In no particular order or ranking, recent and not-so-recent articles from PLoS-1. The common thread (if any): I thought they were pretty cool in one way or another. 1. Men don’t tell the truth about their penis. No kidding? But this is somewhat more serious. It has been accepted for some time that male […]
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Iddo
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. — William Hazlitt We like to think that we are the only species capable of emotional self-awareness and therefore the only “animal that laughs […]
It is with no inconsiderable degree of reluctance that I decline the offer of any Paper from you. I think, however, you will upon reconsideration of the subject be of opinion that I have no other alternative. The subjects you propose for a series of Mathematical and Metaphysical Essays are so very profound, that there […]
Genomics is a new and exciting programming language based on Brainfsck. Here are the commands: g Move pointer to the right. e Move pointer to the left. n Increment the cell at the pointer. o Decrement the cell at the pointer. m Jump forward past the matching i if the cell at the current pointer […]
If you have a merged file of paired-end reads, here is a quick way to read them using Biopython: from Bio import SeqIO from itertools import izip_longest # Loop over pairs of reads readiter = SeqIO.parse(open(inpath), “fastq”) for rec1, rec2 in izip_longest(readiter, readiter): print rec1.id # do something with rec1 print rec2.id # do something […]
Warning: NSFW language. Brainfuck is a Turing-complete programming language consisting of eight commands, each of which is represented as a single character. > Increment the pointer. < Decrement the pointer. + Increment the cell at the pointer. – Decrement the cell at the pointer. . Output the ASCII value of the cell at the pointer. […]
This excellent cover of “Whole Lotta Love” went viral last week. Michael Winslow of Police Academy fame gives his interpretation to the Led Zeppelin classic: And if that gave you a taste for the original, go here.
The Scientist is one of my favorite go-to destinations for keeping up with current biomedical research. That’s why I was rather sad when it was recently announced that The Scientist will be closing down. However, it seems like The Scientist will continue to be published after all: NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – Oct 14, 2011) – […]
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not dead. The Dead Collector: What? Large Man with Dead Body: Nothing. There’s your ninepence. The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not dead. The Dead Collector: ‘Ere, he says he’s not dead. Large Man with Dead Body: Yes he is. The Dead Body That […]
The IgNobel prizes were awarded this week. Yes, the Nobel prizes too, but the IgNobels are the really interesting ones. (For an thoughtful piece about why the Nobel Prizes in the sciences do not enhance or may even hurt scientific recognition, read Carl Zimmer’s piece at The Loom) . The IgNobel prizes are awarded annually for […]
Percent of pancreatic cancer patients diagnosed when the disease is still localized: 8 Their 5-year relative survival: 21.5% Percent of pancreatic cancer patients diagnosed when the disease has metastasized: 53 Their 5-year relative survival: 1.8% Mean survival rate after diagnosis: < 1 year Ranking in cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide: 4 Number of effective […]
Good news: Press Release 2011-10-03 The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided that The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2011 shall be divided, with one half jointly to Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity and the other half to Ralph M. Steinman […]
Hats off to Jonathan Eisen for hosting this activity on his blog. (I’ll keep mine on, thank you. It’s raining cats and dogs here right now). A couple of weeks ago I posted a discussion about two papers that challenged the ortholog conjecture. Briefly, both papers stated that orthologs may not be such great […]
I found this rather addictive online game, Red. Of course, I only play it when I am, er, compiling. Um, yeah. That’s the ticket. The thing is, the game also has a great soundtrack, which introduced me to a band called Koop. Their music alternates between eerie ambient and big-band-ish. They may have a big-band […]
