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I’ve been so busy these past few weeks that I missed our second anniversary Biocurious! We’re now coming up to the two year plus one month anniversary, but better late than never to review the past year.
Capitalisation — The most obvious change from last year’s post is the lower-case c. It’s just a little more classy this way.
Travel — I stayed in Canada this past year, but still managed to attend to excellent small conferences. The first was the Frontiers in Biophysics meeting put off by the two Vancouver-area universities, while the second was the Chemical Biophysics Symposium at the University of Toronto, where I’m also heading for my Ph.D.
André visited Hawaii, which, given those pictures, is where all conferences should take place!
Research — André published a paper! This paper described their AFM measurements of proteins involved with blood clotting, where unfolding of protein domains are implicated in the stretching mechanics. He’s also been working on combining AFM and TIRF.
Meanwhile, after discussing all about wormlike chains, I ran into problems that were insurmountable in the timeframe of a Master’s degree, but that’s part of the game, and ended up graduating all the same. I hope to talk about new work soon!
Scientific publishing — This remained as a common discussion point for us, with posts on the economics of open access publishing, giving elsevier a hard time because of their arms business, looking forward to drinking champagne, the tactics of for-profit publishers, and “debunking a physicist who didn’t care for open access“http://biocurious.com/open-access-unnecessary-for-physicists.
PLoS ONE launched, and I discussed some fears, while André asked that we hold off judging whether the journal model will be a success or not.
Fun — I wondered if any of us had windows in our offices, and tried to figure out what was contaminating one of my agar plates, while André discussed the physical aspects of fitness, and nearly-alive cornstarch.
This has only been a snapshot of some of the things we’ve talked about here over the past year, so hit the archive to see everything. Here’s to the rest of year three!
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Philip and André,
Congratulations on 2 great years.
Chris