It’s time again for John Bohannon’s annual “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest. This year, in my opinion, there are even more high quality entries than in previous years! (I was one of the judges who did the first round of choices…the “winners” were then chosen by a panel that includes several professional dancers (for several years it has been members of Pilobulus))....

I have a small part in a show called SACRED WASTE which was created by LSU Ph.D. student Bonny McDonald – which is playing in the upcoming New Orleans Fringe Fest.  The show involves dance, poetry, ritual, elaborate costumes (made of 100% recycled plastic), and explores many aspects of the relationship between humans and plastic – including the manufacture...

Our lab has a paper called: “Enthalpic Switch-Points and Temperature Dependencies of DNA binding and Nucleotide Incorporation by Pol I DNA Polymerases” that was just published in BBA (Biochimica et Biophysica Acta): Proteins and Proteomics. The study follows up on an observation and prediction we had made some years ago in a different paper. The study...

This summer I am working with a student on trying to start to get some reasonable assessment of one of our ongoing oddball-ish outreach projects.  Working with a local videographer, we’ve been making 2 minute mini-profiles of astrobiologists who work here at LSU (Louisiana State University) – two minute summaries of who they are, what they work on,...

I was discussing SciArt on several occasions with different people recently and was fishing for a way to classify different SciArt in order to make a particular point – the point being that the type of SciArt I find most interesting and valuable is in the minority. Basically, it seems there are 3 (or maybe 4) general types of SciArt: informational,...

I recently spent a week in Lithuania visiting biophysical laboratories and giving a couple of seminars. My host was Daumantas Matulis of the Institute of Biotechnology at Vilnius University, where they have an EU grant that includes funds for bringing in visiting scientists from other countries (thank you EU!). Although my sampling of the science in...