I have been reading a fascinating paper on a couple of proteins called lamin-A and lamin-B. Our cells have their DNA in a particular compartment called the nucleus and the lamin’s basically strengthen the wall of the nucleus, protecting the DNA inside. The work is by Dennis Discher’s group at the University of Pennsylvania.
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This is a good question. It is also the excellent title of a rather speculative paper. The point is that cancer is a disease that results from us, and whales, being multicellular animals. We are made from around a few hundred trillion cells. If one of them starts dividing uncontrollably then it can produce more […]
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Astonishingly, the picture to the left shows not a flower growing out of a stem, or even candy floss or the hair of a back-combed terrier, but just ice. This ice is actually growing out of the plant stem in the sense that the mechanism by which it forms is roughly as follows.
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This was one of the opening lines of the guy providing entertainment for the conference dinner of the meeting I attended in Warsaw last week. The guy was an extremely accomplished Polish pianist, with a self-deprecating sense of humour. He interspersed jokes with stuff like playing the bit from Beethoven’s 9th symphony called ‘Ode to […]
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I am an enjoying a conference in Warsaw – the 17th International Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy. We must be enjoying it, a lady from a neighbouring table asked 6 other attendees and me to keep the volume down – it seems we were talking and laughing too loudly – in a beer hall […]
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