cancer and the cell cycle

Last Friday I came to the Max Planck Instute for Cell Biology, at the other side of Dresden, to attend a series of seminars including one from a colleague and friend of mine, Babis Hatzikirou, about the cell cycle.

The classical view on the cell cycle can be seen in this picture that I took from Babis's presentation (and which I suspect he took from somewhere else :)):
This is quite interesting although not precisely research news. Most of the cell cycle is of course devoted to interphase and only a minority of the time (assuming that the cell is not in arrest mode) is devoted to create a copy of itself (through mitosis and cytokinesis). The cell cycle is controlled by a finely tuned balance of proteins cdc2-cdc13 and a number of checkpoints make sure that before changing the phase of the cell cycle everything is in order. These checkpoints and their associated proteins (such as the famous TP53) are quite critical to prevent tumour formation as they impede the growth of cells that need DNA repair.

Cell article on science blogs

Blogs as a way to communicate science. This is quite an unusual topic for Cell that, as opposed to Science and Nature journals, devotes less space to the non-technical side of science. For those of you that are subscribed, the article is here.

According to the article there are approximately 20000 blogs with the label 'science'. That is quite an impressive number since most of my colleagues seem to be doing lots of things but not blogging. It seems that most of these science blogs are actually about pseudo science which would be the number of more conventional science blogs to around 1200 (always according to sources cited in the article). These are generally blogs like mine (of course in many cases better written and updated more often) which deal with fairly specific issues in a specific field of science.

These science blogs can be just about anything. Many do like I do and comment (what we personally find) interesting stuff in our own field of research that we find reading, mostly, papers and journals. Some do also include bits about their own lifes and produce some sort of hybrid between the conventional blog (understood as a personal diary) and the scientific blog. Some take the idea of science blog a step further and every day record their latest results online (although in some fields, like biology, this behaviour seems to be quite rare due to the extreme levels of competition between experimental biologists).

Why would any one start a science blog? On top of the conventional reasons why people start a blog (and weighted down by the fact that most of us do not carry sizable audiences) is the thought that when you write something with the expectation (as unlikely as it might be) that someone will read it that surely helps to clarify that something in your mind.

Acceptance of evolution around the world

National Geographic has published this chart that depicts the public acceptance of Darwinian evolution in 34 countries around the world. As a Spaniard I am happy to see that evolution is widely accepted in my country, with a higher acceptance rate than even in Germany where I currently live although not as high as in Scandinavian countries or in the UK (the birthplace of Darwin). In the U.S. less than half of the population (if the results of the poll can be extrapolated) have at least some reservations towards evolution although the country (of all those polled) that seems most hostile to it seems to be Turkey.

The links between scientific disciplines

I have just found this amusing article about how some guys took more than a million and a half scientific papers from 776 different branches of science and came with the graph included in this post. You can find a larger version (5Mb) of it at this site. It shows how often papers from different disciples are cited by the same paper so it can give a measure of what fields are more likely to inspire interdisciplinary work.

Most of the research seems to be in Medicine and biochemistry (including all the -omics stuff). Math seems to be more unconnected to many other branches of science that I thought but to be honest I am not very sure about the methodology. More about it can be found in Mapofscience.com.