Jul 11
The first animation was created by Hybrid Medical Animation and presents the micro- and macroscopic biological processes of the body (Via Gizmodo).
For more similar videos, follow the Youtube channel of Hybrid.
The second video features BioRap. No comment…
Jun 8
It’s my pleasure to host the 3rd edition of the Molecular and Cell Biology Carnival. This is the first time I host a non medicine-related carnival, so I really hope you will like the posts I found.
Let’s start with an important article from Bitesize Bio: How to reduce your lab’s environmental impact. 12 useful tips including non-mercury thermometers, recycling and many more.
This incredible animation, found at The Daily Transcript, should entertain you while reading all the submissions.
Cell:
Carl Zimmer at The Loom posted about E. coli Evolution Follow-up and answered some questions from the readers as well.
The Seven Stones presented us the E. coli transcriptional network.
Ricardo Vidal at My Biotech Life shared a new journal with us that is dedicated to Synthetic Biology.
Paras Chopra published a funny letter from Synthia, a new organism in this world.
Alex Palazzo at The Daily Transcript continued his series about the Future of Cell Biology- The Sweet Life.
Research:
First, have you checked whether your profession is included in msnbc’s 10 worst jobs in science list?
According to The Biopact Team, researchers present new microbial pathways to bioenergy production.
Elaine Warburton at Genetics and Health talked about the connection between nanotechnology and gene p53.
SciPhu anaylized an article: Use of polyethylene glycol for drying polyacrylamide gels to avoid cracking.
Sandra Porter at Discovering Biology in Digital World liked the flash animations of Sanger DNA Sequencing. Here is another short video about DNA sequencing.:
Medicine:
I couldn’ resist the temptation to create such a section. But what else to expect from a medical blogger? Of course, biology has a lot to do with medicine.
The Ouroboros team examined the question whether advanced glycation endproducts improve chaperone function in the optic lens.
Dr. Chock MD PhD told us some facts about Chocolate and Health.
Have you ever wondered what kinds of viruses can be found in human waste? Sandra Porter gives you an answer.
And the last article I share with you is from Larry Moran, our favourite professor blogging at Sandwalk, who supposed the launch of this service was inevitable: How to Activate Your Junk DNA!
Many thanks to Steppen Wolf (the skeptical alchemist) for giving me the opportunity to host this carnival. Contact him if you would like to host an edition.
Steppen Wolf gave me the opportunity to host this week’s Molecular and Cell Biology Carnival on the 8th of June (this Sunday).
Please send me your submissions via the official form or by e-mail (berci.mesko at gmail.com). The deadline is June, 7 at 12:00 PM.
I’ve only hosted Grand rounds, Medicine 2.0 and Gene Genie so far, so it’s going to be fun to be involved in the molecular biology community.
Jan 12
Last year, I started to create a list about sites focusing on medical/scientific videos, lectures and animations. I’ve been actively improving that list which now contains 17 websites! Through the comment section, I’ve recently come across a new service currently in beta. LearnersTV.com seems to be a unique resource of medical lectures.
This is a comprehensive site providing free Video lectures, Animations, LiveOnline Tests, Audio lectures, ebook download links etc in the fields of Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering, Medicine etc… This site provides free video/audio lectures of whole courses conducted by faculty from reputed universities around the world.
Of course, my favourite section was the one dedicated to Medical Genetics. What do they provide?
An extremely useful database! That’s what web 2.0 is about. Check it out!
Dec 13
The process of cell division which results in the production of two daughter cells from a single parent cell is called mitosis. Let’s see how it’s interpreted by lolcats:
And by plastic beads?
You can also watch a short video about meiosis.
Oct 29
I’ve written several times about how you can use RSS in medicine. I’ve featured:
But here is a new and extremely detailed video about what RSS is and how it is useful. RSS is just awesome! Kudos to the author! Now I have to go and create the RSS feeds of my Technorati pages.
Don’t miss today’s best post of the medical blogosphere, Firefox Add-ons for Molecular and Cell Biologists at Bitesize Bio.
Sep 8
This time, the Golden Mouse Award goes to Sandra Porter, the author of Discovering Biology in a Digital World. From time to time, I’ll present this award to bloggers who educate people in high quality and write hardcore scientific/medical articles, so to bloggers who make science or medicine more readable for laypeople and for even specialists. This week, Sandra Porter had some excellent posts:
Sep 6
Even in the lab I’m working in, we always say a word about, of course, Craig Venter’s genes. So I’d like to share the best summaries and my favuorite sentences of bloggers with you.
First, Sandra Porter asks an interesting question (Why is sequencing a human genome so expensive?) and tries to answer it at the same time. She says with the salaries of the authors and with all the sequencing processes, Venter’s genome costs at least a 100 million $.
David P. Hamilton has an excellent (as far as I remember, Deepak used the same word for David’s writings) post on this Venter story written with masterful sarcasm:
The real significance of Venter’s genome is that it has officially kicked off a new era of “celebrity genomics” in which we’re likely to see a progression of rich and famous people pony up the $100,000 it takes to glimpse their genetic future.
A New Human Genome Sequence Paves the Way for Individualized Genomics from PLoS Biology written by Liza Gross:
The predictive power of individualized genomics, they argue, will depend on gathering far more genomic data from many more individuals. Until then, an individual’s genome sequence will work best in predicting risk for diseases associated with single-gene mutations, like Huntington disease or Fragile X syndrome.
I hope I’ve already welcomed GenomeBoy in the DNA-Network Team. If not, then here is a recent post: Oral fixation
Hsien-Hsien Lei, as always, has a great summary of what has happened in the last few days in the blogosphere.
And at last, take a look at the official Venter genome (the so called “HuRef”) page or navigate among his genes interactively.
Related links:
Sep 5
I’ve already talked about WikiProfessional.org, a semantic medical and scientific wiki. This is a new site (currently in alpha testing) on which you can create now your personalized free Internet Desktop. What does it mean?
You can upload information about you and your scientific work and there is a Knowlet Space as well:
Exploring concepts using the Knowlet Space gives the user a view on the relationships between concepts found in a huge number of scientific publications in just a glance. The Knowlet histogram displaying the concepts related to the source concepts can be adjusted to give different views on the literature. A view on the experts publishing on the concepts of concepts of interest is also easily accessible in the Knowlet Space.
As you see, we can filter the results by semantic groups (anatomy, disease, etc.), you can browse among your own publications; but as it contains a lot of bugs and has just a few terms to search for, it’s hard to tell why this will be useful and valuable to the scientific community. The WikiProfessional.org is going to be the desktop for all the branch-wikis, like WikiProteins:
WikiProteins is a consortium initiative and is technically supported by the Open Progress Foundation and the company Knewco Inc. Wikiproteins functionality and content will be free to contributing scientists in perpetuity.
WikiProteins is in fact much broader than just a ‘proteomics’ oriented environment, although a main focus is on proteins and their role in biology and disease. Many other focused planned Wikis for Professionals will be developed but these will all operate on the same database system and will be fully interactive.
I’ve got three invitations to give away! Check out Scienceroll later for more information on this futuristic wiki!
Just a short post about a great resource of medical books. The Textbook Revolution is a collection of free medicine/health-related books. The FAQ says:
Yes, the books are offered for free by their authors/copyright holders, at least to view online. Some of the books have restrictions on printing, sharing, reusing them, etc. Please respect these restrictions. There’s no catch, but because this is a collection of other people’s work, each item will have different restrictions.
The maintainer of the site has a blog as well: The Stingy Scholar.
