with 3 copies of p14ARF. This enhances p53 signaling but maintains normal regulation. These mice have less cancer and an extended life span, possible through reduced ROS. It's a very thorough and extensive piece of work.

Maybe it is a sign that I'm getting a little long in the tooth, but I am astonished the day has arrived where an undergrad science project can be to sequence a genome. Wow.

I found this in the NY Times...a good description of some of the basic prinicpals underlying statistics. And, an interesting read about the end of humanity. What's not to love?

Finally I can cut back on my 20 servings of fruit and vegetables a day. The one main caveat to this study is that it is based on differences in literature distribution and counseling that was given to the two groups. As brought up in the article, just giving someone literature doesn't mean they are actually following it.

The scientist has a short editorial about tenure that has generated a lot of comments from readers. Do you think that tenure needs to change?

The Open Library just launched! This is a free and open library project brought to us by the people from Internet Archive. This is a very ambitious project to make books freely available online. Check it out.