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October 8, 2007
The finalists for the 2007 Blogging Scholarship have been announced. There's 20 of them, and, from a quick perusal of the list, it appears that four of them are science bloggers. Two of those four are familiar to evolgen: Shelley of Retrospectacle and Kambiz of Anthropology.net. The other two are…
October 7, 2007
Mark Liberman has an excellent post examining the general public's understanding of basic statistical concepts such as means, variances, and distributions. Here's a taste: Until about a hundred years ago, our language and culture lacked the words and ideas needed to deal with the evaluation and…
October 7, 2007
My series on using computational tools to study molecular evolution [Publishing Original Research on Blogs] has focused on the evolution of the aldolase gene family in Drosophila. When I described the Backstory, I left out a lot of details regarding the biochemistry of glycolysis. Well, Larry Moran…
October 5, 2007
Previous entries: Part 1 - Introduction Part 2 - The Backstory Part 3 - Obtaining Sequences This post is part of a series exploring the evolution of a duplicated gene in the genus Drosophila. Links to the previous posts are above. Part 4 of this series (Obtaining More Sequences) can be found…
October 4, 2007
Haldane never had it so good: (Via Shelley.)
October 4, 2007
The new edition of Circus of the Spineless has been posted at The annotated budak. Go get yourself some invert blogging!
October 3, 2007
Previous entries: Part 1 - Introduction Part 2 - The Backstory This post is part of a series exploring the evolution of a duplicated gene in the genus Drosophila. Links to the previous posts are above. Part 3 of this series (Obtaining Sequences) can be found below. Obtaining Sequences In the…
October 2, 2007
Pedro has posted a new edition of Bio::Blogs, the bioinformatics blog carnival. Go check out the hottest new computational biology blogging.
October 1, 2007
Some of you may recall that last year we held a sort-of fundraiser to support science education. The program was organized through DonorsChoose.org, a non-profit dedicated to getting money to teachers to support in class projects. Each teacher submits a proposal requesting funds for their desired…
October 1, 2007
This is a repost (with some edits) of an introduction to publishing original research on blogs -- a series I am reintroducing. The original entry can be found here. Previous entries: Part 1 - Introduction This post is part of a series exploring the evolution of a duplicated gene in the genus…
September 29, 2007
Most of us are so used to the male+female=baby system of reproduction that we practice that it doesn't even occur to us that there are other options. Sure, there's the occasional instance of parthenogenesis in some megafaunal species, but that seems like the exception rather than the norm. And we…
September 28, 2007
This is a repost (with some edits) of an introduction to publishing original research on blogs -- a series I am reintroducing. The original entry can be found here. In April of last year, Bora pushed the idea of publishing original research (hypotheses, data, etc) on science blogs. As a responsible…
September 27, 2007
Or is he micro-phobe? Nature Genetics has published a mostly positive review of the new Evolution textbook by Nick Barton and others (the others include blogger Jonathan Eisen) The review is penned by Francisco Ayala. Among the things Ayala brings up is the coverage various taxa receive:…
September 26, 2007
The newest edition of Tangled Bank has been posted by Martin at Aardvarchaeology. Go read yourself some science!
September 26, 2007
The human genome is one big, bloated motherfucker. It's almost all non-protein-coding DNA. The same is true for many other eukaryotic genomes. Sure, some of it has a function. But a whole lot of it (and maybe most of it) is just junk. There are some who point to a relationship between genome size…
September 26, 2007
Over a year ago I threatened to perform some original research and publish it on my blog. I got as far as writing an introduction to the project, but I never actually posted any data. I know, I suck.I had hoped to make the project simple enough that people could follow along. The problem was the…
September 16, 2007
Carl Zimmer has a post covering three recent papers on gene duplication: one on amylase variation in humans, one on whole genome duplication in yeast, and one on duplications of genes in the Drosophila arizonae reproductive tract. In all three papers, results are presented showing the importance of…
September 14, 2007
I'm sure by now you've heard of the ginormous spider web that was spun in Texas. The thing was huge -- 200 yards long -- and it was spun by multiple different species. That interspecific collaboration got Bill Poser thinking, so he blogged about it at Language Log: The web covers hundreds of…
September 12, 2007
As I was making my way back from a seminar on skin color genetics yesterday, I noticed a couple of bugs perched on the outer wall of my building. This wouldn't be a blog worthy moment, except that the bugs were huge . . . and in mid coitus. I hurried inside and ran upstairs to grab my camera. I…
September 12, 2007
Matt at the Behavioral Ecology Blog has posted the newest edition of the Tangled Bank, the original science blogging carnival.
September 10, 2007
Mendel's Garden is the original blog carnival devoted to genetics. A new carnival is traditionally posted on the first Sunday of the month (although the date is somewhat flexible). The newest edition of Mendel's Garden has been posted at balancing life. Sandy at Discovering Biology in a Digital…
September 6, 2007
Among my many pet peeves are when people refer to Drosophila as fruit flies (they are not). Real fruit flies (Tephritids) feed, mate, and lay their eggs on live fruit -- for this reason, many are agricultural pests (e.g., the medfly). Drosophila, on the other hand, feed on the micro-organisms found…
September 4, 2007
Lookie here -- they've sequenced Craig Venter's genome. What did they learn about Craig? Well, he's European. He has 46 chromosomes. He's got some structural differences from the reference genome. Venter also differs from the reference genome by insertions and deletions.Like every other human, he's…
September 3, 2007
A new article in Nature Genetics brings together two themes that I've blogged about before: human brains and King and Wilson. In fact, I've even already blogged about the article, but this post contains a more thorough treatment of the science. The long and short of it is that some people think…
September 2, 2007
Massimo Pigliucci has reviewed Mike Lynch's book on genome evolution for Science [Postgenomic Musings]. In his review, Pigliucci writes the following: One of the central theses of the book is that natural selection is not necessarily the central evolutionary mechanism, as quite a bit of the details…
September 2, 2007
Remember when I said that the near future of eukaryotic genome sequence would involve sequencing EST libraries (collections of mRNA, or transcribed genes) rather than de novo sequencing of whole genomes? Well, I did, even if you don't remember. Anyway, a new paper in PLoS ONE puts that approach to…
September 1, 2007
Shelley's posted some pictures of nerd cakes. She calls 'em geek cakes, but I see no headless chickens. Anyway, I've got my own little nerd cake: We had it made for a party we threw during recruitment weekend for our grad program this past spring. Sadly, the icer responsible for the art couldn't…
September 1, 2007
According to this press release Trends in Genetics (TIG) is "the most established monthly journal in Genetics". I have no idea what that means, but if I were asked to name the top journals in genetics, TIG wouldn't crack the top four. In fact, here is my top four: Nature Genetics PLoS Genetics…
August 31, 2007
Eukaryotic genomes are chimeras of sequences from many different sources. There are the genes responsible for the normal functioning of the host, but there are also transposable elements (TEs), sequences from mitochondria (numts), and endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). In addition to those examples,…
August 31, 2007
Genome rearrangements are fast becoming one of the most interesting aspects of comparative genomics (I may be slightly biased in my perspective). We have known for quite some time that genomes of different species (and even within species) differ by inversions of their chromosomes (this was first…