A chance to support research on Parkinson's Disease

The scientist known as @parklifensci (Parklife blog) on the Internet will be walking in the Parkinson’s Unity Walk. The donation page says:

Why I’m walking:
Every walker and donor makes a difference by taking the Walk one step closer to finding the cause and cure for Parkinson’s. By joining together with thousands of others, we’ll be empowering those who are living with the disease, and honoring those who lived with Parkinson’s.

Who I’m walking for:
Over 1 million people in the United States have Parkinson’s. 60,000 people are newly diagnosed every year – one person, every nine minutes. Walking and raising funds and awareness for research is my chance to help.

Why I’m supporting the Parkinson’s Unity Walk:
100% of donations go to research. The Parkinson’s Unity Walk is the largest grassroots event in the U.S., raising funds and awareness for research.

Ways to support my fundraising efforts:
There’s strength in numbers so please join me. Donate, register to walk, and fundraise.

I encourage you to donate if you can or join the walk if you are nearby.

All you ever need to know about the purpose of fraternity/sorority systems is explained by the prairie chicken

I shit you not. All scientific like.

lekking is relatively uncommon and mainly confined to birds – although some fish and insects do it. In a lek, basically, a large group of eligible and horny bachelors get together in the same place, fairly close to each other. They then each do some kind of individual (although, rarely it can be coordinated) mating display. They may show impressive feathers, or brightly colored throat sacs…They may call out, do an ornate dance, jump up and down, or even jostle or fight each other. Their main goal is to show that they are the biggest, strongest, most healthy males in the group…
In any case, by whatever definition of sexiness this particular species uses, the females in the area all gather around and watch the males in an attempt to determine who they should mate with.

Or maybe it was football and cheerleaders. Something like that.

Random Walking

drdrA:

I wrote a lot of grants in my first 3 years as faculty. A LOT. Nearly 30. And so I’ve read a few reviews, and a few summaries of review panel discussions that took place over my grants. I take reviewing grants incredibly seriously because I know that more often than not, someone’s career is on the line. If I agreed to do the review then the applicant absolutely deserves the most careful review that I can possibly deliver.

Anonymoustache:

I guess what they are all declaring is that a salacious story about a young superstar American icon will play really well with the American audience while a sordid story about an aging superstar American icon will just not play very well in most American households. The fact that the former is a colored man while the letter is a gray-haired white man has nothing to do at all with all of this, I’m sure.

drleigh:

From here on up, New Postdoc, you should know there will forever be far too much administrative crap all up in your science. What, nobody really warned you about this, you say?

AnyEdge:

So. One of the things I’m afraid of is not making a significant contribution to the world while I’m here. That’s why I like publishing. That’s why I want to win grants. I want to leave something behind. Something that mattered. Even a little bit.

The PalMD readers are kicking the DM readers behinds in the Donor’s Choose stakes. Every little bit counts. How’s about a little love for the schoolkids? $5? $10?

DamnGoodTechnician:

It sounds pretty great though, doesn’t it? In practice, I think it may have meant “count how many times a monkey craps in a day”, but at the time, I thought it was terribly glamorous.

Blogrolling: Infactorium

I’ve been scanning the Infactorium blog penned by AnyEdge a little bit. I am captivated by post such as these.
What it was Like:

I think now about all the energy I put into trying and failing to hide it. What a waste. I remember the bathtub, the soda bottles half full of liquor. The thinking people didn’t notice. All the little games I played to try to conceal how much, how often.

What Happened:

LawnBoy said: “if [ex] shows up, please just restrict yourself to two beers.”
Now, I took minor offense to that, but I understood. Later that year I made an ass of myself at goldlust’s wedding too. I did a lot of that. I could probably write 20 pages about all the asinine things I did at friend’s weddings. I was impressive. I stranded my sister penelope in the Chicago airport, because I was too drunk to go to her aid. Like I say, impressive.

More Grants, with a Discussion of the Constancy of Inadequacy.

I found out about two weeks ago that I’m going to be co-investigator on this huge grant, covering 30% of my time and salary. It’s the same work that I was planning on doing anyway, I just had no idea that it was going to be written up for funding. Silly me. In academic circles, everything is written up for funding.

What to Call My Degree

Medical Doctors don’t have to do shit but memorize and pass a test.

Why are you still here? Go Read.

Obviously, I'm busy.

Sorry dudes.
DoubleDoc captures the essence. One of the biggest rushes of science is the…..grant proposal?
Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde cannot figure out how to strip off the cover page when she downloads a PDF version of a paper.
I had a great scientific meeting recently, in case you care. ….as if.
Absolutely classic Professor in Training on the proper behavior at a scientific meeting. (My fat feet have now recovered, thank you very much.)
BSDs of science only see other BSDs of science. This really is a huge problem and I am not so quick to let OBSD off the hook, personally.
revere takes on correlation-is-not-causation triumphalism. Read it.
Apple is being incredibly stupid about their lost next-gen iPhone. Losers weepers dudes, losers weepers.
Candid Engineer sounds just about ready to be a PI.
and finally, how can you not like a title like this?
Things I Learned While Filming A Horror Movie Outside On A Mountain In The Catskills In The Dead Of Night Through Sub-Zero Temperatures With No Sleep, Little Food, And Some Decent Scotch

Obviously, I’m busy.

Sorry dudes.
DoubleDoc captures the essence. One of the biggest rushes of science is the…..grant proposal?
Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde cannot figure out how to strip off the cover page when she downloads a PDF version of a paper.
I had a great scientific meeting recently, in case you care. ….as if.
Absolutely classic Professor in Training on the proper behavior at a scientific meeting. (My fat feet have now recovered, thank you very much.)
BSDs of science only see other BSDs of science. This really is a huge problem and I am not so quick to let OBSD off the hook, personally.
revere takes on correlation-is-not-causation triumphalism. Read it.
Apple is being incredibly stupid about their lost next-gen iPhone. Losers weepers dudes, losers weepers.
Candid Engineer sounds just about ready to be a PI.
and finally, how can you not like a title like this?
Things I Learned While Filming A Horror Movie Outside On A Mountain In The Catskills In The Dead Of Night Through Sub-Zero Temperatures With No Sleep, Little Food, And Some Decent Scotch

PhysioProf's faaaaaavorite…

…Link Vomitus!
Prof-like Substance and Professor in Training fire up the DisgruntledPostdoc^TM
Odyssey notes that four bloggers will be officially covering the annual meeting of the Biophysical Society.
Privilege 306 (via 49 percent)
All About Addiction, one of the Psychology Today blog efforts.
Do you treat your academic trainees identically, or customize based on the individual? Is the latter bias or good mentoring?
PalMD is kinda cute when he gets crabby.
MsPHD is going to put together a book, woot! (I’m one of those that enjoys blog entries organized into a print volume if that is what she is planning. Think she’ll ask PP and I for jacket blurbs????)

How to Blog

For my Twitter refusenik friends who may have missed this making the rounds this morning.
This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post

What do you expect to see on a faculty web page?

Our good blog friend Professor in Training wants to know what trainees and faculty peers expect to find on a faculty web site.

Students
When you’re hunting for prospective mentors, what type of stuff do you want to see on their sites? Do you just want a list of degrees, publications and a couple of keywords that describe the PI’s research or do you want a little bit more?
If/when you join a lab, do you want your project/information/photo included in the lab page?
Faculty
When you google other faculty, what types of things do you hope to find on their site?
Do you look through faculty websites when reviewing grants? If so, why?

The answers already range from incredibly detailed to “just the email address“.
What do you want to see? Go play over at PiT’s blog, I’m turning comments off here.

Anonymoustache brings the heat on NIH grant "gifts"

Following our little discussion of whether or not NIH grants should be viewed as largesse or something a little more…professional, our good blog friend Anonymoustache teed off:

Not to be framing anything here, but I believe the best analogy for NIH grants is investment capital, and it would serve us all well to look at it and think about it in that fashion. Think about the NIH as a venture capital firm that has a really large portfolio. It makes calculated bets on a really large number of projects with a view to a two-fold return on investment: i) Increasing the body of scientific knowledge, and thereby ii) Generating advances in healthcare and medicine.

Go read the rest.

The manuscript has been submitted for crowdsourced peer review

Our good blogfriend DrJ&MrsH has prepared a manuscript for your review. It contains such observations as:

Despite no obvious size disparity, Righty consistently delivered more product than Lefty. Across all observations (n = 50), Righty matched or outpaced Lefty (Fig. 1).

Our data were consistent with this finding (Fig. 3), although the fucking ANOVA is only 0.07. I went ahead and ran the T-tests anyhow… Disregarding the ANOVA made me feel naughty.

Happy Reviewing!

Dr. leigh on the pharmacology of marijuana

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHHA! Okay dope fans….go beat up on the new doc in town for awhile….

CB1 receptors affect the function of the presynaptic terminal. When CB1 receptors are activated, they signal through G proteins to close calcium channels, preventing entry of calcium into the terminal. Calcium is needed for vesicles to fuse with the membrane and release inhibitory neurotransmitters into the synapse. So CB1 signaling stops inhibitory neurotransmitters from being released to the postsynaptic neuron. CB1 receptor activation also results in opening of potassium channels. In a resting neuron, these channels are closed. Outflow of positively charged potassium ions leads to increases in the net negative charge across the membrane. This is called hyperpolarization, the opposite of depolarization. As you might imagine, since depolarization causes neurons to fire, hyperpolarization keeps a neuron from firing. This further decreases the chances that neurotransmitter will be released from the presynaptic terminal. There are some other effects too, which I won’t detail here.

Now let us see, do you think this closing bit is a tad optimistic?

I hope that this helps to make the effects of marijuana make more sense. For the record, I am not interested in discussing policy or the legal status of the drug. I am just here writing about how it works.

Lazyblogger Linkage

PhysioProf: Lab Management 101

Trainees are like dogs: they can smell fear. If you are afraid of failure, and your trainees smell your fear…

Behind the Stick: What are you reading?

Now I’m already impressed on two levels with this guy, first because of his drink selection (when I was his age I drank Iron City beer in my hometown of Pittsburgh and the only malt that I knew was served by a soda jerk) and second because of his wonderful choice of authors. I love Kurt Vonnegut, been a fan of the man for years, and was actually saddened by his passing in 2007. There was no voice like his.

Miller Report: Plan B – Beany’s Nightmare

source

Wondering what your RC1 score and percentile means?

Apparently the scores for those hurriedly prepared RC1 applications are starting to appear and boy o boy is everyone perplexed about outcome. No fear….writedit to the rescue!
The comments following writedit’s post “RC1 Scores & Remaining Review Procedures” are off the hook. Scores and percentiles galore!

Blogrolling: Tales of the Genomic Repairman

The blog “Tales of the Genomic Repairman” is authored by:

A semi-cultured, good-natured graduate student in biomedical sciences who escaped out of the deep south.

Sounds intriguing, let’s sample.