Happy Pi (π) Day! Americans write dates in the MM/DD/YYYY format instead of the DD/MM/YYYY format used by the rest of the world. Usually a rather painful and confusing format if you did not grow up with it, causing checks to bounce and leases to expire for those who recently moved to the US, but […]
Most of the Earth’s surface is colder than the inside of your refrigerator. Deep sea temperatures are almost universally 2-4C. That’s already 73% of the Earth’s surface. Then add to that the polar regions, mountain ranges and permafrost and you have about 85% of the Earth’s surface constantly at refrigerator or freezer temperatures. While there […]
From Abstruse Goose
When the Moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, a bunch of people gather for their “Bioinformaticians anonymous” group therapy. There they metaphorically gather, commiserating about how bioinformatics is dead (or was it bioinformaticians?), just smells funny or suffers from identity theft, probably because it got drunk at the last ISMB, […]
But if you know what life is worth, You will look for yours on Earth — Bob Marley – “Is there life on Earth?” – “Well, duh.” – “I mean, is there another kind of life on Earth?” – “WTF?” – “You know… there could be these bugs that, like, they’re all around us and […]
Biopython is entering its 10th year; the unofficial birthday is on September, since that is when the mailing list started: September 1999. I stumbled onto that list mid-September, 1999. I believe the Python version was 1.5, I was still working on SGI Irix, and I was an 0.3 PhD candidate. Today I am coding with […]
Happy Darwin Day! If you are reading this then you probably do not need an introduction to Charles Darwin, the importance of his work, how his theory of evolution by natural selection shaped modern Biology. Or if you do, I bet there are plenty of posts in today’s blogswarm that will address this. There is […]
A new documentary film follows life in a molecular biology lab in Columbia University over the course of three years. It looks very promising: the title is certainly something many of us identify with.
In any data-rich science, data visualization is of prime importance. Finding ways to visually depict data is challenging, as we have opposing demands: we would like to see the data in the whole, but also be able to zoom in and analyze the details; we would like to know how the many details add up […]
Gradualism is a cornerstone principle in evolution. Things happen in small increments; all the time that changes happen, overall organism fitness cannot be compromised. So how then do full-featured complex functions appear? One way is by functional re-purposing of an existing organ: …an organ may become rudimentary for its proper purpose, and be used for […]
Maybe I am slow on the uptake, but I never quite liked the term “post genomic”, and I used it very sparingly. (Yes, I do have that term in one of my better cited papers, smack in the first sentence of the abstract, but I never liked that). Perhaps because of all the associated abuse […]
Here is a little trick I performed as a first year grad student a while ago and which I would like to share. My PhD adviser, Hanah Margalit was supposed to give a talk at a joint Israeli-Palestinian meeting. (Hopefully, such days will be back soon and permanently!) The audience was rather broad, and included […]
