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Iddo

2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

And the winners are…

Weekly poll: which category would you add to the Nobel prize?

Yup, it’s those two weeks again, when that prize is being announced.  Sadly, BsB probably will not get it this year. Might have something to so with there being no category for blogging. Prestige and controversy go hand in hand, mix in science and you have a concoction more explosive than the one Mr. Nobel […]

2009 Ig Nobel Prizes

A bit late in the day, but here are the Ig Nobel prize winners for 2009. Cut and pasted from Wikipedia. The prizes were awarded Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009 at Sanders Theater, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2009 Veterinary medicine: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, UK, for showing that cows with names give […]

Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins on Colbert Nation

Stephen Colbert had an interesting lineup for the past two nights: Richard Dawkins on Sep 30, and Francis Collins last night. Enjoy the vids: The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

It ain’t necessarily so

First, a short glossary. Homologous genes are descended from a common ancestral gene. There are two types of homology: Orthology is homology due to a speciation event. So if there is a gene A’ in humans and A” in mice, and they are obviously similar in sequence, we infer that they homologous. We usually also […]

Weekly Poll: will you have your own genome sequenced?

CLARIFICATION: the events described here have not happened. Yet. We are a few years into the future. Whole human genomes can be sequenced relatively cheaply and accurately. Direct to Consumer Genomics companies offer true genomic analyses now, not just marker analyses. They BLAST* your sequence against known genotype & disease databases, looking for known genotypic […]

An Ontology for Biological Similarities

I griped here twice about the abuse of the term homology in biology. And to quote the Bellman in The Hunting of the Snark:  “What I tell you three times is  true”. But while I gripe, someone is actually doing something about the whole terminology muddle. Specifically, Marc Robinson-Rechavi and his group in The University […]

New: weekly poll

I will try to maintain a weekly poll on BsB, for matters biologick, bioinformatick, generally scientifick or otherick. As in any poll, if read too much into its questions or answers, you should seriously chill. That being said, comments are most welcome. The poll is on the sidebar that’a’way.—> (Scroll a bit down if you […]

What they really found in Niger

A big buzz over the discovery of a skeleton of an early Sauropod dinosaur in Niger. The finding looks amazing even to my paleontologically-ignorant eyes. It is beautifully intact and well-ordered, as opposed to the mixed jumble of bone fragments that are usually found. It has that lovely aesthetic quality that would cause anyone to […]

“Micro homology”. Wut?

I ranted in a previous post about the use of homology as a quantitative term, rather than a qualitative term. Ben Blackburne commented on that post introducing me to “micro homology”, a term I did not know existed. I ignored its existence, until I heard it spoken yesterday at a talk, which sort of rubbed […]

The new natural history

Before the 20th century biology was, to a large extent, “Natural History”. It was an observational rather than the experimental science it is considered to be today. At that time, the typical biologist, a natural historian, was going about the (European colonized) world, collecting specimens of new and fossilized species, classifying and recording them for […]

The Craigslist of Antibiotic Resistance

(Before we get going: this the the 100th post on Byte Size Biology. Happy Birthday to me!) Resistance to antibiotics is a huge clinical problem. In the US, more people die of  methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections (nearly 19,000 in 2006) than of AIDS (14,627).  We know that antibiotic resistance is carried on mobile genetic […]

A FLORA of Protein Structure to Protein Function

Proteins are the machinery of life, and they facilitate most of life’s functions. Traffic into and out of the cell? Protein pumps, pores and channels. Respiration? Proteins. Metabolism and catabolism? Proteins. Immune system, signaling, development…  all complex networks of interacting proteins. Understanding a protein’s  structure can tell us a lot about how it performs its […]

Public service announcement: how to make hummus

Soulico Crew teach us the magical art of making a perfect hummus. Apparently it involves a lot of dancing.

Short bioinformatics hacks pt. 3: more FASTA counting

A few one-liners to kick off the workweek: To order a set of fasta files by the number of sequences each one contains. If anyone knows how to put a tab as the output delimiter, please let us know: grep -c “>” fasta-files/*.fna | cut –fields=1,2 -d “:” –output-delimiter=”  ” | sort -k 2 -nr […]