Many of the talks from AbSciCon 2015, including some that I’ve written about here, are now available on NASA’s website. You’ll need Adobe Connect to watch the talks, but they are only 15 minutes (including Q&A).
Many of the talks from AbSciCon 2015, including some that I’ve written about here, are now available on NASA’s website. You’ll need Adobe Connect to watch the talks, but they are only 15 minutes (including Q&A).
This year’s Volvox meeting, as with the previous two, will feature an image/video/arts competition. Erik Hanschen, a graduate student in the Michod lab, has kindly granted me permission to post the winning entry in the poetry contest at the first Volvox meeting: a sonnet in honor of Chlamydomonas.
An Ode to Unicellularity – Erik Hanschen
On the second day of AbSciCon, members of the Ratcliff lab and I met with a reporter, Bob Holmes, from New Scientist. We had all given our talks on the first day of the meeting. The resulting article came out yesterday.
I’ve dealt with New Scientist before, and I find them among the better science news outlets. They make a real effort to understand the science behind their stories, a refreshing change from sites that slap misleading headlines onto barely reworded university press releases. Aaaand I’m going to wrap this up before it turns into a rant.
Posts may be thin this week. I am preparing a talk for AbSciCon and a manuscript that’s due Monday. Saturday morning, I will board the Empire Builder in Whitefish for a 30-hour ride to Chicago (no doubt some of the manuscript will be written on the train).
Meanwhile, here’s a song about Chlamydomonas (skip to 1:05 if you don’t want to hear the intro).
Undergraduate Maggie Boyd has been awarded the Life Sciences Poster Award in the University of Montana Conference for Undergraduate Research for her poster “Motility in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.” This is kind of a big deal: only one poster award and one oral presentation award were bestowed in Life Sciences university-wide.
Maggie has also recently been awarded a Honerkamp-Smith Travel Grant to attend the Third International Volvox Meeting in Cambridge, U.K. this summer.
The somatic cells commit suicide by a process known as apoptosis — programmed cell death — that I wrote about here. This process involves a minimum of several novel genes as well.