My body is my thesis: The 2009 AAAS Science Dance Contest

The 2009 AAAS Science Dance Contest is for hidden artists disguised as scientists, nerds and shameless self promoters who are tempted to dance their PhDs, upload it to YouTube and enjoy microcelebrity. A real thesis live, non-profit but for fun and a one and only chance to make a fool out of you. This is…

Resharing FriendFeed: What is the optimal length of a presentation?

My tweet was based on my recent Understanding Aging Conference experience where I was part of the audience and not a presenter. So the context is scientific presentations. Of course the chat continued on FriendFeed.

Sergey Brin goes mobile in 2000 & a Russian lesson

Sergey Brin, Google co-founder is a very interesting man. His story is the number one immigrant success story in the USA today, I dare say. I have 2 Brin videos to show you today: In the first one, Sergey demonstrates mobility in 2000 in 3 ways with his ‘faint accent that is no longer identifiably…

Biomedical informatics and the NIH, in the Googleplex

“I feel like I am talking to an empty room. Why do I feel like I am talking to an empty room?” starts Michael Marron his Google Tech Talk on NIH and the computational infrastructure for biomedical research rather unfortunately. (I remember that room.)

Pelletology: the essence of ultracentrifugation in 14 slides

Have you ever wanted to isolate subcellular components from molecules to organelles with the old but ever improving ultracentrifuge method but were unable to figure out a correct protocol as the basics were not that clear? To get an optimal protocol you have to take account the biological entity and pellet you want, the maximum…

23andMe: “official launch” webcast by co-founders Avey and Wojcicki

From the press release: The co-founders of 23andMe, the first, web-based personal genome service, Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki will hold a webcast media briefing on Monday, November 19, 2007 at 11:00 am PST/2:00 pm EST. (via The Genetic Genealogist)

Venter on the Web 2.0 summit, Mayer on Google Health and petabytes

The ongoing mainstream Web 2.0 summit has a little coverage on health and biomedicine too: an upcoming conversation with genomics maverick, uncovered Craig Venter and a past presentation by Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President for Search Products & User Experience, on health information. Sarah Milstein says: “They’re also interested in helping you store and access…

SENS3 conference talks are now available in MP4

All the SENS3 talks are now downloadable from the SENS3 website.

SENS3 conference videos online on a personal website

Similarly to the Edmonton Aging Symposium which reportedly “was a WORLD FIRST! in being streamed live onto the internet” (Kevin Perrott) amongst conferences, a selection of the presentations of the SENS3 conference are now available at the personal website of Richard Schueler. Richard is a big mouthed, cowboy hat geek with a serious life extension…

Vincent van Gogh and human embryonic stem cells

Let’s continue our Hit art illustrations for scientific slides project this time with van Gogh’s “Starry night“. The slide is from Chang-Kyu Lee’s presentation on the SENS3 conference, entitled Interspecies somatic cell nuclear transfer for establishing embryonic stem cells with desired genotype.

The last time you saw a science presentation with an overhead projector

For me, it was on SENS3, the presentation of Anun Hallen, who blamed only extracellular crosslinks (e.g. advanced glycation end products) for ageing. It was not the best presentation I’ve ever seen, I can tell ya. (I heard once, that there was a high school science contest in the 80’s with an overhead projector only…

The Gonzo Scientist on IdeaCity in Science and on the web

If you compare the Nature and the Science front pages (which is not the topic of the current post) you can notice a big difference: there are a lot of “web 2.0″ish fresh features on the Nature site while significantly fewer on the Science counterpart. Now Science came up with a new, less academic and…

SENS3: Stephen Coles on the secrets of supercentenarians (slides)

A supercentenarian is anyone with the chronological age of 110 years or older. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., co-founder of the Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group kindly sent me his slides of the presentation he held last week on SENS3 entitled the Secrets of the oldest old and he gave a permission to publish these slides…

Hit art illustrations for scientific slides: Fountain of youth by Cranach

Help me to collect the list of art illustrations that are frequently used and overused by scientists on their slides either as background or as an analogy for some biological or other scientific phenomenon! The first one is the “Fons Juventutis” (“Fountain of Youth“) and now quickly switch to wikipedian composed by Cranach, executed by…

SENS3 program: John Schloendorn: Medical bioremediation

SENS3 is coming, so it’s time to take a closer look at the agenda. Here is my first pick: Friday 7th September, Session 6 14:20 John Schloendorn Tempe, USA Medical bioremediation J. Schloendorn, M. Hamalainen, S.K. Kemmish, L. Jiang, J. Rebo, B. Turner, B.E. Rittmann Center for Environmental Biotechnology, Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University,…

Pecha Kucha for scientists? I’d love to participate

Pecha Kucha Night was invented four years ago by 2 architects, Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, in Tokyo. During the event each presenter is allowed 20 slides each shown for 20 seconds each giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. According to Wired journalist Daniel H. Pink: The result,…

The role of Journal Club in lab life and how to move the genre to the web

Regular (daily, weekly) Journal Clubs are crucially important events in the life of labs. Reviewing other labs’ results is a way to get synchronized with all the data accumulated by a particular subdiscipline. Moreover it is the most obvious everyday form (conferences are not that frequent) of secondary peer review of the given paper, when…

Microfluidics at SciFoo, 2007: packing cells into bubbles

Microfluidics deals with the behavior, precise control and manipulation of microliter and nanoliter volumes of fluids. Manu Prakash, grad student from the M.I.T.’s Center for Bits and Atoms had a 100% presentation on microfluidics at the SciFoo Camp, 2007. The small audience (I remember Jeff Hawkins and Lincoln Stein amongst others) was really amazed by…

Journal Club slideshow: MSC lung repair via lung-derived microvesicles

Embedded is my classical style (no design, based on the figure section, Powerpoint instead of Keynote) Journal Club presentation on the following paper with the help of SlideShare: Alteration of Marrow Cell Gene Expression, Protein Production and Engraftment into Lung by Lung-derived Microvesicles: A Novel Mechanism for Phenotype Modulation by Aliotta JM, Sanchez-Guijo FM, Dooner…

SciVee: scientists with faces and complicated stories to share

SciVee is a new multimedia and community site where scientists can “a., upload a video and synchronize it to their paper b., publish it as a podcast c., create a professional profile and join science groups”. So SciVee is a way for scientists to “communicate their work as a multimedia presentation incorporated with the content…

Microvesicles in cell-to-cell communication

This slide is from my morning Journal Club presentation at our Tulane Lab. Here are 3 papers if you are interested in the “microvesicles” phenomenon. Membrane-derived microvesicles: important and underappreciated mediators of cell-to-cell communication.

Aubrey de Grey’s Google TechTalk on Prospects for extending healthy life – a lot

Aubrey de Grey‘s presentation in Google Tech Talk series at the Googleplex, Mountain View, May 29, 2007 (Thanks, Russell Whitaker). More on Aubrey on Pimm: Content of Ending Aging, Aubrey de Grey’s coming life extension book 3 Edmonton Aging (Life Extension) Symposium videos Blogterview with Aubrey de Grey: life extension stories

Anthony Atala on regenerative medicine at New Yorker’s 2012 conference

Dr. Anthony Atala of pluripotent amniotic fluid-derived stem cell and tissue engineered bladder fame gave a presentation on Regenerative Medicine at the 2007 New Yorker Conference “2012: Stories from the Near Future”. Atala, the director of the Biopolis-like huge Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine with circa 150 people, talks amongst others on the differences…

Cell’s Superhero Cover: the role of comics in science popularization

I’ve just realized how cool is Cell magazine May 4 issue’s cover (the one with the Scientist Enter the Blogosphere report by Laura Bonetta) with the S-nitrosothiol superhero T-shirt. This substance may have some therapeutic utility in diseases such as heart failure and asthma. Illustration: Cell and me this morning. Cartoons are terrific education tools,…

Blogxperiment: science article popularization with Contents

The question of the blogxperiment series is: What are the good ways to summarize peer-review articles for a more general readership and transmit scholarly knowledge and literature? After showing an abstract and some graphics of a sample review on mitochondrial fusion and division apparatus here I wonder whether the simple copy of the Contents is…

Blogxperiment: mitochondrial division, the graphics way

In the blogxperiment series part 1 the question was: What is the best way to summarize peer-review articles for an open web readership and transmit scholarly knowledge and literature? Here is the cartoon way, figure 1. out of the context of The Machines that Divide and Fuse Mitochondria review, written by Suzanne Hoppins, Laura Lackner,…

3 Edmonton Aging (Life Extension) Symposium videos

Following Reason’s links at Fight Aging here is a little conference webcasting from the Edmonton Aging Symposium. You also can read a Conference Report at Ouroboros. There was a Symposium Live Streaming where for the very nominal fee of $5 CAD per connection to cover bandwidth costs people could watch the majority of presentations in…

Vint Cerf and a flicker of cerfology

Today I visited a presentation of Vint Cerf, whose work in the 70s on the nascent Internet Protocols, like TCP/IP became historical. Mr. Cerf serves as “Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist” of Google, and he has mainly a brand maintaining and popularizer role. Unfortunately he wasn’t asked about his activity on InterPlaNetary Internet Project…

Google’s Larry Page at the AAAS meeting: entrepreneurship and unlocking in science

Larry Page, Google co-founder, gave a talk at the Annual Meeting of American Association of the Advancement of Science, on 16 February. You can also watch the lecture on video if you download it in ram format. Page has not quite finished his PhD on Computer Science in Stanford yet, so he is a rookie…

Post Jobs effect: repeating the marketing mantra

I don’t know what happened to me today, but I am constantly repeating in myself one of the first sentences of the Steve Jobs iPhone Keynote: “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything”. Is this some delayed, and programmed effect leading to verbal addiction that attacks the sensitive minds?…

Steve Jobs style partial immortalization keynote: the iPimm

Now we are after the Steve Jobs Keynote introducing the iPhone at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. I don’t know if the iPhone line will be the ultimate portable digital device everybody is dreaming about, but I do know, that when partial immortalization as a technology will be first introduced it will be by definition…

Best talk at Cambridge today, Austin Smith: self-renewal is default

Is is easy to realize on a conference when you are hearing a good talk. The audience starts to take notes and gets focused. That happened today during Austin Smith‘s talk (look at Day 1 picture). Straightforward, not overcomplicated line of thought presented by easily conceivable, step by step slides, and hardcore science (facts). These…

Sand Hill Road Venture Capitalist about life extension as business

There was a very interesting comment dialogue last week apropos of Aubrey de Grey‘s TED talk, and the host was Baris Karadokan’s blog called From Istanbul to Sand Hill Road subtitled High-tech, venture capital, creativity and innovation. Here are some details. Link storytelling idea source

Early science protocol video: OpenWetWare Drosophila CHiP

One previous post of Pimm was about the advantages of online, open source-like science protocol videos. So thanks to Sri Kosuri, here is an early sample protocol movie (3 parts) made by John Cumbers on the preparation of fixed chromatin from Drosophila embryos to use the DNA in a genomic array technology, developed in Rob…

Science: video protocols can help to share the tacit dimension

Matias Pasquali has a short piece in recent Nature Magazine on the upcoming role of DIY videos in protocol sharing between scientists: “Probably the most feasible approach is to publish movies describing the methods, a service already offered by some publications and protocol websites, but which could become routine. Much more information on the essential…