The Bitesize Bio team will be taking a well-earned rest over the holidays and we would like to wish our readers a very merry Christmas. Myself, Dan, Suzanne and Terry have really enjoyed bringing you the best of molecular and cell biology tips, journal articles, news, comment and other stuff over the last four months since the blog started and we are looking forward to bringing you even more information and entertainment-packed articles, as well as some excellent new features, in 2008. We will be resuming our daily article schedule on Jan 2nd.

For our final post of the year, we present a paper written by Larry Silverberg on the science behind Santa Claus. We hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for reading and supporting Bitesize Bio, and see you next year!….

ON THE TECHNICAL EXPLANATION FOR SANTA CLAUS’ ABILITY TO DELIVER PRESENTS WORLDWIDE IN A SINGLE NIGHT

Larry Silverberg
Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Raleigh, NC

November 12, 1997

The Premise: To explain the phenomenon of Santa Claus.
Human factors: What human conditions can explain the phenomenon? Why would a community of elves evolve to dedicate itself to such a goal?
Engineering Principles: What instruments and devices would need to be developed. What engineering limitations would need to be overcome?
Science: Which scientific principles would be used? Do we currently have the ability to understand these principles, then why not, and why does Santa understand them? Read more »

Amid the political controversy and obstructions to conducting stem cell research, scientists this year managed to turn lead into gold… Genetically manipulating fibroblasts to become ESC(embryonic stem cell)-like sort of sounds like alchemy in a way, doesn’t it? The product of these papers, inducible pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, were created by transfecting four factors into fibroblasts, Oct3/4, Sox2, c-Myc, and Klf4, and they found that the epigenetic, morphological, and proliferative characteristics resembled those of embryonic stem cells. Read more »

Have you ever had a sales person suggest just the right new kit or enzyme that makes your life a whole lot easier? Or on the flip side, how about when a sales person doesn’t get the hint that you are in the middle of keeping track of setting up a 96 well plate of PCR reactions and can’t stop what you’re doing?

Being a sales rep is a really tough job, requiring a thick skin, good interpersonal skills and the ability to handle rejection and a lot of pressure. I’m sure many of you have had the experience of sales people who were very good, as well as those of the more clueless variety so thought it would be fun for us to discuss our experiences, both good and bad. Here are some questions we could look at:

1- What makes a good sales person ?
2- What are the worst qualities in a sales person you have observed that should be avoided at all costs?
3- What is your funniest or best sales rep story? (Please, no company names, unless you are giving kudos!)

So here are my answers: Read more »

This is a rather personal post for me, as I’m getting set to follow my wife abroad, while still seeking a research or lecturing position of some kind, whatever may happen. The situation is sometimes known in academia as the “two-body problem,” and is occasionally lamented as a fact of life for the challenging life of a researcher.

In searching for stories that I could relate to, given my situation, I came across one in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Helen Atwood (a pseudonym) mentions many of the emotional and stressful points of my situation, although the details are of course different. I don’t know whether my story will turn out as well as hers did, but I would rather take the chance than lose my marriage.

Atwood offers some advice, that I’ll try to follow, and others might be interested in as well: Read more »

I’ve always thought that it takes a good imagination to study molecular and cell biology since we never actually see much of the molecular processes we study, dissect and hypothesize on every day. Think about the mental models you have of the processes of cytoskeleton polymerization/ de-polymerization or DNA translation for example. Aren’t they amazing?

Biovisions, a Harvard animation company have come up with an animation of cellular processes that is probably the closest thing to an external representation of a molecular biologist’s imagination you can get. Read more »

Wikipedia gets quite a bit of attention, and the student of the molecular biological sciences regularly needs a more in-depth information resource. There’s Bruce Alberts et al.’s Molecular Biology of the Cell, Harvey Lodish et al.’s Molecular Cell Biology, and David Nelson’s Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry if you have the textbooks handy. An online compilation or virtual library is extremely useful too.

Fitting that bill for the biochemist or cell and molecular biologist is BioChemWeb. With such a resource, I’m surprised that I don’t hear many of my colleagues mention it, ever. In it, everything from tutorials to protocols to multimedia to a Who’s Who listing can be found there.

Check it out, if you haven’t already. Read more »

For most scientists, writing their PhD thesis will be one of the most time consuming and complicated individual tasks they ever undertake. In my experience, the most common approach taken by students is to bury their head in the sand, get on with the research and only start thinking about the thesis when they absolutely have to, as the end of their PhD approaches. This obviously works, but it generally leads to a very stressful few months (yes, months) of writing. But it doesn’t have to be that way, with the right approach you can make the whole process much easier - here’s how: Read more »

As scientists, we have to keep up with new research coming out and follow the journals. We all have our preferred way of doing so though. Sporadic searches on Pubmed are one way, or weekly email updates on specific search terms (also offered by Pubmed) are another. Alternatively, there’s Hubmed for RSS of Pubmed updates, and many more options besides.

Using search terms narrows your attention however, so I prefer simply browsing around my favorite journals online. I get a broader sampling of current research that way - which may not be of concern for the average scientist, but for a blogger, it’s often more productive for finding topics to blog on in the peer-review literature.

Some of my favorite journals, below the fold (feel free to add to the list in the comments!): Read more »

There was some great stuff in the molecular and cellular biology blogosphere this week - here are my favorites… Read more »

As always, it’s these odd conjunctions of things that don’t go together that catches the eye. In this case, molecular and sociology. The actual article¹ is much more mundane and true to the correct science jargon, and included in a special section of the most recent Nature on “Proteins to Proteomes.” It’s also a nice article that examines a broad array of topics in molecular biology.

Of greater interest and with a slightly less catchy title, is another article on the section: Reaching for high-hanging fruit in drug discovery at protein–protein interfaces². The abstract: Read more »