Saturday, October 12, 2013

Prokaryotic Saturday: Movies of the microbial marine world… coming soon on your favorite theater

Hello!
I hope you all are spectacular!
......

.... I am spectacularly tired. It was a good week, actually was a lot less hectic than the previous week (believe me, A LOT!), but still, I feel tired. So for today I’ll keep this short  :)

I have some bad news, nobody called in the middle of the night from Stockholm this week. I think is still too soon. Maybe in a couple of decades I’ll get that call. For now, from my little space on the internet I congratulate the winners of the Nobel Prize 2013, here they are:


  • Physics: François Englert and Petter W. Higgs. "For the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider".
  • Chemistry: Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel. "For the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
  • Pysiology (Medicine): James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof . "For their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells"
  • Literature: Alice Munro "master of the contemporary short story" (I really liked this, "a master", hehe).
  • Peace: Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). "For its extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons".
  • Economy: this one will be announced on Monday 14 (they know how to keep the suspense). 

And you can read more about them here, here and here.

So for today’s PS I was planning to talk about that paper I left last week, Sorek et al., 2010. But then it happened that I came across something else. In the last few days I've been reading several reviews of Dr DeLong (this and this other). And most recently this one named “Microbial Earth: the motion picture”. In this paper DeLong is writing about what would be the difficulties in making a documentary about the marine MICROBIAL life. 

How will you make a documentary about marine microbial life at the level of one of those BBC documentaries about nature? It would be very difficult. As DeLong pointed out, there are many interactions that “microbiologically” speaking you won’t be able to capture. At least for now it’s impossible. In this super short and super-easy-to-read paper, four movies about several microbial dramas are announced… can’t wait to watch them. 

If you want to know more about the impressive work of Dr DeLong, here is his web page, and his wikipedia page. And here is a really cool picture of him working:


Nice.
Here is a lecture he gave in 2009, I warn you, it's an hour long.

Please, if you got something to say, leave your comments below this post or in twitter @ale_alvarador.
Although if you don’t, I understand, this is not the best PS, I have to do justice to DeLong in a post, later.

All right, if you want to suggest a topic for the upcoming PSs, something you would like to discuss, feel free.  Would it be a good idea to write some PS in spanish?

See you next week!!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Todo documental tiene su grado de dificultad, simplemente en el hecho de encontrar lo que tu buscas en ese preciso momento, aunque al ver el resultado te das cuenta que todo esfuerzo valió la pena pues sabes que al menos estas contribuyendo o aportando algo nuevo quizá.