“The Scientist contacted researchers around the world, looking for their tips and tricks for saving money in the lab; here we present 15 of our favorites.”
I’ve been saying for years that biology has become a kit-based science, when lots of the stuff is easy to make yourself and really doesn’t waste time. Spend money where you need to and be creatively economical when you can.
“The point is this: like people, ideas need a social life. Introduce them to your friends. Help them develop good contacts. It’s worth it: more than any accolade or discovery, you get the pleasure of hanging out with ideas and with friends.”
A comment by Erez Lieberman-Aiden on an article about him and his research and life. A very interesting and inspiring profile of Erez and his wife, Aviva. Erez is playful, disregards organizational and academic boundaries, and had incredible drive. He’s already done so much and I wouldn’t be surprised as to what he comes up with or ends up doing over his next 3 decades. This article is a must-read.
I doubt there’s a grad student, past, current, or future, who doesn’t like PhD Comics. It’s a great comic take on academic research life with a few sidebars of interesting stories in science that the writer shares.
Testament to the following, there’s now a movie:
“Piled Higher and Deeper” The Movie is a live-action adaptation of the popular online comic strip by Jorge Cham (www.phdcomics.com). It was filmed on location at and was produced in partnership with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
For those of us in the Boston/Cambridge area, there seem to be two screening tentatively planned – MIT and Harvard. Though no details that I’ve found yet (will look harder).
In the mean time, here’s the trailer:
PHD Movie Trailer from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
Beautiful visualizations of viruses and bacteria, made in glass. The artists is exploring what these organisms really look like, since most visualization is in color. Pretty cool.
“R is a widely used statistical software environment, and this should facilitate real-time statistical analysis of the rich amount of publication data available in Mendeley”
When I think of find-navigate-recombine-publish in science, this is the kind of thing I’m looking for. Now that I’m at a Big Data firm, everything looks like a nail. 🙂
“For the antiquarian shipbuilders who are painstakingly restoring the world’s only surviving wooden whale ship here, an essential ingredient can be very hard to find: lumber that’s big enough and strong enough for a massive 19th- century seafaring vessel, and cheap enough for a restoration project’s budget. Restorers of the Charles W. Morgan at Mystic Seaport had relied on fallen live and white oak trees from the Deep South, where hurricanes like Hugo and Katrina had uprooted many. But supplies were running low last June and officials wondered where they would find more. Then construction crews working in Charlestown made an accidental and historic discovery.”
Reminds me of the oak beam story from New College in Oxford, UK.
Is this a Pandora/Last.fm/Netflix/(put in the name of your fave recommendation, collaborative filtering tool) for brews? [Wondering all the possible biz models and social networking this can promote.]
Sign me up. 🙂
“The small industries and biotech freelancers springing up are, in some ways, like the divisions of the old behemoth drug company, but connected only by the tendrils of the Internet, and the relationships that grow so easily there. Rienhoff is contemporary biotech’s answer to the lost Renaissance man. He pulls the renaissance effect out of the network around him, using the terrible complexity of the global community to fight the terrible complexity of disease. It’s the way science ought to work.”
An interesting, if “anemic” article, on FerroKin, a virtual drug company developing chelating agents to treat excess iron due to blood transfusions (fixing the fix, I guess).
This is the second virtual drug developer I have hear about. In hi-tech, virtual programs managers are common, developing products across different companies – coder, hardware design, production, distribution. No reason to think that can’t be done in biotech. Especially with all the communication tools available.
“Developing countries lack both clean water and clean energy sources. By converting soiled water into energy and clean water, a new project could wipe away both problems.”
Every since an organic waste conference I attended a few months ago, I’ve had anaerobic digestors on the mind – for farm, for municipal waste to energy, even for small-scale home systems. Decomposition of poop is an ancient process and we’re just ignoring it and pissing away the benefits. In a smaller and smarter planet, we’re going to have to take more control of the whole organics process – from food, to distribution, to waste, to energy and fertilizer. [I sense a new brainwave coming on…]
I’ve got a new gig (read the announcement) and need to update my usual disclaimer.
Data and bugs
My name is Charlie Schick. I am Director of Marketing, Public Sector at Netezza, an IBM company (read the announcement). I am also a determined practical microbiologist with a wide range of interests (listed in part on my About page).
What happens here?
I haven’t been as prolific as in the old days. Also, I am sure I irritated everyone with site changes in the past months (moved to new hosted platform). So if you’re still reading this site, thanks a ton for still thinking I have something of value for you. I hope at least that I have expanded your mind as I travel into cutting edge areas in biology and data.
Standard Disclaimer (riffing off of Cringley)
Everything I write here on this site is an expression of my own opinions, NOT of my employer, IBM. If these were the opinions of IBM, the site would be called ‘IBM something’ and, for sure, the writing and design would be much more professional. Likewise, I am an intensely trained professional writer :-P, so don’t expect to find any confidential secret corporate mumbo-jumbo being revealed here. Everything I write here is public info or readily found via any decent search engine or easily deduced by someone who has an understanding of the industry.
On the flip side, this is my personal site. Please don’t flood me with ideas that you think IBM might be interested in. There are other channels for such biz dev, and this site is not part of them.