Category Archives: Uncategorized

CoffeeBlog makes the Best of Blogs list at MSNBC!!

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CoffeeBlog makes the Best of Blogs list at MSNBC!!

I know it’s just because the editor, Will Femia, decided to focus on medical blogs, and the field isn’t really all that big, but hey…it still counts as major media attention! He found my page linked from Lagniappe, and says:

One recent post that caught my attention is a discussion of a really cool idea for mixing text/audio translator tools with the XML program known as RSS which allows potentially wide distribution of Weblog entries. This leads to a vision of a future where we can sit in our cars and listen audio translations of our favorite blog feeds.

I thought it was a little far-fetched when I wrote about it. I was just pissed off at the moment at the Clear Channel radio monopoly and wishing I could get my favorite webcasts in my car, when I happened to read about AudBlog.

HIV Vaccine affects hispanics and african americans differently from others.

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There is a nice analysis of the HIV vaccine results at Lagniappe. This story has been all over the news, even making the local television news. Apparently, it’s supposed to be some big deal that the vaccince caused a greater immune response in hispanic and african americans than in asians or “others”. Who can practice medicine, now in the post genomic era, and not take as old news the fact that different genes may mean different medical treatment? I would certainly hope my doctor places patient care over being politically correct, wouldn’t you?

I am so ready for this to become a non-issue, but, as Derek mentions, it is going to come up more and more often now, like a repressed memory whose only release is through catharsis. Only then we can start talking about what we’re going to do about it.

Peter Schultz makes mRNA cry.

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I recently heard a presentation on this crazy guy, Peter Schultz, who has engineered bacteria to use para-aminophenylalanine instead of amber codons. The bacteria synthesize para-phenylalanine, have a para-phenylalanine tRNA synthetase, and and insert it with very high fidelity whenever the amber codon is found. The amber codon, which causes the ribosome to stop reading the mRNA when it’s found, is apparently quite rare, and because bacterial mRNAs aren’t as processed as eukaryotic ones, the bacteria get along quite well. I was thinking it would be really keen to make a series of mutants, each of which incorporated a different D-amino acid instead of the L version. Then, analysis of the structures of the D tRNA synthetases, of the ribosome translating the codon, and of the resulting protein could contribute a little information towards answering why we use all L amino acids.

Coincidentally, while I was googling a good link for this story, I found Lagniappe, who just blogged this story about the same time I heard the presentation.

Here’s Schultz’s PDF in JACS.

Derek, if you’re reading this, you’re the number one link at google for para-aminophenylalanine. Kinda funny that I find a blogspot blog as the number one search result for something right after google buys pyra. However, there were only 2 results total, so I only mention this to be funny, not to suggest anything conspiratorial.

Amazing Science – Mind Control Edition

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Sometimes an article comes out with a title that makes me think, “Wait a second. It’s not even April 1st yet.”

Joe Tsien’s NR2B overexpression experiment and John Chapin’s “Rats control robots with minds” were pretty amazing articles, and now Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence comes out with a technique that can detect “whether you are thinking about a calculation, a place, a colour or even what you want to eat for dinner…but it’s not good enough yet to detect exactly what colour you’re thinking of.” I believe they’re using Bayesian analysis, a great statistical learning technique which I’ve seen being used more and more often, to look for “EEG patterns embedded in the continuous EEG signal associated with different mental states.” Here’s a summary .pdf describing the technique.

First Post!!1!!eleventy1!!

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I promise to never write one of the following two things: excuses for not posting frequently enough or overextended, overwrought metaphors so old and tired they not only fell off the turnip truck last decade, but have been lying in the dirt of the dusty road, getting run over by passing farm equipment and tractors, ever since. You figure out which.