Here is a link to a very beautiful movie The Inner Life of a Cell. Those who has a degree in Molecular Biology will enjoy it a lot. Before downloading 24 Mb you may want to check some screen shots

EM tells you that the distance between two cells is in the range of 20 nm in fixed tissue. Thorne & Nicholson, however, find a much wider gap of 38-64 nm by looking at dye diffusion in vivo.

There has been broad news coverage of this paper. The paper proposes that pain sensitivity increases more in mice that are visually exposed to their cage mates being presented noxious stimuli (acetic acid injections creating thermal hyperalgesia) than if these mice were exposed to unfamiliar animals.

Institute for Advanced Study/Rita Allen Foundation symposium. Wednesday and Thursday. The speakers are Rita Allen Scholars, including me. Much of the focus of the other talks is cancer. For a schedule click here.

Nature peer review experiment. For the next three months, Nature is trying out a form of peer review in which open comment is sought in parallel with the normal, anonymous peer review process. [subscription version] [free for five days] I can’t find the information on the Nature site, but to quote the Chronicle of Higher Education piece, “the journal will allow authors to decide whether to participate in the open form of review. The manuscripts of those who choose to participate will appear online as preprints, and people who provide their name and institutional e-mail address can post comments about the content. Editors will also send those papers to anonymous reviewers, and will consider all comments in decisions about whether to publish the manuscripts in the journal.”

The Kleinfed lab has developed an acquisiton suite for multi-photon micorscopy called MPscope.
“MPScope is also compatible with many other microscope designs providing that they use the same scanners (Cambridge Technologies 6210) and data acquisition board (National Instruments PCI-6110E). “

Downloads and paper.

Last fall I participated in an interesting symposium here at Princeton, run by graduate students and sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, on the gap between science and the public. Information on that event is now posted: [Blurry vision]

Open source science. Here’s an interesting experiment in open source science - making information available openly via the wiki process. [Science 2.0] [Manifesto] I haven’t been through it yet to see if it is just discussion or includes data. But take a look! Hat tip to former lab member Damon Clark.