Sandra Porter
sporte
Posts by this author
September 25, 2007
Biology as a second-language: the immersion method
Language teachers say the best way to learn a language is by total immersion and even better, spending time in the country where it's spoken conversing with native speakers.
See it, hear it, speak it, use it!
Put yourself in a position where…
September 20, 2007
The-Scientist recently posted a short piece on science-related blogs and interviewed seven different science bloggers to find out which blogs they recommend.
One puzzling feature about the piece is that all the bloggers they interviewed were male.
Pretty harmless, right?
Sure.
Except, as others…
September 19, 2007
But I'm certain that you will find some interesting things.
Mendel's Garden will be ready for harvest, here on Sunday, October 7th, and I need your help.
You won't need to stay on the path, but I would like you to submit your best genetics & molecular biology articles by midnight, Friday…
September 18, 2007
At least this is what I imagine it's like to live with someone who has bipolar disorder. Tonight - Sept. 19th, between 7-8 pm EDT, there will a "blogger's conference with the experts," discussing this very thing.
The transcript will be posted and you can learn more about the event here.
September 16, 2007
Can you tell the difference between the sort of person who would write a programming language and a serial killer?
It's getting close to Halloween so this is a good time to test your powers of detection.
Malevole has a lovely survey that asks if you can tell whether a person is a famous computer…
September 13, 2007
A reader from the UK sent me these lovely photos that he took of a jellyfish and asked for my help in identifying it. Unfortunately, while I'm pretty good with bacteria, plants, and tropical fish, my taxonomy skills don't go much farther unless I have a sample of DNA.
These photos were taken at La…
September 11, 2007
Two protein structures from an avian influenza virus are shown below. One form of the protein makes influenza virus resistant to Oseltamivir (Tamiflu®)
Don't worry, these proteins aren't from H5N1, but they do come from a related influenza virus that also infects birds.
technorati tags: molecular…
September 10, 2007
One of the places that I've always wanted to visit in Portland, OR, is Powell's City of Books. Powell's is the kind of bookstore that people in Seattle discuss in the same reverent tones that they use when they're describing Cody's in Berkeley or City Light in San Francisco.
It's not just a…
September 9, 2007
If you haven't, then hustle over to Mendel's Garden for a wonderful story about the monk and his life as a scientist, check out Gene Genie for best drawing of Craig Venter that I've ever seen; and if you're into computers, take a good long look at the lightning edition of Bio::blogs. I've visited…
September 8, 2007
Bertalan Meskó shares his strategies for keeping up and gives instructions so you can do the same.
He shows how you can save your favorite PubMed searches and have NCBI send you e-mails about new papers. He describes some third party PubMed tools that make pretty graphs. Last, he discusses RSS…
September 7, 2007
During the past few Fridays (or least here and here), we've been looking at a paper that was published from China with some Β-lactamase sequences that were supposedly from Streptococcus pneumoniae. The amazing thing about these particular sequences is that Β-lactamase has never been seen in S.…
September 6, 2007
Yes, indeed. I got the Red Hot blog of the Day award from RedOrbit.
Not for science, though; it's for showing why genome sequencing is expensive.
Sigh.
September 6, 2007
One of my readers asked: Why does genome sequencing cost so much?
My short answer is because it's big.
But I thought it would be fun to give a better answer to this question, especially since I'm sure many of you are wondering the same thing.
Okay, so let's do some math.
Don't worry, this math…
September 5, 2007
If you've read any of the many stories lately about Craig Venter or Jim Watson's genome, you've probably seen a "SNP" appear somewhere. (If you haven't read any of the stories, CNN has one here, and my fellow bloggers have posted several here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
You may be…
September 4, 2007
We were all thrilled last spring when the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act passed the House by a vote of 420 to 3. When GINA gets through the Senate, this act will protect individuals against discrimination based on their genetic information with health insurance and employment. The…
September 4, 2007
"Come quickly, Watson," said Sherlock Holmes, "I've been asked to review a mysterious sequence, whose importance I'm only now beginning to comprehend."
The unidentified stranger handed Holmes a piece of paper inscribed with symbols and said it was a map of unparalleled value.
Holmes gazed…
September 3, 2007
The Capitol Hill Seattle blog has a great set of lunar eclipse photos on flickr.
August 27, 2007
Some of them work for Bayer.
technorati tags: biotechnology, education, biotechnology education, high school biotechnology
The San Francisco Chronicle has a nice article on a 15 year old education program in Berkeley that serves students from Berkeley High and Life Academy. Over 1500 students have…
August 25, 2007
Why the ABRF of course!
I spend a fair amount time every summer giving workshops for college and high-school teachers on genomics and bioinformatics. One of the things that always surprises them, is the amount of lab work that's carried out by people working in shared, or core lab facilities. For…
August 24, 2007
I began this series last week with a question about a DNA sequence that was published and reported to be one the first beta-lactamases to be found in Streptococcus pneumoniae. Mike has a great post about one of problems with this paper.
I think the data themselves are awfully suspicious.
So, last…
August 24, 2007
What's the connection?(image from Newton TAB blog)
I have to admit, I don't know.
But, I do know where you can find out.
Dr. Gerard Cangelosi, from the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, will be speaking about tuberculosis, godzilla, and XDR-TB, Monday night, 7 pm at the Pub at Ravenna…
August 23, 2007
Charles Darwin was so fascinated by beetles he paid people to help him build his collection. The Coleopterists Society and the Smithsonian Institute want to help kids explore the wonders of beetles, too.
They're providing grants for kids, in grades 7-12 to work on beetle biology.
Applications are…
August 22, 2007
I get asked this question often enough and now that's it's come up again, it seems that I might as well answer it once and for all and get it over with.
First, I want to change the question. Of course they don't need to learn programming.
A better question is would it benefit biologists to learn…
August 21, 2007
or maybe seminars on parade?
They're calling them PubCasts, but I don't think I'll be watching them in a pub.
Seriously, SciVee is kind of cute, and has lots of potential down the road, and even has a few unintentional moments of humor right now, but....
It's a bit distracting. I can't watch these…
August 21, 2007
If you've read the previous posts on this topic, here and here, you're probably aware by now that I have this weird (okay, maybe fanatical) obsession with data. Or at least, with knowing if my data are right so I can get on with life, do the analysis and figure out the results.
My results from…
August 20, 2007
I'll continue with the remaining parts of my career series shortly, but for the time being, I want to bring your attention to a really good post on doing bioinformatics as a software professional, and some commentary on the question that never seems to go away: "do biologists need to be able to…
August 17, 2007
One time I was watching a football game on TV and they had a short quiz, called "You make the call" or something like that, and you had to watch a play and pretend to be a referee. A short video clip showed football players falling over each other. Then you were three possible calls that a…
August 16, 2007
Thanks to Steven Colbert you can hear about DNA directly from Dr. Spencer Wells from the National Genographic Project.
I read about this video in the GenomeWeb Daily Scan and had to check it out.
Who would have thought scientists could be so funny?
Watch it quick! There was a note at the Comedy…
August 15, 2007
Sometimes asking a question can be a mistake.
Especially when your question leads to more questions and having to question things that you didn't want to question, and pretty soon you begin to regret ever opening the file and looking at the data and asking the question in the first place.
Sigh.…
August 15, 2007
Yes, you can!
Really, I thought this was going to be more challenging, but the nice folks at the NCBI have made a special personal genomics FTP site. You can also get Craig Venter's genome, and maybe even do some comparative genomics and see if one has a few deletions. After all, don't you want…