Avatar, heat, work and molecular therapy

I am kind of fond of long random titles for blog posts.

Just got back from seeing Avatar in 3D with a good mate who is visiting from Tasmania (Seth). James cameron did a good job in re-creating a fantasy world, as did Weta Digital. I quite liked the storyline and character development – despite the bad reviews. Was a visually stunning movie, though I felt a little dizzy/headachy by the end. This was likely due to the heat though and my dehydration. 36 degrees is not that hot (when not humid) – but the warm wind makes it pretty uncomfortable.

More warm weather to come – yay. Christmas in Brissy though so the weather will be nice then. A whirlwind 4 day trip, but c’est la vie.

Work has been busy. Yay. As per the monash guidelines we have from the 23rd to 4th jan off. I was in today though to do a maxi – got a cool new construct in that I want to use asap. Writing up my paper (actually several') – hopefully a decent impact factor first author though. Got news today the Molecular Therapy paper with Michael got accepted (I’m an author anyway, even if not first). Papers are always good. Finally on top of things and starting to feel comfortable. Eventually I will get motivation back and maybe even be inspired to go out photographing. meh, maybe.

Enjoy the break peeps – happy festivus (As daz would say), merry christmas (remember it’s about jesus and not gifts/food) and happy new Year!

oh the pretty lights

So recently I went to a conference on lights. Pretty lights. Fluorescence if you will. Lights in Life Sciences 2009. Damn impressive. What people are visualising with ocnfocal microscopes, widefield microscopes, 3d structured illumination, PALM, dSTORM, STED microscopy etc. Being able to visualise single proteins within a cell via a tagged fluorophore. It’s impressive. Kudos to the people coming up with the new technology – and to those developing the new fluorophores (a  lot of these techniques require photo-switchable fluorophores such as dendra, eos, PS-CFP2, kindling etc). I can easily see why the big journals are asking for this sort of technology rather than basic microscopy and “colocalisation”. I am glad to have a project that has allowed me to develop skills in advanced confocal microscopy.

I think I want to learn every available technique and then consult out.

I also covered my poster at the conference and a second poster for the ever evolving http://Researchgate.net

hmm. back to work I guess.

p.s. clannzu sounds damn good with rain in the background.

argh

So. another rant. I kind of remind myself of Foamy sometimes - http://www.illwillpress.com/vault.html 

Anyway, I felt some serious road rage today. If it wasn’t an overloaded ute seriously driving 30km/hr down the freeway it was a bag of clothes falling off a truck onto my windscreen or a cab cutting me off by driving up a traffic island and almost toppling over (the cabbie even looked scared and grabbed his window).

Ahh melbourne – some crazy roads. The weather here is great though – a bit of heat and very little humidity (so far anyway) unlike what I have heard brissy is like.

Seriously almost snapped and killed a crazy driver today – well not really.

6 1/2 hrs of continuous confocal (FRAP) – yay what a good day.

so anyway…. Neville Parish will soon make a debut at http://www.cityonahill.com.au

Leonardo’s Last Supper

Awesome.

The piece, by Peter Greenaway, is pretty impressive. A unique mix of artwork, lighting, music and pojector/cinematography. Short (20mins) but sweet. I found the use of lighting/projector on top of a fixed painted image to be a pretty decent blend of skills. If you are in Melbourne – it is going on for another 2 weeks. http://www.melbournefestival.com.au/program/production?id=3505 Check it out.

visually disturbing

A few visual sights I have found disturbing recently:

- A 5yo girl wearing a miniskirt so short I saw her g string when she bent over.

- A pink toilet bowl on the side of the street that someone had taken the initiative to use (hard rubbish collection, where people dump furniture etc on the side of the road).

- Someone had stuck a photo of a guy on the cow up a tree - http://blog.panedia.com/2007/04/27/docklands-cow-up-a-tree/

-clayton

-One of the regulars at my local pub spill bill on himself because he was trying to drink while pissing at the urinal.

- An indian cabby getting changed in the back of his cab (fully changed).

-The amount of blood that can be mixed with snot when you have a seriously blocked nose.

-The fungus growing on one of my supposedly ‘bacterial’ plates.

- The ants pouring out of the mini-CBD buildings in the docklands and running to get to the train station (by ants I mean people in suits).

Rio beats Tingalpa for the 2016 olympics

South America is celebrating as Rio De Janeiro wins it’s bid for the 2016 olympic games. This bid would normally be worth celebrating – however they only win over the unsuccessful bid of Tingalpa. Tingalpa, a small suburb in Brisbane, has now failed for 3 olympic bids in a row. More information about TINCOG’s bid can be found here http://tincog.splunge.net.au/

Science is cool – See the Bloodlamp

 

So – science is geeky. We all know it and embrace it. Sometimes you can use geeky scientific knowledge to make cool objects.

The bloodlamp by Dutch designer Mike Thompson is a glass ball filled with Luminol. It reacts upon binding blood to fluoresce – hence giving off light.

Pic c/o the NS pic of the day - http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn15018-pick-of-the-pictures

It was designed to make the person think about how precious energy is and how much they really need light.

anyway – how’s that for a random post of the day.

Important questions to ponder

Why must one walk up a rampfrom the footpath to get to “lower ground” in my complex?

Why was there one supra, one mitsu Evo X, one GTI, one skyline GTR, 2 HSV coupes a WRX STi, a civc type R (rally prepped) and 2 highly modified nissan patrols in my apartment carpark at midday? Why spend lots of money on a car then leave it parked in the garage all week long.

Why does the name “Craven Cottage” sound so cool?

Why did the butcher let me down? (Worst lamb shanks ever for diner tonight, I swear the sheep must have been 20 yr old reject stock).

Merlo or Di Bella?

Why does the microscope work fine when your cells don’t express the protein properly, but screws up when you get good clean expression?

Enough questions for now anyway…..

On another note, I’m going to cross post my ResearchGate Blog posts from their to hear aswell. Starting with this one on Gene therapy to restore color blindness.

A recent Nature letters paper by Mancuso et al details the use of a recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) in gene delivery to restore the function of photo-pigments in squirrel monkeys. The male monkeys, red-green color-blind from birth, obtained the ability to process red-green color information via the delivery of the L-opsin gene into the retina. 

While this research opens the door for further hope of gene therapy involved in human eye conditions, including blindness, it also raises some interesting questions. It was previously thought that the brain of adult monkeys would be too "hard-wired" to gain a beneficial effect from the restoration of deficient pathways. The recent paper proves that gene therapy can be utilized in "middle aged" monkeys, and is not solely an avenue to be pursued during early development. This adds a lot of significance to work already begun in human patients, to restore an enzyme involved in a type of hereditary blindness.

Original Article:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08401.html

Gene therapy for red–green colour blindness in adult primates

Katherine Mancuso¹, William W. Hauswirth², Qiuhong Li², Thomas B. Connor³, James A. Kuchenbecker¹, Matthew C. Mauck³, Jay Neitz¹ & Maureen Neitz¹

ResearchGate providing free access to journals.

This is a pretty awesome loophole potentially allowing free access to journals people would not normally have available.

ResearchGATE launches SelfArchiving
Repository
Scientific Online Network ResearchGATE blazes a new route into the world of Open
Access
Boston, September 15th 2009. The last few weeks have been big here at ResearchGATE
(www.researchgate.net), the world's largest online scientific platform. We have only been online
since May last year, but already have 140,000 members. Recently, we introduced our
international Job Board for Science and Higher Education. But today is set to be even bigger, as
we are launching our SelfArchiving
Repository. This will make full‐text articles available to the
public, for free – the first application of its kind worldwide!
Currently, there is no way for researchers to access millions of publications in their full version
online. ResearchGATE is now changing this by enabling users to upload their published research
directly to their profile pages (a system called the “green route” to Open Access). Our
publication index, containing metadata for 35 million publications, will be automatically
matched with the SHERPA RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo) data set of journal and
publisher’s selfarchiving
agreements. As a result, authors will know which versions of their
articles they can legally upload. Since nine out of ten journals allow selfarchiving,
this project
could give thousands of researchers immediate access to articles that are not yet freely available.
Our SelfArchiving
Repository does not infringe on copyrights because each profile page within
ResearchGATE is legally considered the personal website of the user (and the majority of journal
publishers allow articles to be openly accessible on personal homepages). Therefore, each user
can upload his or her published articles in compliance with selfarchiving
regulations . Our
publication index makes every publication identifiable and is searchable. Since each profile is
networked to the larger platform, the uploaded resources will form an enormous pool of
research for our members. Of course, it’s free of charge, like the all the other resources at
ResearchGATE.
To learn more about ResearchGATE and its many features, visit www.researchgate.net and sign
up for a free profile. Also, feel free to contact our team at press@researchgate.net.
To learn more about SelfArchiving,
visit www.self‐archiving.me

football, soccer and the world game

Well, if our teams last efforts in indoor soccer are anything to go buy - I suck. But I like to watch. Premier league and A-league have started again and this year is looking interesting. As ashamed as I am to admit it - I have traditionally been a Man Utd fan. (maainly from visiting man when my bro lived there). This year they are looking crap and it is good to see Man City starting off so well. Arsenal are also looking hot this year, and even the wolves have potential. Liverpool need a bit of help and we'll see how chelsea end up doing (off to a good start). Even newly promoted burnley beat Man Utd. So yeah - I am going for man city this year I think... but hope arsenal or chelsea take out the crown - Man Utd has just won too much.

In the A League - I am a melbourne victory supporter. This year, however, they look shit. Need some serious help. I am curious to see how well the new gold coast ends up doing.

For those looking for a new internet provider use iinet (use me for a referral). 4 live premier league matches (in HD) a round and 5 pre-recorded (via fox sports online). Free and quota free.

If you have a digital tv you can see serie-A and bundesliga LIVE in HD on that new sports channel ONE HD (ch 10 sports). They also show UFC wired, which is a crack up.

anyway, off to work.

TV, cars, melbourne, soccer

SO – priorities. Trying to finish thing that NEED to get finished and sorted. Also trying to organise time better so there is minimal waste. Getting there.

Now some random thoughts – TV: is crap, especially in australia. There are very few shows I like to watch. Bones, rush, nciis and occasionally csi. SO there is now a new tv channel (on freeview) called GO. It is basically a second ch 9 tv channel – where they show all the shows they canned. I like the crap shows!

Cars: So, I’m a little sad. The proton is gone. traded in. But i’m over it. Got a used 5yr old peugeot 307 xse (2l, 5dr hatch, 100kw). It’s nice. the leather seats a tiny bit cold when your skin touches them after work and melbourne is 8 degrees. – but it warms up fast enough.

Melbourne is awesome – still love being here – even with the sporadic weather patterns. Last weekend was so beautiful on the saturday arvo at a chilli cookoff in a brewery in the yarra valley. The sunday was bucketting down in rain. c’est la vie. Still managed to visit one winery. p.s. coldstream brewery rocks.

Sitting in the lounge room watching soccer, chatting to steph, chilling (feel too sick to do any work) and yeah – the soccer is streaming through the mac onto the TV c/o iinet/telstra fox sports online. In case you haven’t guessed – the new premier league season has started. It is lookig interesting. Arsenal and liverpool are both playing well now, and Man utd is playing crap. WIll be interesting.

Haven’t watched b’ham or the wolves play yet – burnley was looking ok though.

Well, I’ve been busy.

so let’s see. I’ve worked my ass off doing crazy microscopy on fancy confocal microscopes (FRAP, FRET etc).

I flew to the gold coast for my sister-in-laws wedding (of which I was the photographer).

Had a very brief sojourn in Brissy with a catchup of some of the old DICIMM crew.

Played with lots of relatives/friends new kids (zach, anya, etc).

possibly caught a cold.

signed a contract that may fall through due to East Melbourne being too close to the city (and so high risk).

ARGH!.

Tamiflu Rant

Ok – this whole media perspective on tamiflu is really beginning to shit me. The drug, oseltamivir, manufactured by Roche, is shit. The way they have modified it to be available in capsule format is the major reason why the efficacy of it is so CRAP. It seriously decreases the effectiveness of the drug and allows a door for resistance to the drug by the virus. But hey – the aussie government decided to stockpile it. Yay, aren’t they brilliant. It is well proven that tamiflu is not as effective as the australian counterpart – Relenza (licensed by CSL). But hey, what does that matter. There are tamiflu resistant strains of H1N1 “swine” flu already out there, as well as Tamiflu resistant strains of real flu (H5N1 avian influenza, H1N1 non-swine influenza etc).

The boys down at AAHL are working on a vaccine – hopefully it will be as effective as their trial effort with a single injection multi-valent vaccine against H5N1 that was recently published. CSL is also doing a similar thing.

Media – please focus on a real threat – like the outbreak of avian influenza affecting Thailand/vietnam and countries like Egypt etc.

Tamiflu

It’s the drug by Roche called oseltamivir, or tamiflu. They give it out during pandemics and to treat the seriously sick. They also dish it out occasionally as a prophylactic to prevent spread.

That’s what I just picked up from the pharmacist. Steph is getting tested for swine flu atm (since she is sick with the flu and been exposed to an Influenza A positive patient). She finds out wed arvo.

yay!

Messing around with the Safe-Imager

Just playing around with the Safe-T-Light and the fluorescent DNA stains.

Simon:

BlogSwitch

so – in case you haven’t guessed. This blog has no switched – and the servers’ domain structure etc will be redirected very shortly. Currently migrating everything to the new servers and enjoying the chilly melbourne weather. yay!. Also sick with possibly the flu (hopefully swine flu) and a headache.

things are a changing

finally getting things sorted, starting to get on top of stuff and yeah – that is about it. Website re-arrangement coming soon (new reliable host). twitter (aignome). photography upload, science updates and yeah other bits and piece (just made an offer to buy an apartment).

premiership

Well, what can one say. Poor Villa. Aston villa played so well only to be slaughtered by man utd right at the end. Macheda has skills.

Slumming it

So - I've heard a few people rave about slumdog millionaire recently. Having just watched it, I can say yeah it is damn good. Nothing overly amazing about it, just nicely done and the first movie in a while to keep me truly intrigued throughout.

Most movies are crap lately.

I may well be slumming it soon if we BUY here in melbourne. Makes sense to buy though, with the bonus finishing midyear and the market being ripe for longterm investments. Med finance companies to make it easier aswell :)

Feeling the Heat

So, today was a max of 43 degrees. Now that is damn hot, like really hot. Still no real humidity which makes it almost bearable, but not quite. All week it's going to be that damn hot. I walked to the car in the middle of the day and back, as a result I have a mild sunburn. The proton was running quite hot aswell.

Well anyway, no choice but to deal, drink lots of water and yeh - why not some Dr Pepper.

USA Foods www.usafoods.com.au sells Dr Pepper, so I bought 24 cans. I also bought some Lipton raspberry flavoured instant Iced Tea, PopTarts (for Matt) and a can of Cherry (Code Red) Mountain Dew (crap).

Hooray for aircon - lets hope the energy companies have enough power to let us keep running it.

Oh yeah, did I mention some of connex's (victorian rail) tracks buckled under the heat today.

Random Reviews

Liverpool vs Everton: Damn - These two are permanently at each other. Liverpool should be the better team and definitely have some better stars. As long as Everton have guts (and timmy cahill) then they will hold out though.

The Black Cow, Launceston, Tas: Best restaurant in Australia. It's a tough call and I have eaten at a few decent restaurants around Australia, but the Black Cow does a mean steak. Still water winery is responsible for the chef and the wine that matches it. The duet has come up with an awesome menu and some great wines to match. The local produce, both the lamb and the beef were just awesome.

Gordon River Cruises, Strahan, Tas: Great cruise, friendly staff and a nice 6hrs on a smooth catamaran. Two nice stop offs at the Heritage Landing and the ex-convict settlement: Sarah Island. The boat cruises down the Gordon River, right to the start of the Franklin river and all through the UNESCO world heritage forest. Oh yeah, it starts off with a cruise out through Hell's Gates and into the southern ocean. From there all you would hit in one direction is Antarctica, or in another direction - Chile. On the way back in you go pass the salmon and ocean trout farms. Damn tassie salmon is good, and they serve it on the buffet in the boat aswell.

Strahan, Tas: overpriced, over-rated but yeah it's ok I guess.

Hobart, Tas: pretty mad. I liked it. Nice cafe's/restaurants/art galleries etc.

Boags Brewery, Launceston, Tas: mmm beer

Mole Creek Caves, Tas: cool, glow worms rock.

Cradle Mountain, Tas. They sell it as this amazing unique experience. Quite over-rated really. Admittedly it was very dry but it really resembled queensland and much of the lakes etc we see in QLD. I would love to go back in full snow, would be quite beautiful then I would imagine. Some nice mountains around tassie though, whereas QLD is quite flat.

HTC touch Diamond: Seriously mad.

Dandenong Ranges: A nice ride up. Pretty countryside. Nothing overly awesome though. Sassafras had some cute shops. I got Dr Pepper at a confectionary shop - yay.

Dr Pepper: still Awesome.