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Science

Book Review: Small and Packs a Punch

A Planet of Viruses Carl Zimmer The University of Chicago Press 109 pages Interesting things happen when physicists decide to go into biological research. They ask questions that biologists generally won’t. For example, viruses have small genomes, but they also have very small storage space in their capsids. Bacteriophages inject their genetic material into the […]

You don’t get to 11 million papers without a few dodgy results

“The Science Network”: who stole PubMed? Well, their accents don’t exactly fit the population in the NLM….

Thursday Odds and Ends

  A woman in Chesterfield, Ohio robbed a convenience store using her MRSA-infected arm as a weapon.  Warning: graphic picture of MRSA infected arm. Or a zombie limb. You can never know in northwestern Ohio. A US vector biologist got infected with Zika virus which is  a mosquito-borne pathogen causing joint pain and fatigue. He […]

Reverse Translation Discovered?

  We will never look at life at quite the same way again.   Until now, information flow in biology looked like this:   DNA gets transcribed to RNA, wheich in turn is translated to protein. While reverse transcription does take place with retroviruses using reverse transcriptase, the central dogma of molecular biology held that […]

Ratting out landmines and tuberculosis

  Thanks to John Stevenson for drawing my attention to this one: Giant African Pouched Rats are trained as detectors; a good solution for low-income countries and communities. HeroRATS, as they are called, come in two “models”: landmine detectors and tuberculosis detectors. Rats born in captivity (captured rats are impossible to train) are trained to […]

Big Moon Rising

  Unless you have been living on the, um, moon, then you have heard about the large moon expected tonight. The moon will be almost at perigee (closest point to earth in its orbit), and full. Luna is expected to be bigger & brighter. Best viewed when it is on the horizon, seems even bigger […]

Why are there no (or almost no) disease-causing Archaea?

Some microbes are evil minions of Hell (but not all) Quite a few people think that microbes are evil, disease causing minions of Hell that should be eradicated. Supermarkets are handing out sanitary wipes: wipe the handlebar if you want to live, never mind that 90% of the food in the supermarket is worse for […]

Function predictor? Submit your work to the CAFA meeting

  Last July I introduced CAFA: Critical Assessment of (Gene and Protein) Function Annotations. Recap: the number of genomic and metagenomic sequences is growing at a horrendous rate. We are inundated with sequence data, yet the fraction of useful information we can glean from these sequences is steadily decreasing. There are simply too many sequences, and they are […]

Giggity

The authors and editor knew exactly what they were doing with this one: Thanks to Ed Yong for tweeting this. Chau, R., Hamel, S., & Nellis, W. (2011). Chemical processes in the deep interior of Uranus Nature Communications, 2 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1198

You know your graduate student is frustrated when…

…you find this on the top of the paper pile on his desk:

Humans draw the LINE at Gonorrhea. Not that it helps.

א וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָה, אֶל-מֹשֶׁה וְאֶל-אַהֲרֹן לֵאמֹר.  ב דַּבְּרוּ אֶל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, וַאֲמַרְתֶּם אֲלֵהֶם:  אִישׁ אִישׁ, כִּי יִהְיֶה זָב מִבְּשָׂרוֹ–זוֹבוֹ, טָמֵא הוּא.  ג וְזֹאת תִּהְיֶה טֻמְאָתוֹ, בְּזוֹבוֹ:  רָר בְּשָׂרוֹ אֶת-זוֹבוֹ, אוֹ-הֶחְתִּים בְּשָׂרוֹ מִזּוֹבוֹ–טֻמְאָתוֹ, הִוא.  ד כָּל-הַמִּשְׁכָּב, אֲשֶׁר יִשְׁכַּב עָלָיו הַזָּב–יִטְמָא; וְכָל-הַכְּלִי אֲשֶׁר-יֵשֵׁב עָלָיו, יִטְמָא. , The day after Valentine’s Day. Ah! What better day in the year can we find […]

Playboy Pleasure Palace Provides Pneumophila?

It seems like an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease (in a mild form, Pontiac Fever)  has occurred at the DOMAINFest this year at Santa Monica, California. Legionnaire’s disease  is caused by gram-negative bacterium, Legionlla pneumophila. Legionella typically inhabits the water tanks of central air conditioning systems, but any aerosolized  fresh water such as from fog machines […]

Open Positions in Structural Bioinformatics

Posting for a colleague, who leads a great structural bioinformatics group in Valencia. Structural Genomics Unit Bioinformatics & Genomics Department – Príncipe Felipe Research Center Seeking a Bioniformatician and a Postdoc The Structural Genomics Unit at the CIPF (Valencia, Spain) seeks candidates for two open positions: Open position in RNA 3D modeling (Technician/Bioinformatician) Open position in […]

The Oxygen Rush: late January, all of February and a Day in November

I have just returned from British Columbia in Canada. I have to admit that their license plate motto is quite accurate: BC is incredibly beautiful. Another thing that struck me is the provincial flag of BC: the Union Jack at the top (OK, it is British Columbia), there are white and blue horizontal stripes, and […]

Bad Project

No apologies to Lady Gaga necessary.