BioData

      In honor of last night’s Academy Awards, PhD Comics has provided us with their version of The 2397th Academic Awards:

The 2397th Annual Academic Awards

     Back in 2007, Joel Gilmore created the following video of the well know 007, James Bond, as a Graduate Student. The video was an invitation he made for a party celebrating the completion of his PhD.

     Thanks to @nparmalee, @LadyScientist, and @scicurious of the twitterverse for bringing this great video to my attention.

This week’s quote comes from George Wald.

“To Whom It May Concern:

For all intents and purposes, the SI prefix system has served the scientific community extremely well since its inception. However, we believe there is one significant flaw in the system which demands immediate attention.”

So begins the mission statement of a facebook petition calling for the designation of “hella” as a prefix for 10²⁷. “Hella” means “very” or “a lot of” in North Californian slang.

This week’s quote comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

BioKM is launching an update to our linking system and helping you connect the dots of your research by showing you its complete picture. Now you won’t have to waste time and frustration searching for your project related papers or protocols. You won’t need to keep looking up references to which plasmids or antibodies you are using in your project. When it comes to writing a paper, you’ll have all your project’s information organized and in one place. Click the link icon next to an item and it immediately becomes linked to your project. View all of your project’s related materials and their locations, events, tasks, papers, and protocols. Check out the following video to see how the linking system works.

     Uri Alon, a PI in the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, recently published an article in Molecular Cell where he discusses how to build a motivated research group.

     Motivation in a research group is very important as that is the way that work actually gets done. Its not enough to go uninspired through the motions and conduct experiments because if it doesn’t work out – what is going to push you to keep trying? I personally have spoken to many involved in research asking what it takes to be successful in science and research, particularly for those in the academic field. The two words I have heard over and over again are perseverance and motivation. Now that we have established that motivation is important in the laboratory, how can we instill motivation in our students, lab members, and maybe more importantly – ourselves?

This week’s quote comes from Henri Poincare.

      PhD Comics has once again hit the nail on the head with the following comic:

Cecilia’s Adventures in Thesisland, Pt. 6

      Ahh, to be a Grad Student…

This week’s quote comes from Sir William Bragg.

      SciencegeekGirl recently compiled a list of all sorts of science geek resources. On her list is Biocompare’s Funniest Science Videos. I suggest checking these funny and informative videos out when you have a minute.

      My personal favorite is this GTCA song from BioRad:

     In June I commented on the autism – vaccine controversy and the role that Oprah had in promoting it. Seven moths later, I am revisiting this issue. 12 years ago, Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues first published his findings in The Lancet providing ‘evidence’ suggesting they had tracked down a shocking cause of autism – that being the MMR Vaccine. Last week The Lancet published a retraction of Wakefield’s paper stating that “it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect.”

     Steven Novella of Science Based Medicine has a detailed article about this which I highly recommend reading. I can only agree with Novella’s conclusion: “I applaud the Lancet for finally retracting the Wakefield study and removing it from the published record. It should not, however, have taken this long.”

     Got to wonder what Jenny McCarthy and her pal, Oprah have to say about this.

This week’s quote comes from Wernher Von Braun.

     John Bochardt recently posted tips for editing laboratory reports in the Lab Manager blog. In the article he quite correctly points out that many laboratory professionals have difficulty in writing reports and that the process often takes longer than it should with the result being a poorly written report.

      I recently saw this PhD comic and thought I’d share this with you. For those of you that are working or have ever worked on a thesis, you are bound to have one (or two or three) of these days.

Cecilia’s Adventures in Thesisland, Pt. 1