'Trash' journals

When I was an undergrad student, it was not allowed to borrow Nature or Science journals out of our library. They are precious source honored as presents from the God. After I came to US, I found that those journals can be found anywhere here and sometimes you can find stacks of journals through several years in a corner. They look like trash. And maybe you cannot imagine that when I left my college, online source especially the access to top journals was very limited - you cannot download PNAS, Science or Nature. If you want to get some reference, there are some in the library - which are years' old. Maybe these years the condition has been improved but it was horrible. Looking at these, I got an inspiration that next time when I back to China, I will carry nothing but a large box of journals which were in the corner of my lab - even though they are out of date, at least students in my college can have a sense of how those top journals look like. They do not have to reply on the limited source in the library which provides journals in 1980s. The journals will be free to anyone who is studying the college for anywhere as long as they return it. I believe this way they will have a better sense what they are going to pursue in their career.

Communication to public is important.

I suddenly realized that I had no sense of spreading our science at all - when I was reading the background information in the Biowriting class. Even though I am in the 'science' field, I do not believe in global warming effect - First, there is no related introduction to 'public' and non-climate people. Second, I heard a lot of rumors that their research is focusing on a corner rather than a large scale, which means if you consider the overall effect, the iceberg is not melting. Maybe our earth is indeed becoming warmer and warmer but those climate people need to introduce their data more regularly to public so that we can be convinced. What they are doing now is simply emphasizing that we need to reduce CO2 release and how to reduce it but we do not understand why at all.

It is this condition in a developed country US, so not to mention in a developing country China. Maybe next time go back to China, I should organize a workshop or a series of presentations about our research, from the very basic knowledge to deep details. The speakers will be scholars studying and working in US. For my part, at least I can explain how signal is conducted through our nervous system and how memory is formed.

I love mom (2)

What did I write in the previous post.... I have complained so much to mom how hard it is to finish this PhD program. We are top students in China so we were able to apply for an opportunity to study abroad. Why I feel I am so weak here? Everyone around me has a higher IQ? It is impossible, right? Mom told me I need to be confident, but before that, I need to be humble. If we look at others with nose, nobody would be happy to communicate with us or talk with us. No matter you are good or bad, be humble first and then be confident. I did spend a lot of spare time on games, parties and entertainment.

I am improving. I restart working in weekends today. I did immunostaing in lab this morning and continued afternoon. I need to catch up with my girlfriend. She is a crazy science girl. Our talk was, is and I believe will be full of science. She did published several posters and hopefully one paper as first author as an undergrad student. She is a person with faith in science. Compared to her, I am a fake scientist. Before I came US, I thought I can do science freely of my interest but now I realize that it is not true. I spend a lot of time on other issues such as daily life, teaching and classes. Of course all of them are helpful, but when can I have a real free science? Not until as a faculty?

I love my mom.

Had a video talk with mom for one hour just now. I dislike that she asks me every time through email or on phone: how is your research? When to publish your paper? Have you started collecting information about job market? Will you graduate two years later?
This time, I did not hold myself and told my mom I was stressed out by those questions. Some students can publish Science, Natures, Neurons while some students can make only one 'regular' paper. Unfortunately, I am a student on the latter side. I have too many problems to solve once I stepped on this land which is completely new to me.  I need to learn how to talk to others because I was too shy to be talkative. I need to learn how to understand people in English, because my English learning was from tapes, videos and books in China. I need to learn how this scientific system is organized and operated. I need to learn how to write a paper! Oh, gosh. I even gave mom a bad example showing why I hate that kind of question - I asked her a similar question.

Be proud of our football team.

I need a more comfortable chair for the study desk so we went to Target, Walmart and finally Office depo. Definitely Office depo has the most chairs but also the price is the most. I turned to non-wheel chair which was still 50 bucks but it was better than those wheel chair at 200s or 300s. Suddenly I found a wheelchair at a corner with a yellow tag saying 46.99, which was an amazing price for a new chair. A lady shouted at me that this was the area accessible for employees only so please got out of here. Ok, then I had to walk out and looked at those priceless chairs but later found that I could afford none of them. I asked a male stuff whether the chair in the corner is on sale and shortly I got the answer that it was on sale and the price is 37.99 plus 8 bucks installation fee. I was so surprised and glad to take it immediately. The lady came back and tried to 'check' the chair for me and she found that the chair could not lock itself at a certain angle so she suggested I buy a 20 bucks' insurance. What is the problem if I take this cheap chair home? You are not happy if your costumers happily spend some money in your store for some good items? I do not buy! Then she asked do you need a delivery? I have a car, though not big! I move the front chair to the front as much as possible and load it easily into my car. My front plate shows that I am from OU so they complained about the game at last weekend - I understand now - you lost the game but you should not release your pressure on me! This story happened in Austin last weekend.

Taking test.

Though this is my 4th year as a grad student, I did not understand how to take a test for a good score. This semester, I am taking two classes and teaching one - sounds funny, right? PhD students usually finish their course work in two years and focus on research in the following years but I made an unusual way. I did not take a lot of courses in my first two years but now found that my knowledge especially the English terms cannot help me understand people from different fields. So, Cell Biology is one of my two classes this semester. My first test was completely a failure, not because I did not understand but because of the timing. There were 25 multi-choice and two assays but when I came to the assays, I have only 15 min left. The result was, I missed the last one losing almost all scores.

For the second test last Friday, I changed my strategy: I started with assays and then multi-choice. This way, I finished almost half the scores in 25 min (50 min in total) and finished all questions in time (you can try your luck on multi-choice if time does not allow fine thoughts, isn't it?). Just now I saw the key for the test and I believe I will do a much better work in this test. All boring work before this test got realized. I am so happy that I can make some improvement after my hard work.

At conference.

Recently, a group from Harvard University showed that they do not “steer” along their way but they employ the frequently stops strategy. Every few steps, larvae will stop and sense the environment with their head. If they were put between a sugar at left and a bitter at right, they will try to understand both sides and choose the preferable one. Their videos showed that larvae can make the decision pretty fast. After they checked right side, they turned to the left side again. Almost immediately they chose the sugar side. No matter it is chemical, light, temperature or other stimuli, larvae employ the same strategy – no steer but check it frequently.

Another interesting story came from YungNunh Jan, a fly giant in UCSF. He told us the history of his career. His boss was Benzer, the first scientist trying to decode mechanisms with molecular biology. Dr. Jan worked with his boss in Cold Spring Harbor and then CalTech. In the first Neurobiology of Drosophila Conference, there were only about 20 people but now, the attendant population ranges at hundreds. (On my way to the airport, a professor with silver hair told me that he kept attending this conference since the second one. Isn’t it a long story he can tell me?) At the very beginning of Jan’s career, it was pretty tough and they tried very very hard. Jan couple published 5 papers in 9 months and got the tenure successfully. Nowadays, they have a lab consisting of 18 postdoc and 4 graduate students.

Finishing conference.

On the conference, I was so glad to find several people working on RNA binding protein as well and they are roughly in the same stage as me - identified phenotypes, got phenotypes rescued and looking for molecular interaction with other factors. A surprising point is, all of them are Asians. Why? Americans do not like RNA binding proteins? Just a joke. It seems like that everyone here is conducting screens - are you all at the beginning of your projects?

I was hurt by an event but of course that was not anyone's fault. A lady from U of Tokoyo was seeking professor jobs. The economic situation is not good neither in Japan so especially hard for drosophila people (easier for medicine related things). All of people around her suggested that "we might have opening jobs so please check it out with our departments" and of course, I did it too (we kept recruiting one people per year, isn't it?). However, she is interested in the suggestion of a guy from NYU, which is better than OU. Well, it is understandable that everyone wants to go to better and developed places. But since she is not that young any more, I believe she spent a lot of years on job hunting. Is it possible that she was aiming too high so that too many people were competing for the jobs she was applying for? And, OU is not bad, right? People here are nicer than people from 'cities'. We were like a family.

Mating shorter, living happier.

People care about how long they can make it with their partners but flies are telling you that: it does not have to be that long!

A research about how nervous system affects the timing of mating reveals that on average, flies spend 27 min to finish the copulation but in fact, a ten-min copulation is good enough for most females to get enough sperms. There are six P element insertions into the same gene indicated that there are 8-12 neurons at the very tip of the ventral nerve cord which are responsible for determining how long the copulation is. If people silence these neurons, flies can spend hours on copulating. Surprisingly, decapitated males can finish the copulation process within 34 min on average, just slightly different from those controls. Does it mean that males do not think with their brains?

Give male more beer!!

It is well know that males drink more beer (hopefully it is also true for Americans?) and drink beer more often. There is a recently research proposing that male fruit flies can drink more alcohol and respond more actively to alcohol. There is dimorphism for flies' response to alcohol - males express more active locomotion activities than females after exposed to alcohol and won't undergo sedation until higher concentration than females. That dimorphism is related to a gene called fruitless. In fruitless mutant, male flies respond like females to the alcohol in terms of lower activity and lower resistance to alcohol sedation. Ectopic expression of fruitless of male form in females fruitless mutant make females behave like males. Scientists then worked on interaction of fruitless with other genes and another gene called tank came out. In tank mutant males, they enjoy alcohol as tanks that cannot be filled up. So they tried to figure it out whether fruitless and tank interact at molecular level. Unfortunately, they do not co-localize so people turned to look at neuronal level. They used a technique called GRASP which will shine GFP if two synapses are close enough. Finally, they found they did interact with each other at neuronal level.