I love it when other people use my ideas, especially before I think them up. After my previous post advocating group review of scientific articles, it was pointed out to me that two journals are already using group reviews to referee their papers. One is Frontiers (which is a collection of journals, rather than a […]
So I’ve been catching up on my paper reviewing duties this weekend. To those outside the Ivory Outhouse, “reviewing a paper” means “anonymously criticizing a research article considered for publication in a scientific journal”. (For those of you familiar with the process, you can jump to the text after the first figure.) Here’s how science […]
This commentary appeared in Nature recently. Title: Ancient Fungi Found in Deep Sea Mud. Quote: Researchers have found evidence of fungi thriving far below the floor of the Pacific Ocean, in nutrient-starved sediments more than 100 million years old….To follow up on earlier reports of deep-sea fungi, Reese and her colleagues studied sediments pulled up from […]
I received this email today from Gary Battle at PDBe . Very cool: Nobel Prize Quips: Explore the structure of B2AR bound to its G-protein. Today, Nobel Laureates Robert J. Lefkowitz and Brian K. Kobilka take center stage in Stockholm where they will receive their Nobel Prize Medals for their studies of G-protein–coupled receptors […]
Our lab has a new project and website up. The project is BioDIG: Biological Database of Images and Genomes. BioDIG lets you combine image data and genome data of, well, just about anything which you can make images and have a genome, or partial genomic information. You can upload your image, annotate (tag) parts of […]
See what happens when a Capuchin monkey receives unequal pay: The article in Nature (2004): Monkeys reject unequal pay Sarah F. Brosnan & Frans B. M. de Waal
Today is the last day of Open Access Week, where all things Open Access are heralded. William Gunn gave a great talk here at MU on how open access is changing scholarship. (And a big thank you to our librarians Jen Waller & Kevin Messner for hosting William!) I have posted about Open Access before, […]
Let’s get this clear: Tyrannosaurus rex, the best selling figurine of class reptilia is not my favorite bad-ass top-of-the-food chain predator. Come on. Did you see its arms? I mean… As a kid, I always thought the Allosaurus was much cooler. For one thing, it was on the cover of my favorite dinosaur book, “The […]
My previous post on ROSALIND, a bioinformatics learning site, got picked up by the Slashdot community. A discussion came up on careers in Bioinformatics, and the Slashdot user rockmulle made some interesting observations on career paths in bioinformatics, which I have copied here. While brief and therefore omitting many important details (research at a university […]
I just learned about this one: ROSALIND is a really cool concept in learning bioinformatics. You are given problems of increasing difficulty to solve. Start with nucleotide counting (trivial) and end with genome assembly (not so trivial). To solve a problem, you download a sample data set, write your code and debug it. Once […]
I can’t believe I did not realize this before. Thanks to Mickey Kosloff for enlightening me by posting this on his Facebook. Of course grants are like homework. You don’t want to do them; anything is better, really; multiple excuses why not to do them right now; anything has more priority, suddenly. BUT if […]
Improve wikipedia entries in computational biology, and you too can win cash prizes, a free membership to International Society of Computational Biology, or a dinner date with an ISCB officer of your choice! OK, maybe not the last one, but definitely the first two. The ISCB is announcing a competition to improve Wikipedia entries that have to […]