PhD Comics, didn’t include DOIs in their recent bib­li­og­ra­phy of Christmas-related cita­tions. For lazy peo­ple, com­piled list is below:

• Christ­mas Dis­ease. Biggs, R, Dou­glas, A, Mac­far­lane, R, Dacie, J, Pit­ney, W, Merskey, C & O’Brien, J, 1952, BMJ, vol. 2, no. 4799, pp. 1378 – 1382.
  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.2.4799.1378

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29th December, 2009 Comments Off

The Brookhaven team, has been refin­ing tech­niques to use strands of arti­fi­cial DNA as a highly spe­cific kind of Vel­cro or glue to link up nanopar­ti­cles. Such DNA-based self-assembly holds promise for the ratio­nal design of a range of new mate­ri­als for appli­ca­tions in mol­e­c­u­lar sep­a­ra­tion, elec­tron­ics, energy con­ver­sion, and other fields. But none of these struc­tures has had the abil­ity to change in a pro­gram­ma­ble man­ner in response to mol­e­c­u­lar stim­uli — until now. “Now we’re using a spe­cial type of DNA-linking device — a kind of ‘smart glue’ — that affects how the par­ti­cles con­nect to make struc­tures that are switch­able between dif­fer­ent con­fig­u­ra­tions,” says Oleg Gang a team lead. This reli­able, reversible switch­ing could be used to reg­u­late func­tional prop­er­ties — for exam­ple, a material’s flu­o­res­cence and energy trans­fer prop­er­ties — to make new mate­ri­als that are respon­sive to chang­ing con­di­tions, or to alter their func­tions on demand.

a) Ide­al­ized schematic illus­trat­ing the struc­ture of the device (l_d) link­age, with A’, D’ and B’ recog­ni­tion sequences. b) A bcc unit cell rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a bulk three-dimensional super­lat­tice con­sist­ing of nanopar­ti­cles A – p and B – p inter­con­nected by l_d. © Nature Pub­lish­ing Group.

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22nd December, 2009 Comments Off

Tip #1: Walk fast when on cam­pus and explain to col­leagues that you can­not go out to lunch because you are busy respond­ing to law review edi­tors’ com­ments on your manuscript.

Tip #2: Remind your col­leagues how many stu­dents you teach, how many exams you have to grade, how fright­fully many hours it will take you to grade them, and how grad­ing exams really cuts down the time you can be avail­able for schol­ar­ship, ser­vice activ­i­ties, friends or family.

Tip #3: Send an e-mail inform­ing your dean or col­leagues that you have been invited to speak at the local Rotary Club or the neigh­bor­ing town’s PTA meeting.

Tip #4: Bring mas­sive amounts of work to talks by out­siders and stu­dent events, and make sure to vis­i­bly mark on doc­u­ments — as if edit­ing your own paper or mak­ing com­ments on stu­dent work — in full sight of every­one else in the room.

Tip #5: Get ticked off and behave badly at fac­ulty meetings.

Tip #6: Do not timely answer e-mails from any­one who may be rely­ing on you to show up to an event, help review appli­ca­tions or sched­ule a meet­ing, then get huffy when the meet­ing takes place before you respond to the e-mail.

[via The Chron­i­cle ]

6th December, 2009 Comments Off