If she were alive today, Ella Fitzgerald would have been 92. Sadly she is not, but her majestic singing will be with us for centuries to come. Oscar Peterson on the piano, Ray Brown bass and Ed Thigpen drums. A moving interpretation of Thelonious Monk`s ‘Round Midnight.
Short quiz and a movie for DNA day. 1) We celebrate DNA day because: a) Congress said so b) Francis Collins said so c) I said so 2) Who has DNA? a) CSI Miami b) James Watson c) Please, please, PLEASE let the paternity test comes back negative… 3) Nature vs. Nurture: which is more […]
Jonathan Eisen started something nice in his blog: a review of children’s science books. So I think I’ll follow suit, especially since my first review will combine two of Jonathan’s faves: Microbiology and Open Access. The book is “Bacteria Galore by Sunday at Four” by Mel Rosenberg, a Professor of Microbiology at Tel-Aviv University who […]
And the future is certain Give us time to work it out — Talking Heads – Road to Nowhere We are a species obsessed with knowing what the future holds. Our personal future, the future of our kith and kin, our countries, and our planet. Humans have always been trying to predict their personal future. […]
In the latter epoch of those 2 billion-odd years between non-life and life on early Earth, our ancestral molecular replicators were quite probably RNA, not DNA. There are many arguments for this RNA world hypothesis: RNA can store information in its sequence, and self -duplicate; it can also catalyze reactions as a ribozyme. So technically, […]
We learned in high school and/or undergrad biology that one antibody would bind to one antigen. This is what makes our immune system so effective: antibodies bind with high affinity to foreign proteins or other molecules. Not only that, but those antibodies are specific: they would bind only to a specific site on the foreign […]
Wordle is a toy for creating word clouds from text. Each word’s size is correlated with its frequency in the input text. Every three months or so I will generate a Wordle from the RSS feed of this blog, to see whether this blog has any direction, theme change, and just because Wordles are cool. […]
…Your Brain Will Fall Out.
Apparently sequencing two white males of European extraction does not make for a very good sample of mankind, and that if we really want to get a good view of what we are really like, we need to sequence a couple more. Maybe even, you know, a woman, or someone from India or China or […]
Drive by Truckers. My favorite flavor of Southern Rock.
Following Shirley Wu’s excellent post on the stimulus money at the NIH, I decided to do my bit, and post some bioinformatically relevant programs from the Challenge Grants. I am defining bioinformatics rather narrowly here, and excluding most biomedical informatics, imaging technologies, clinical data management, etc. Also, many other topics would be supported to some […]
Hypatia (b. ~360CE d. 415CE) was a mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and teacher in Roman Alexandria. She was also quite probably the last librarian of the famous Library of Alexandria. Note that at the time, the definition of Philosophy was much broader, and encompassed what we term today the natural and exact sciences; and yes, she […]
Beautiful and sad. Extra points if you recognize the source of the sentence Lisa reads at the end.