Terrific Pixar-style Harvard animation on molecular biology

In my biologically committed childhood I fantasized about a movie which presents all the main actors of the cell machinery: nucleic acids, enzymes, cytoskeleton (see left), ribosomes (mRNA translation into polypeptide chain, see right), hydrophob and hydrophil proteins, lipid membrane bilayers, kinesins and so on. Now BioVisions from Harvard made half my dreams (no intranuclear story just cytoplasmic) come true, although I am just not sure about the music. Conception and scientific content: Alain Viel, Robert A. Lue, animation by John Liebler. The company behind is XVIVO, a Connecticut based scientific animation company. The movie is extremely useful for educational purposes. Link via BoingBoing from astroshack.

Imagine this made out of Lego bricks. When will Lego produce MatterStorms for bioDIYers besides Mindstorms for infoDIYers? Bionicle is not about biology at all.

Pimm in analysis: blogger self-test

Business 2.0 September cover story is Blogging for dollars, and in that there is a little rulebook: the 7 habits of highly effective bloggers. Let us see if pimm can pass the exam.

1. Focus intently on a narrow niche Partial immortalization is an archetypal niche topic: it stands in the intersection of many sub-field disciplines: stem cell and mitochondrial biology, regenerative medicine, analytic philosophy, Wired-type journalism and so on.

2. Set up your blog so that each post gets its own permanent URL Done naturally by my favourite WordPress motor and host.

3. Think of your blog as database Hey man, this is mainly a bookblog, so the majority of posts organize themselves into a hierarchical database according to the book-genre. We shall see it, when I have enough time to update the content page.

4. Blog frequently and regularly My biggest sin: I plan to develop it highly, but as I work in an experimental field I have problems to set, say 5 posts a day.

5. Use striking images in your posts Try to do my best in that respect, precedent was, when the invention of a good image took more time than writing the post.

6. Enable comments and interact with readers Well, I m still very hungry for comments and interactive readers.

7. Make friends with other bloggers As life extension and aging research is a niche topic, there are not too many players recently on the Web. I have crosslinks with my fellow blogs Fightaging, Ouroboros, Michael Yamashita’s Blog Scan, with SENS and I continuously scan the area for new friends.

Impact of Longer Lives on Retirement and Careers

From NewsReleaseWire: Futurists Look At Impact of Longer Lives on Retirement and Careers at the 2006 meeting of the World Future Society in Toronto. How to choose you post-career life well in an ageless society. Link