I have always been amused by the fact being listed at the HUGO meetings immediately after a Nobel winner as WJ–ST follows WA–TSON. Not so amused by his many ignorant, Continue reading Avoid boring people
courtesy of Craig Venter – whom else? It is also one half of the genome of his only son (the individual denoted 3.5 Continue reading First individual human genome
A quick update of my DNA pooling studies: The Affymetrix Genotyping Console 1.0 now includes a parameter CONTRAST Continue reading And now all together
Embedded in the tragic history of Henrietta Lacks – a 31 old mother of five small children – the authors of a new Nature review show how closely both processes are being related. The main culprit seems to be genomic instability as shown by loss of heterozygosity. What has been particular new to me were the cross links to autophagy – the waste management of the cell that came into focus only recently in Crohns disease. Yea, yea.
Yes, some scientists can think and write pretty fast while others are much slower. Software created for the Dark Web Project of the Artifical Intelligence Lab U Arizona can measure that and identify an author by Continue reading Don’t let them hear you typing
Although not so much appreciated by big companies, peer to peer technologies have a great success in sharing communities. Peer to peer might even work with mobile phones in Africa as shown recently by a Swedish company.
I wonder if peer to peer would also work. Continue reading Peer to peer publication
Edge has an obituary of Alex, the worlds most famous talking bird.
What the data suggest to me is that if one starts with a brain of a certain complexity and gives it enough social and ecological support, that brain will develop at least the building blocks of a complex communication system.
This note should probably start with a smile ;-) as you may already know about my interest in parthogenesis, microchimerism, siRNA transmission and other epigenetic wonders. We already know about preferential transmission of allergy by the allergic mother Continue reading More on paranormal inheritance of allergy
A new review paper about online genetic databases nicely summarizes the current state of the art (including my own efforts). There are only 13 databases Continue reading Genetic databases – the tragedy continues
Only a couple of years ago, you could edit your file allocation table and replace all these fancy question marks in ?ecret.doc to undelete your files.
While importing now my holiday pictures from a SD card to Picasa 2, I accidentally Continue reading Accidentally deleted files
but repeats in the human genome are not such impressive. Instead they create a lot of trouble when situated in the close proximity to genes. Think of Huntingtons disease, myotonic dystrophy, fragile X or some ataxias. The human genome sequence paper already had a chapter Continue reading Repetitio est mater studiorum
Have you ever ever wondered how these nice photo tracks in Google Earth work?
After spending hours of try & error, here is my recommendation if you can record NMEA stream on your GPS device and JPG on your camera. No hacking, no conversion, no scripts, just a quick & intuitive way by freely available software.
Adjust your camera & GPS to be absolutely synchronous. After data recording copy all your files into a single directory and let Locr GPS Photo propose a GPS position for all photos. Correct positions in the map window if necessary.
Then fire up COPIKS Photo Mapper, load photos plus track and export all together as a KMZ file.
You are done!
An excellent new review summarizes our current knowledge about telomeres – the complicated chromosome end machinery that is necessary to prevent unwanted repair while allowing to track for the number of replications. Think of it like a source code control system as CVS, the Concurrent Version System. During a recent research project on life cycle of single point mutations / SNPs I realized Continue reading Living on borrowed time
I had the chance to install now the new PLINK GWAS software for a further analysis of recently published ORMDL3 asthma data. It seems that PLINK is some software that I was looking for a long time (paper link|download link). There are great and foolproof functions to check the validity of your data. I discovered for example unnoticed stratification in the German case-control sample by first and second component of the MDS analysis Continue reading Blink Plink
SPIEGEL online points to a retrospective of former SCIENCE editor Daniel Koshland on the science typologies challenge, chance and charge.
Challenge – putting the pieces together like the discovery of the DNA structure of Watson & Crick.
Charge – solving longstanding ubiquitous problems like gravity laws by Newton, a rare event.
Chance – events like the development of PCR by Mullis.
I could add cha-uvinism (ignoring previous work), cha-os (also called creativity), cha-racter (???), cha-rity (work for nothing), cha-rade (also called congresses), cha-pter (many to write), cha-lk (many lectures), cha-nge (not really), cha-mpion (a few), cha-ir (less), cha-ff (most), cha-rts (hundreds), cha-t and cha-rivari (always), yea,yea.