Another gem from CNN.com

“Grey suggests the use of curves instead of hard edges on counters, furniture, and cabinets to help nurture contentment and well-being.

“The reason has to do with your peripheral vision and is linked to a primitive part of the brain called the amygdala,” he says. “If you were to walk down a dark, narrow tunnel lined with sharp rocks, you wouldn’t be able to think about anything except avoiding getting hurt. But if the same tunnel were lined with linen upholstery, you’d feel safe to daydream.”"

Pretty much.

“Article: Grant System Leads Cancer Researchers to Play It Safe”

“DiI is very rarely effective in mature brains, but it works well for tracing local circuits in human postmortem fixed tissue (personal observations).”

—Vercelli et al., 2000

*Fashionista
*Earmuff
*Flashdance
*Sausagefest
*Frappuccino
*Malbec
*Legwarmer
*Gordita
*Brangelina

“The ping-pong cycle acts independently of Piwi and Armitage but requires the function of Aubergine, the RNA helicases Spindle-E and Vasa, and the Tudor-domain protein Krimper.”

—from Malone et al., Cell, May 2009

I still believe that the most interesting problem in the world is the biological basis of behavior. I had to serve on a jury recently, and the biggest thing I took away from the experience was a new appreciation for the study of behavior. The whole case basically revolved around understanding why different people in different positions act or perceive things the way they do, and using logic to make sense of a large and complicated portrait of social interaction. And I just began to realize that the subject really is endlessly fascinating to me… the things we do, and why we choose to do them. So many fascinating things that are going to require decades to understand nest within the problem of understanding behavior itself: decision-making, emotion, reward, punishment, value, the generation of action, perception, social behavior. There are larger problems out there, I’m sure, but none that intrigue me more on a daily basis.

I have come to the conclusion that I’m not going to post in detail about papers I’m reading for the Lonely Hearts Journal Club, for two main reasons: 1. Because I’m more or less completely unfamiliar with the subject matter and techniques used half the papers I’m going to read, I’m not going to have anything interesting to say from a critical perspective, probably just a lot of commentary about how little I know about everything; 2. I’d rather not anger loads of individuals by critiquing journal club-style the papers I know something about in a global forum (well, at least more global than a bunch of people sitting around a conference room). Reviews are anonymous for a reason. :)

However, do look for ongoing comments about papers or subjects I find particularly well done or interesting. And paper suggestions are always welcome, especially “classic” papers in any field.

So I have reached the point in a PhD student’s life where, though there is still much work to be done in the thesis lab, it is time to start looking forward a little. And while thinking about where to go and what to work on as a postdoc, I realized something: I don’t know very much about science. Forget science— I don’t know very much about biology, even. And since this is likely to be my last summer without the pressures of paper submitting and thesis writing before the end of grad school, I have decided to spend it attempting to expand my biological horizons as much as I possibly can.

And so, I announce the formation of the Lonely Hearts Journal Club, where I will read two papers— one on something within the field of neuroscience, or I’ll feel guilty about abandoning my specialization completely, and one on any other topic in the biological sciences— every two days. I will discuss these papers here, because, as this is the Lonely Hearts Journal Club, I’m the only one reading them. And I will pick a venue outside the couch in my apartment to have my “discussions” in, otherwise I will probably just fold laundry or watch old episodes of MTV’s “Engaged and Underage” instead of getting any work done.

First up:

Mathy et al., Neuron, 2009 (“Encoding of Oscillations by Axonal Bursts in Inferior Olive Neurons”).

Li et al., Cell, 2009 (“Collapse of Germline piRNAs in the Absence of Argonaute3 Reveals Somatic piRNAs in Flies”).

It’s that time of year again— time to fill out your bracket for your lab’s March Madness pool. If you don’t live in America and/or have no idea what I’m talking about, well, I’m sorry.

Here are some tips on how to pick which teams are going to win, and emerge victorious in your lab’s NCAA March Madness pool:

-Did anyone in your lab/scientific circle go to that school as an undergrad? Do not pick that team to win.

-Either your lab or the lab next door has an old technician who reads the newspaper every day at lunch. Just pick whatever teams they did.

-Does the name of a team include the name of a state? Pick that team to win.

-Do not create a random bracket generator using Matlab/another programming language to pick your teams. You’ll think it’s a cool idea until you realize that people take the March Madness pool seriously.

-Fact: the higher the ratio of blondes/brunettes at any college, the more likely it is that the team will succeed. If you don’t know the ratio at that particular institution, estimating based on the B/B ratio of the state in which the college is located is a good first approximation.

-In every department, there’s guaranteed to be at least person who went to Duke. Find that person, and copy their bracket entirely, except for any game that involves Duke.

My father used to have a coffee mug that said “Old bowlers never die, they just strike out.” Why he had it, I have no idea, because I can only ever remember him playing golf when I was growing up. In any case, what do old scientists do?

Increasingly, I’m starting to think science is a young person’s game. It takes so much time, so much energy, so much focus, so much money, and so much effort to remain on the forefront of whatever your field is (assuming you were lucky enough to be there in the first place), that it always impresses me greatly when someone who has been in the field for 20 or 30+ years is still doing really innovative, interesting work. I think part of this is the nature of the way a lot of biology is done—-if you’re lucky, you discover something new, interesting, and important when you’re young, you get a job with this discovery, and you use your lab to study this thing, as well as a few related things, in extreme detail for the next few decades; this often leads to the smaller questions and experiments being done later in one’s career, and if you’re not lucky/good enough to happen upon another discovery as interesting as your first one, you end up doing this kind of work until the end. Also, it’s very challenging to keep learning the newest approaches, keeping up with a literature that tends to get broader and more complicated as a field progresses, and very expensive to keep retooling. And distractions start to about as one gets older, between familial obligations, administrative demands that start to accrue as progresses through the academic hierarchy, time spent away from the lab giving talks. I think out of all the things about my boss I find impressive, the thing I find most compelling is that he keeps doing really interesting, technologically innovative work after three decades or so in the business—-and he’s been that way his entire career. That’s hard to do.