Art competition entries 2012

I entered a few of my images into our Faculty Art Competition this year. They didn’t win but I thought I would post them here anyway.

Click on the images for a larger view.

You can see the winners here.

3D rendering of ciliated cells. LLC-PK1 (pig kidney epithelial) cells were grown on a round micropattern to constrain growth. Cilia are in green with the Golgi in magenta and nuclei in blue. The image is a 3D rendering of a deconvolved z-series acquired using widefield microscopy.

A pseudocoloured image of the jellyfish Aequorea victoria from which Green Fluorescent Protein was isolated. The pseudocolouring illustrates the diverse colour palette of GFP variants that we now have available.
The image is a photograph taken by me at Monterey Bay aquarium in 2003. There is only one jellyfish in the original photo, this image is a montage.

Apps for the biomedical academic

A month (or so) into the new iPad, I have found many sites that detail academics’ favourite apps (Steven Krause, Janet Temos, Colleen Greene and others; MIT Library have a particularly useful collection) but many of these are out of date, refer to apps that have been superseded etc. It might be relevant to know that I am no Apple fanboy – I own an aging iPod and now and iPad. All my computers at work and home are PCs and I have an Android phone. Seamless integration with my Android Phone and Widows PC are key features for the multi-platform apps.

There isn’t much that is discipline specific here and for me it is really just a case of clogging up the Internet with my list in case it is useful to anyone.

So here is my May 2011 version….

If you can’t be bothered to scroll down, just get Dropbox, Flipboard, Tripit and Bamboo Paper.

Why start this blog

The primary aim of this blog at the moment is for me to see if it is a worthwhile venture. I plan to include updates of what we are doing/thinking in the lab, where are projects are going and where we are having any breakthroughs. It is likely to reflect my Twitter feed too – including some thoughts on relevant and pertinent science funding and policy issues. I am also likely to blog about the odd meeting or two that I attend, nice articles I have read, and really who knows what else.

Whether this is useful to you will likely depend on whether you are A) interested in similar things to myself, B) working in higher education, C) working in cell biology research.

Whether this is useful to me is likely to reflect the amount of time that I have to put in to this blog and the amount of info we as a lab might disclose (without prejudicing publication routes or remaining competitive).

In the meantime, here is a test embedded image from our older work….