Pawel on Open Science. Full disclosure: I consider sharing an office with this guy for over a year to be one of the best experiences of my postdoc.
Despite our best attempts to remove species from the face of the Earth, there is still quite a bit of life out there and it is still quite diverse. Also, there are still quite a few people who want to document, describe and make the rest of us aware of the magnitude and diversity of [...]
A nice take on the vi / emacs wars Also, real programmers browse the web using the vimperator.
In no particular order or context. No personal stuff and by no means a complete list: WordPress (like, duh). Wikipedia (default for looking up new stuff) Wikis in general (great lab management tool. Don’t need LIMS) Open Access Publishing and Creative Commons licensing. FLOSS licensing (90% of the software I use, and 100% of what [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
(Full disclosure before I start: I am an academic editor in PLoS ONE. I have no financial stake in PLoS, and as far as I know, they have none in me. They’d better not, if they know what’s good for them). PLoS have come up with yet another cool mechanism for scientific communication: PLoS Currents. [...]
Open Notebook What is it? Open Notebook means “no insider information” You lab notebook is on a wiki, out there for everyone to see. Negative results & all. You share your research process with the world as you go along. There are many shades to this process: you may share some of your data, edit [...]
Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB) is a large international gathering of computational biologists, mostly from the bioinformatics side: genomics, structural bioinformatics, computational genomics, etc. This year there is a friendfeed room for microblogging ISMB 2009. So if you are not in Stockholm, or also if you are, look it up. Most of the microbloggers [...]
eMusic, a subscription-based indie music estore has hiked its prices and concurrently signed a deal with Sony BMG to sell their back catalog. What’s wrong with this? Well, a lot. Read my previous post for details. It seems like the reaction on the intertubes has been less than joyful, with phrases like “corporate sellout” and [...]
Don’t you know We’re all light Yeah, I read that someplace –XTC This is interesting: an article in PLoS ONE that claims that Paramecia can communicate using light. The author, Daniel Fels from the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel, separated two Paramecia populations using quartz or glass vials, grew them in the dark, and checked [...]
There has been a lot of buzz recently about Wolfram’s new product, the Wolfram Alpha (WA). After attending a webinar on WA, I was given a preview account, and started messing around with it. In case you were wondering, that is the extent of my involvement with Wolfram Research, LLC, I don’t even have a [...]
Sooo… NIH and NSF started Tweeting. Nice. A good way to keep up with grant programs, funding opportunities, yadda yadda. Here’s my @ tweet : @NIH protein catalytic site evolution health implic: good for drug design. Young scientist, need $0.7M 2010-2013, 2xpostdocs+cluster+travel. Prev pubs: http://is.gd/vnPN; kthxbi I hope I won’t get killed at the renewal…
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 [...]
