Going to San Francisco and the Valley, SciFoo preparations

SciFoo is coming, so I take my flight tomorrow from humid and subtropical New Orleans (running experiment terminated this afternoon, things in liquid nitrogen for downstream processing) to the cold San Francisco. Besides the Googleplex I am visiting Berkeley, Stanford, UCSF and as many of the central places of high tech culture (you know, the…

Making notes in a seminar with an iPhone: in progress (SciPhone Test)

In our lab there are seminars almost every day, and I started to use my iPhone’s Notes function to record some information and thoughts I found interesting during the seminars. I am really not experienced in typing the iPhone keyboard yet so here are my first 2 trials first as screenshots and then the texts…

Physics geeks, get a retro car!

Online political marketing with embryonic stem cells

I’ve just realized that Mr. Governator’s official website is the most visible outbound link on the website of The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. That is actually a 3 billion dollar link.

google.stanford.edu circa 1997: a little slide

This slide comes from the presentation of Google Fellow Jeff Dean on Seattle Conference on Scalability, entitled Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets. (The title Google Fellow seems to me as something similar in rank to a full professorship at Stanford.) Here is the presentation itself embedded:

Some fresh facts about Tulane University Medical School

Science on the iPhone, is it a good SciPhone? Aspects for a test series

I like Google and Apple products, but my expectations are focusing on how these products can help and facilitate me as a scientist, especially as a biomedical research scientist. With the Science on the iPhone test series I’d like to examine in details how proper and user friendly is the iPhone as an ultimate portable,…

3 rules to protect your iPhone from a serious Safari security problem

Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Joshua Mason, members of the software security team at Independent Security Evaluators had discovered a vulnerability within two weeks of part time work and “developed a toolchain for working with the iPhone’s architecture (which also includes some tools from the #iphone-dev community), and created a proof-of-concept exploit capable of delivering…

Audobon Zoo, New Orleans: Trolls, Gators, Swamp Monsters

Pictures made with iPhone by Anna.  

Fast networking with Apple gadgets at a Harry Potter party

On Friday we went to a Harry Potter Midnight Magic party at the Uptown Tulane Campus. There I met Noah from Michigan, who was videoskyping on his MacBook Pro with his brother in Los Angeles. Our 3 minutes talk was an excellent exemplar of what I call “fast networking”: Facebook confirmation, iPhone presentation, blog introduction,…

How to read PDF files on iPhone via Safari instead of lame email attachments

The 2 main drawbacks to reading PDFs on the iPhone are the must-send-it in email in order to store and open “solution” and the user-unfriendly, landscapeless left-right scrolling reading mode. Not anymore. Both problems can easily be overcome with the help of a Safari browser hack using the almost forgotten data: URI schemes. From now…

Organ donation after death: a generous gift or an obligation?

What do you think?

Everyone ‘should donate organs’ post mortem, UK chief medical fellow says

This suggestion sounds like a proper body recycling to me: Everyone should be seen as a potential organ donor on their death unless they expressly request not to be, England’s chief medical officer says. Sir Liam Donaldson calls for a system of “presumed consent” to be introduced to tackle chronic shortages of organs. Only 20%…

Donating Frozen Embryos for Stem Cell Research: a survey in Science

EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS: Willingness to Donate Frozen Embryos for Stem Cell Research by Anne Drapkin Lyerly and Ruth R. Faden, Science 6 July 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5834, pp. 46 – 47 DOI: 10.1126/science.1145067 We conducted a survey of 2210 infertility patients receiving treatment at one of nine major, geographically diverse infertility centers and asked…

Highlights from Science 6/07 issue: wireless power, education, hippocampus, avatars

It was a long time ago, when I last had the opportunity to scan through a complete printed, offline Science issue. On the picture made by Anna with my iPhone (it is not named yet), I am just going to relax with Science and sync my iPhone. Here are my suggestions to read: Straight Talk…

The domesticated biotech future according to Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson, old school physics hero conceptualized his rather philosophical thoughts on future biotechnology in a visionary essay in The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 12 · July 19, 2007. What is surprising to me that according to Dyson “our biotech future” is centered around genetic engineering only, and there is not…

Subscribed STEM audio and video podcasts on my iPhone

Just the mainstream actors of my niche STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. 🙂 I am not too experimental when it is about new podcasts without any recommendations based on simply trial and error, although it is not the best attitude. I hope this attitude will change due to heavy iPhone usage as the…

Say hello to Pimm, Joker, respiratory chain and science on my iPhone

As in the case of my old iPod, I’d like to use myPhone to access the scientific world and web from everywhere, not just as a tool of coolness. (Warning: Macbook shots, bad quality pictures on a good quality experience).

First post from iPhone

Dear readers, it is not so easy to write an interesting post with a one day old iPhone. Let me give you just one link manually this time: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/114290609/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

Reconfigure the NIH!

Although I have no time now to meditate on NIH policies (I must take care of my cells), but I spread this package from Tom further, as the timing seems good, especially what concerns stem cell research. 4 rules (1 abandoned by me), and 1 copy/paste. 1. Include in your post the links to the…

The architecture of the scientific web, a must read/see from Timo Hannay

Natureplex boss Timo Hannay published a landmark article draft on the web opportunities for the (more and more NPG boosted) scientific web. He highlighted 3 areas: audio-video content, databases (my emphasis), social software and summarized the science webspace with an artistic figure:

Links from my reader/radar: Googlized Science Direct, Foo Camp, G Scholar as impact-o-meter

Science Direct-ly into Google by Peter Brantley, O’Reilly Radar: Elsevier has now undertaken to have the majority of its SD journals (those for which it holds or can obtain the copyrights) crawled and indexed by Google. Both Google and Google Scholar are slowly incorporating an increasing amount of this content, and these data will be…

Prospective anti-research fears around Stem Cell Labs on the Globe

Stem Cell Labs on the Globe is a public map initiative of important, worldwide stem cell locations made by Google My Maps for the sake of stem cell researchers. The original idea is to easily find all the interesting academic stem cell places that you need to know in order to proceed further professionally. The…

Nature’s Superb Many Worlds Retro Cartoon Cover, quantum physics and SF

The current issue of Nature looks like something especially targeted for geeks with a high end content. Consider again the role of comics in science popularization. Is this Nature, not Wired? From the Editor’s Summary: “Yes, this is Nature. The cover art, by David Parkins, salutes a big year for quantum physics: 50 years ago,…