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Renato Dulbecco
Renato Dulbecco was born on the 22nd february 1914 at Catanzaro, Italy. He worked between Italy and USA, where he went for the first time in 1947 with Rita Levi-Montalcini. He winned Nobel Prize in...
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The most Zen of molecules
Chemists are the Zen masters of science. Chemistry is a minimalist art. Its structures and mechanisms resemble the spare ink characters which trickle down scrolls. We seek elegant syntheses in which a...
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The end of biofuels?
Hartmut Michel from the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics has an editorial (open access!) in Angewandte Chemie with a title that makes his views clear: "The Nonsense of Biofuels". He essentially comes...
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Amazing Preservation of a Permian Forest Redux
Here is the abstract and link (open access) to the previously mentioned article. It is too bad that with instantaneous preservation of a Permian ecosystem that no animals are mentioned as found. I...
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#openaccess: Exploitive prions versus your innocent immune system
Prion protein in red on dendritic cell beside neuron (green) This blog focuses on trying to understand how viruses cause disease in their hosts - whether they be single cells or us, humans. Attempting...
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Promoting careers in plant science
Promoting interest in studying plants and pursuing careers in botany has always been part of my job. The Phactor's basic premise is that everyone wants to be a botanist, but some people just take...
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Very very funky books
Here's some sculpture that may give the bibliophiles among you a strange feeling. On one hand, a book, rather than being destroyed, is utterly transformed into a fascinating object that is strangely...
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Photos of Preserved Permian Forest
http://gizmodo.com/5887454/first-photos-of-chinas-298+million+year+old-buried-forest
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Experimental problems in OPERA
It seems that are some experimental problems in OPERA: The OPERA Collaboration, by continuing its campaign of verifications on the neutrino velocity measurement, has identified two issues that could...
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Twisted Threads: The history of the LCD
Learning to tell time when I grew up was a challenge. Clocks were analog - not digital. Everywhere. I can still see the little stiff pink paper clocks we were issued in first grade, with a brass brad...
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Religion, self esteem and psychological adjustment
Much is made of the apparent fact that religious people are happier and better adjusted than the non-religious. However, as regular readers of this blog will know, this is to a large extent an...
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Do you study a cute enough organism to get patron funding?
How cute is that? Here's a well known entomologist trying to drum up research support on line. The problem is that charismatic organisms tend to get support from "enthusiasts" or their organizations,...
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Your Sunscreen Makes Fish Anorexic
Infinitesimal particles inside our cosmetics, drugs, and processed foods are making their way into streams and oceans. There, they become a whole new food group for fish and other aquatic life....
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Vanilla
The Phactor would be quite remiss to not post a FFF for the 2nd week in a row and it was kind of readers not to mention this. This is a pretty attractive flower, but this is the best photo that could...
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Refining the mass of W
In our standard model of elementary particles we have four fundamental interactions: gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force and weak interaction. In particular the last force is responsible...
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Should a doctor fire an anti-vax patient?
The anti-vaccination movement continues to grow, despite the retraction and thorough discrediting of the 1998 scientific study that spurred much of its growth. The stubborn persistence of...
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You just don't smell like you.
Our two black and white girls get along as well as any two unrelated felines can. But feline tranquility has encountered a bit of disruption for last couple of days. The event that led to some...
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Finding the elusive retraction motor
Sorry for no recent posts. I've been traveling and grant-writing, but now I need to think through one part of our pending CIHR grant proposal (due Wednesday). The overall focus of the proposal is the...
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Horizon in the Milky Way
On twitter Filippo Menconi shared an incredible flash applet realized with Stéphane Guisard's photos. The applet is intercative: for example you can change point of view simply moving the mouse up and...
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Holly berries and robins - not according to plan
Two different species of holly, if dutifully pollinated by their accommodating male plants, carry their red fruits through the winter to spring. Several springs ago, one of the corners of our garden...
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