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Iddo

But did you correct your results using a dead salmon?

The first article in the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results (JSUR) has been published. Reminder: “JSUR is an open-access forum for researchers seeking to further scientific discovery by sharing surprising or unexpected results. These results should provide guidance toward the verification (or negation) of extant hypotheses.”  (From the JSUR website.) I posted about JSUR before here and […]

Now that’s a f***ing big genome!

It isn’t junk DNA: God just commented out a lot of crappy code as he rolled out releases. — An old bioinformaticians’ joke (Hey, I never said it was a funny joke…) Why are some genomes so big? I mean, seriously. Why would the marbled lungfish with a genome weighing 132.83 picograms (pg) need an […]

Carnival of Evolution coming here

The 29th edition of the Carnival of Evolution will be hosted here. There are quite a few good things in store: on parrot feathers and lizardfish eyes, on Darwin cartoons, on dogs, dancing and much more. You can still contribute. So if you are a blogger with a post on evolution, go to the blog […]

Spiders

Warning: somewhat NSFW language.

Two Workshops on Biological Wikis

This seems very promising: two consecutive workshops on biological Wikis in Naples. If you have a life-science related wiki, plan on doing one, or just want to learn about how collaborative authoring can help your work, this would be a great place to do so. Thanks to Paolo Romano for the information. Joint NETTAB 2010 […]

Money and Science

Writing grants all the time (another deadline coming Monday, yikes) made me think about money and science, but in a rather oblique way: coins and notes commemorating scientists and scientific achievements. While looking for examples, I found that Alex Pasternack from Motherboard.TV has done a really nice and thorough job already. So have a look, […]

John Lennon, 9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980

IgNobel Slides

The IgNobel prizes have been announced last week. From Wikipedia: “The Ig Nobel Prizes are an American parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten achievements that ‘first make people laugh, and then make them think.’ Organized by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they […]

Life serves viruses

Sometimes I get the feeling that all life on Earth basically serves as a vehicle for viral replication and propagation. Viruses thrive in all three domains, they embed themselves in all creature’s genomes, they may lie dormant in the genome for eons or decimate whole populations in a few years, and they are the most […]

Attack of the Giant Archaea

Archaea are under-rated. For one, most people don’t really know they exist – and if they do archaea are thought of as a type of bacteria. This goes not only for the general public also for some of my non-microbiology colleagues. (I had to correct quite a few “archaeobacteria” utterances.) The discovery that Archaea are a […]

Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics Conference

Quick post: at the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics Conference. I’m a bad microblogger, but thankfully Jonathan Eisen and Ruchira Datta are doing a great job of covering this conference live. There is a friendfeed room. The Twitter hashtag is #LAMG10.  The science, people, food and location are all great. My student, David Ream, is presenting […]

Changing directions

For some reason, this reminds me a lot of the way some of my research has been going recently….

The open source spammer: extracting email addresses from an openoffice.org document

I’m organizing a workshop later this month (see here, scroll to session V), and I have just received the attendees list from the main conference’s organizers. Since I need to spam send the attendees informative email on the specific workshop, I needed their email addresses. Here’s what I did. The file itself is MS Word […]

Predator MX: Jack the Rippler

No, not a new hunter-killer drone, neither is it the n+1 installment in the sci-fi horror series. Rather, Myxococcus xanthus. Again.     M. xanthus is a highly cooperative bacterium, as we have already seen: when starved, most cells “commit suicide” while a few form spores, to survive the lean times. But M. xanthus also […]

When is it a good idea to cheat?

I have written before about bacterial cooperation, and how cheating works, up to a point, in an environment of bacterial cooperation. That post talked about bacterial quorum sensing, the collective signaling mechanism by which bacteria construct supra-cellular structures called biofilms. Biofilms are tough multicellular enclosures that allow bacteria to survive and thrive in hostile environments, […]