Some months ago I decided to strengthen my background in chemistry by looking for chemistry lectures available online. Fortunately, I happened to find what I think is probably the best institutional program on offering lectures online: webcast.berkeley, the UC Berkeley initiative for opening its lectures to everybody from everywhere.
Finally, I chose the course “Chemistry 1A 002-General Chemistry”, lectured on Spring 2010 by professor Heino Nitsche, and I went through the whole 43 lectures, taking some lectures per week during some months, when I had some spare time.
I absolutely recommend this course. Professor Nitsche covers the main topics that correspond to an introductory chemistry course: stoichiometry, an introduction to quantum mechanics (introducing topics like Schrödinger equation, energy bands and wave-particle duality), the periodic table, Lewis dot structure, Valence Shell Electron Pair Repulsion (VSEPR) theory, kinetic theory of gases, acids and bases and reduction-oxidation reactions, to cite just some. By the way, I specially recommend lecture 43, about UC Berkeley and the Actinides, as a nice historical perspective of some of the core moments in the History of Chemistry in the 20th century.
Additionally, the experiments professor Nitsche and his colleagues perform to illustrate the theoretical concepts will help you to get a better understanding of that concepts and, together with professor Nitsche’s sense of humour, will make you to have a funny time as well.
So, if you are in my situation and want to get some background in chemistry, I totally recommend the course.
By the way, the spring 2011 course “Chemistry 1A, 002 – General Chemistry” by professor Heino Nitsche is now taking place. You can follow it from here.
If you have about three minutes of spare time, I recommend that you take a look at Derek Sivers’ TED talk “How to start a movement“. It is simply amazing. It will give you some interesting ideas about how to recruit mates and followers for your projects.
It is in English but you can add subtitles for a wide variety of languages.
Social networks are indeed a nice thing. You can keep track of your old friends, add new ones, be embarrassed with pictures of yourself you didn’t know about ,…
But what about when it comes to science? Have social networks any effect on the work and career of scientists? Is it a good idea to have a social network focused on the science career and scientists necessity of interaction?
Of course scientists don’t need to be isolated in a social network just for them, but is it a good idea for them to use a social network for scientists as a complement for their work and career?
There are some skeptical opinions about a social network for scientists, but from my point of view it is an excellent idea.
Sometimes articles may be published even a year after they were originally conceived (you know, peer review issues,…) and even if arXiv has partially solved this problem with the opportunity of publishing papers in preprint state and the community commenting them, a higher level of interaction would be desirable, even about research projects that are not yet finished. For biomedical researchers we have an interesting service with biomedExperts, which is able to show relations between researchers in the biomedical field based on the authorship of the articles, but not a real biomedical researchers community is formed or promoted. What else is out there?
Some interesting steps are now being taken to port the model of Facebook o Linkedin to the science field.
For example, we have Labmeeting, founded in July 2007 and most active since July 2008. Even though I have not explored it yet, it seems to be focused on managing and sharing your papers as well as getting recommendations about papers written by others, interacting inside users groups called “laboratories”. It seems to add some interesting features to the “state of the art” of social networks for scientists, but it seems to lack some broader social interaction features.
What I have found so far to be closer to the concept of a social network for scientists is iAmscientist. I found it through this post (blog in Spanish, here the English translation by Google) in the blog Bioinformática (in Spanish, here the English translation by Google.).
In iAmscientist you can post your papers, analyze their impact, interact with your readers and so on. So it seems an interesting first step towards a social network for scientists.
I just received a grant for a year from CIBER-BBN (here in Spanish and here in English). The research institutions network CIBER-BBN is a network of Spanish research institutions focused on bioengineering, biomaterials and nanomedicine.
The grant is for a project that my master thesis supervisor and I presented about using bacterial biofilms for the synthesis of “bacterial tissues” in what could be called a “bacterial tissue engineering”. We will mainly study techniques for biofilm manipulation, for example dielectrophoresis. Here you can find the reference to a paper analyzing the possible applications of “bacterial tissues”.
This project is also very related to my master thesis, which is about analysis of bacterial biofilms (mainly Staphylococcal biofilms) in medical indwelling devices: the mathematical modeling of the biofilm dynamics and the biofilm response to different treatment strategies and the modelling of the physical and chemical interactions when electromagnetic fields are applied to biofilms, as it happens in dielectrophoresis. So it will be very interesting to see if conclusions from one project can be applied to the other one.
Kakurenbo tells about “Otokoyo”, a game similar to “hide and seek” played inside the ruins of and abandoned citadel in some part of what seems to be a dystopic version of Tokyo. But Otokoyo is not like common hide and seek: it is said that children who play this game are taken away by demons…
The anime is written and directed by Shuuhei Morita and premiered in March 2005 at the Tokyo International Anime Fair, where it won the award for Notable Entry in the General Category. It also received a Best Film Nomination at the Seoul Comics and Animation Festival in Korea and it also won in Best Short film category at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal (at least according to the entry in Wikipedia).
Here you have the trailer (the trailer is in Japanese, because I think that Japanese voice actors (called “seiyū“) just made an impressive work here, so I prefer that trailer best than the English dubbed one even if one cannot understand what the characters are saying. And even though there is an English dubbed version available I really recommend watching it in Japanese with subtitles because, as I said, the voice actors just made an excellent work here.
It is a bit old (it is from June 2008 and, you know, two years in science can be a lot of time) but this article from Nanowerk provides a very interesting insight into the field of interfaces between organic elements (protein, cells,…) and electronics. Several different trends are covered in the article.
Firstly, a brief insight into the work of Peter Fromherz’s group from Max Plank Institute of Biochemistry is presented: the interaction between neural networks and electronics. Their range of research is wide, varying from studies related to neural responses to external electric signals, to research about neural signal monitoring employing biosensors. The applications: from enhanced brain computer interfaces to neurocomputing and brain research.
Focusing specifically in the field of biosensors, the article tells us about a new generation of smaller and more sensitive transducers aimed at sensing very tiny events like chemical signals from single cells. This new generation of biosensors would overcome the actual cellular sensing methods based on metal electrodes, like patch clamp.
Several technologies of transducers aimed at sensing events at these very small scales are proposed, like semiconductor transistors and carbon nanotubes. But a new third technology is explored in deep in the article: “organic ultra-thin film field effect transistors” (some background information can be found here and here).
Specifically, the article cover the work of Dr. Fabio Biscarini , from ISMN-CNR. This researcher works in the development of organic ultra-thin film transistors made of pentacene. This new transistors are made of a very thin layer (3nm-5nm) of pentacene and have the property of showing a very high degree of coupling with what happens in its environment. The application of this phenomenon is, as it is described, the ability to sense biological signals and processes in a non invasive way, witch makes it a good choice for its use as biological transducer. Also, these transistors have some more properties, like the ability to get adapted to curved geometries with ease.
The improvement of this organic transistors over, for example, inorganic molecular semiconductor ultra-thin films transistors(inorganic semiconductor transistors of just a few molecules thick), says Dr. Biscarini, are various: inorganic semiconductor transistors provide lower sensitivity (due to low capacitive coupling) and can affect the cells they are trying to monitor, as well as be affected by the cells they are trying to monitor.
AFM images (”b” and “c” images are magnified and modified images of “a”) showing the interaction of a neuron and a thin-layer of pentacene. The pentacene thin-layer is neither damaged nor modified by the neuron. Check the article for more information.
An amazing Flash animation made by the Genetic Science Learning Center of the University of Utah that gives us an excellent idea of sizes and scales in nature: from a coffee bean to a carbon atom. Really impressive!
Here you have the link.
A mayor breakthrough in the controversy about gene patents.
Last Monday, March 29th, United States District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet issued a decision about the claim made by The American Civil Liberties Union about the validity of seven patents related to the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, which are linked to breast and ovarian cancer. These patents, held by Myriad Genetics, made, for example, that a relatively cheap genetic test for breast and ovarian cancer prevention rose up to around 3000$, as Myriad Genetics is the only legal provider for the technology for those tests.
Of course, it is probable that Myriad Genetics will appeal the decision, but that judicial decision is a step in the right direction to put public attention into some abusive aspects of the current laws of intellectual property rights and industrial property rights, as well as to amend them.
More information can be found in this article from Wired and in this article from New York Times.
The judge decision can be found here.
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