clock | July 2, 2009How simple it is to see that all the worry in the world cannot control the future. How simple it is to see that we can only be happy now. And that there will never be a time when it is not now.
- Gerald Jampolsky
clock | July 2, 2009I am running to the Lindau Harbor for the last day's trip and will be offline for the next 12 or so hours. So I don't have time for a long post right now about this cool new dinosaur paper we just published in PLoS ONE.
So please check it out - see what it is all about and read the paper itself.
clock | July 2, 2009Microarrays have been used in the study of circadian expression of mammalian genes since 2002 and the consensus was built from those studies that approximately 15% of all the genes expressed in a cell are expressed in a circadian manner. I always felt it was more, much more.
I am no molecular biologist, but I have run a few gels in my life. The biggest problem was to find a control gene - one that does not cycle - to make the comparisons to. Actin, which is often used in such studies as control, cycled in our samples. In the end, we settled on one of the subunits of the ribosome as we…
clock | July 2, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
Today, I asked Eva Amsen, a participant at the 2007 and 2009 meetings, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
Hello readers of Bora's blog! I'm Eva, nice to meet you. I finished a PhD in Biochemistry…
clock | July 2, 2009This post, originally published on January 16, 2005, was modified from one of my written prelims questions from early 2000.
EVOLUTIONARY PHYSIOLOGY OF BIOLOGICAL CLOCKS
"Circadian clocks allow organisms to predict, instead of merely react to, cyclic (predictable) changes in the environment". A sentence similar to this one is the opening phrase of many a paper in the field of chronobiology. Besides becoming a truth by virtue of frequent repetition, such a statement appeals to common sense. It is difficult to imagine a universe in which it was not true. Yet, the data supporting the above…
clock | July 1, 2009Nobody sees a flower, really - it is so small - we haven't time, and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
- Georgia O'Keeffe
clock | July 1, 2009There are a bunch of bloggers here at Lindau, wearing Press badges, going to Press meetings and generally behaving like Press. Apart from PZ and myself, most of them are German sciencebloggers who are posting their interviews and dispatches on the Lindaunobel blog on Scienceblogs.de (you can filter only English-language posts here) as well as on Page 3.14. Last night we went out for dinner together and had great fun. Most of my pictures turned out, well, pretty bad, except perhaps this one:
clock | July 1, 2009Carnival of Evolution #13 is up on FYI: Science!
Festival of the Trees #37 is up on TGAW
Four Stone Hearth #70 is up on Afarensis
114th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is up on Homologous Legs
Grand Rounds Vol. 5 No. 41 are up at Edwin Leap
Carnival of the Green #186 is up on Conserve Plastic Bags
Friday Ark #249 is up on Modulator
clock | July 1, 2009This is a repost of a May 29, 2008 post:
I was wondering what to do about the Classic Papers Chellenge. The deadline is May 31st, and I am so busy (not to mention visiting my dentist twice week which incapacitates me for the day, pretty much), so I decided to go back to the very beginning because I already wrote about it before and could just cannibalize my old posts: this one about the history of chronobiology with an emphasis on Darwin's work, and this one about Linnaeus' floral clock and the science that came before and immediately after it.
In the old days, when people communed with…
clock | July 1, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
Today, I asked Betul Kacar of the Counter Minds blog, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I am Betul (Kacar), originally from Istanbul, Turkey, living in the USA. I actually came here to get a PhD…
clock | July 1, 2009PZ was sleepy this morning, but he was a diligent blogger - he sat through each and every talk this morning and wrote about them all in two posts. Knowing myself (and my ADHD) I did some cherry-picking. I skipped the heavy-duty chemistry lectures that I was bound not to understand, and went to only two talks I really wanted to see.
The first one was by my yesterday's co-panelist Prof. Sir Harold Walter Kroto (homepage, Wikipedia, Lindau biography). Just this moment, I am sitting in the press room discussing with other bloggers who are at this very moment writing blog-posts about Kroto's talk…
clock | July 1, 2009
This is the third in the series of posts designed to provide the basics of the field of Chronobiology. This post is interesting due to its analysis of history and sociology of the discipline, as well as a look at the changing nature of science. You can check out the rest of Clock Tutorials here.
It appears that every scientific discipline has its own defining moment, an event that is touted later as the moment of "birth" of the field. This can be a publication of a paper (think of Watson and Crick) or a book ("Origin of Species" anyone?). In the case of Chronobiology, it was the 1960…
clock | June 30, 2009The liberality of sentiment toward each other, which marks every political and religious denomination of men in this country, stands unparalleled in the history of nations.
- George Washington
clock | June 30, 2009
Chad wrote a neat history of (or should we say 'evolution of') clocks, as in "timekeeping instruments". He points out the biological clocks are "...sort of messy application, from the standpoint of physics..." and he is right - for us biologists, messier the better. We wallow in mess, cherish ambiguity and relish in complexity. Anyway, he is talking about real clocks - things made by people to keep time. And he starts with a simple definition of what a clock is:
In order to really discuss the physics of timekeeping, you need to strip the idea of a clock down to the absolute bare…
clock | June 30, 2009Today was a busy day. I was somewhat surprised at how shy people are of the little Flip camera - so much worry about the future career prospects if one does something seemingly 'unprofessional' like say a couple of words about one's research for the Lindau YouTube channel and my blog. But see the two interviews below, and I got a few more promise to do it tomorrow. I bet Nobel Laureates will be easier to persuade than the young researchers!
In the afternoon, although it was very hot, I put on my shirt and tie (instead of my 'Ida' t-shirt) for the Open Access panel which I shared with Sir…
clock | June 30, 2009Just because I am galivanting in Lindau does not mean I could not take a look at the brand new papers published in PLoS ONE, PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases last night. A few titles caught my eye - take a look. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:…
clock | June 30, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
Today, I asked Dr. SkySkull of the Skulls in the Stars blog, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
First, the name: I seem to have evolved many different aliases over my time in the blogosphere!…
clock | June 30, 2009
A brief interview with one of the young researchers attending the Lindau Nobel conference - Corinna Reisinger from Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung
clock | June 30, 2009
This is the second in the series of posts designed to provide the basics of the field of Chronobiology. See the first part: ClockTutorial #1 - What Is Chronobiology and check out the rest of them here - they will all, over time, get moved to this blog.
Here is a brief overview of the concepts and terms used in the field of chronobiology. I will write much more detailed accounts of various aspects of it in the future.
Seasons of the year, phases of the moon, high and low tides, and alternation between night and day are examples of cyclic changes in the environment. Each presents a different…