An original viral (or rather, fungal and bacterial) marketing campaign for the movie Contagion. Although the film tells the story of a fictional viral outbreak, the marketers of Warner Brothers Canada kept it in the realm of microbiology by teaming up with 25 microbiologists and creating what is probably the first agar-plated billboard, which they […]
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Iddo
Freddie Mercury’s Birthday was celebrated with great fanfare last week all over the interwebs. So a bit late, but here is Killer Queen. Because you can never have too much of Queen.
MIRA is a really cool sequence assembly software, developed and maintained by Bastien Chevreux. MIRA has a large and active community, led by the funny and gracious Bastien, for whom no problem is too small, or too large. Recently MIRA seemed to have developed a stochastic bug, one of those which are a serious headache […]
Insane Clown Posse and Jack White are working together. That, by itself, should send people to stock on water and non-perishable food. But having them cover Mozart (which they pronounce “MOHZZZ-art) is worthy of a trip to the gun store as well. Having rediscovered “Leck mich im Arsch” (lick my ass, Mozart’s scatological party hit […]
Postdoctoral Research Scientist Rutgers University Joint Appointment: Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, BioMaPS and Dept. of Biochemistry and Microbiology Two 2-3 year Postdoctoral Research Scientist positions are available. We are looking for young scholars with experience in the areas of computational biology. In the scope of this project, we will uncover how the metal-containing […]
The best description I have for this talented trio is a acid / free jazz with a bebop groove. Anyhow, these cats from Cincinnati sure can play. Kristin Agee – Vibraphone, Keyboard/Electronic Sounds, Joel Griggs – Guitar, Quena, Drones, Jeff Mellott – Drums, Percussive Sounds. Their first CD is coming out mid-September. Look for them […]
I have posted quite a few times before about the acquisition of new functions by genes. In many cases a gene is duplicated, and one of the duplicates acquires a new function. This is one basic evolutionary mechanism of acquiring new functions. Sometimes, gene duplication occurs within a species: part of the chromosome may be […]
So you received your mate-paired reads in two different files, and you need to merge them for your assembler. Here is a quick Python script to do that. You will need Biopython installed. #!/usr/bin/env python from Bio import SeqIO import itertools import sys import os # Copyright(C) 2011 Iddo Friedberg # Released under Biopython […]
The manuscripts I review invariably fall into four categories: 1. This is crap. (Rare). 2. This is terrific. (Even rarer). 3. This can be OK, but they really need to fix A, B & C. (fairly common). 4. If I only knew what they meant in point A, I could say whether they need to fix A, […]
Class X7 solar flare, viewed at 3:48am EDT today, August 9. A short guide to solar flares class types, from NASA. Class X is the biggest one, the kind that may disrupt communications. This one will mostly miss us, phew. The (hopefully minimal) magnetic storm is expected on Earth August 11.
…Tim Berners-Lee taught the world to play. Well, actually, he posted the following on the Usenet group alt.hypertext. For those of you who are too young to remember Usenet, think of it as a working version of Google+. Scroll down to message 3, in which the first web-page server is announced.
After WWII, Pacific islands occupied by the US military were regularly receiving goods via air. Once the military evacuated , the goods stopped arriving. Some inhabitants of those islands mistakenly thought that receiving the cargo was due to some divine intervention that required rituals they saw American servicemen performing. This eventually led them to […]
The AFP/CAFA 2011 meeting was held on July 15 and July 16. Yes, it was a huge success, and I’m not just saying that beacuse I am one of the organizers. I will write up something more comprehensive soon; in the meantime, here are my tweets from the meeting. I am learning a lot about […]
ISMB this year had quite a few twiterrers. Hashtag: #ISMB. I tried to collect all the #ISMB tweets, so I wrote my own twitter scavenger script, but it seems to go only 3 days back. I am not sure if this is a Twitter feature, or something with the library I am using (tweepy) or […]
Balkan Beat Box, with some good advice for me, and for anyone else with a grant proposal deadline tomorrow:
