It has been a long time since I wrote a book review. A few months ago I read on IgorExchange that Martin Schmid had written a book about programming Igor. I snapped up a copy. I’m a competent Igor programmer but I was hoping that this book would be useful for lab members that want to learn.

As with children’s toys and clothes, books aimed at children tend to be targeted in a gender-stereotyped way. This is a bit depressing.

I am now running a new module for masters students, MD997. The aim is to introduce the class to a range of advanced research methods and to get them to think about how to formulate their own research question(s). The module is built around a paper which is allocated in the first session. I had to come up with a list of methods-type papers, which I am posting below. There are 16 students and I picked 23 papers.

We have a new paper out. The title is New tools for ‘hot-wiring’ clathrin-mediated endocytosis with temporal and spatial precision . You can read it here. Cells have a plasma membrane which is the barrier between the cell’s interior and the outside world. In order to import material from outside, cells have a special process called endocytosis.

Raw Data: A novel on Life in Science by Pernille Rørth (Springer, 2016) {.alignleft .size-medium .wp-image-786 loading=“lazy” decoding=“async” attachment-id=“786” permalink=“https://quantixed.org/41txjjrwibl- sx328_bo1204203200 /” orig-file=“https://i0.wp.com/quantixed.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/41txjjrwibl- sx328_bo1204203200 .jpg?fit=330%2C499&ssl=1” orig-size=“330,499”

Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty Ben Ratliff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) {.alignleft .size-medium .wp-image-756 loading=“lazy” decoding=“async” attachment-id=“756” permalink=“https://quantixed.org/41lkbxvsugl- sx329_bo1204203200 /” orig-file=“https://i0.wp.com/quantixed.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/41lkbxvsugl- sx329_bo1204203200 .jpg?fit=331%2C499&ssl=1”

This year #paperOTD (or paper of the day for any readers not on Twitter) did not go well for me. I’ve been busy with lots of things and I’m now reviewing more grants than last year because I am doing more committee work. This means I am finding less time to read one paper per day. Nonetheless I will round up the stats for this year.

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I have just finished reading this excellent book, Statistics done wrong: a woefully complete guide by Alex Reinhart . I’d recommend it to anyone interested in quantitative biology and particularly to PhD students starting out in biomedical science.

When I started this blog, my plan was to write about interesting papers or at least blog about the ones from my lab. This post is a bit of both. I was recently asked to write a “Journal Club” piece for Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, which is now available online. It’s paywalled unfortunately. It’s also very short, due to the format. For these reasons, I thought I’d expand a bit on the papers I highlighted.