Monday, May 28, 2007

Lights, Camera, Action


Romania ete ...!
Vive la Romania !
CANNES, France, May 27 -- The international critics corps can be a tough crowd (if they don't like a film here, they boo), but they mostly agreed that the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival presented an especially strong slate of movies. At the awards ceremony at the Palais on Sunday evening, the head of the jury, British director Stephen Frears ("The Queen"), praised the selections. "I am told by people who come every year that this was a terrific festival. Thank you. The films were a pleasure to watch." They were also tough to watch, with meditations and stories about evil, sickness and death -- but filled, too, with the triumph, or sometimes just the mere survival, of the human spirit.
And so it was no surprise that the top prize, the Palme d'Or, went to one of the darlings of the festival, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu. The film is set in 1987 Bucharest, during the waning years of the Soviet bloc. It tells the story of a college student who has an illegal abortion, her friend and the abortionist, who is also a rapist. Whew, no?
At the end of a long day in the lab, what we'd all like is an award-winning movie. What makes for a good movie? An engrossing story, deft cinematography, and an extraordinary ensemble of actors. Cannes do not offer something like that so back to nanotechnologies until Eurabians will grow up. The goal of single-molecule research is to produce a movie of the cell. Biochemistry and biophysics done in the test tube already provide an understanding of the dynamic behavior of molecules; from these studies, what goes on in cells, minute by minute or even second by second, can be inferred.
Ultimately, however, the goal is to film single molecules in single cells, focusing in closely enough not only to observe spatial and temporal characteristics but also to decipher molecular mechanisms. We're not there yet, but recent advances in single-molecule techniques bring us tantalizingly close to a molecule-scale movie of cellular life.Because cells are optically transparent, light microscopy is ideal for noninvasive imaging of cells in three dimensions. However, until recently, the resolution of lens-based optical microscopes was constrained by the diffraction barrier, which gave a resolution cutoff at half the wavelength of light. In his Review, Hell (p. 1153) discusses concepts that show how the diffraction barrier can be broken in fluorescence spectroscopy and how these techniques have been applied to achieve nanoscale resolution. His Review gives hope that real-time three-dimensional imaging of live cells with electron-microscopy resolution may not be too far away.
sciencemag
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm ready! Roll it. Keep the camera warm please! Wakakakakaka!!!!!!!!!