Technology
mikethemadbiologist | September 15, 2010A couple of weeks ago I attended the Human Microbiome Research Conference. At that meeting, one talk by Bruce Birren (and covered by Jonathan Eisen) mentioned something that was completely overlooked by the attendees. Now, I don't blame them, since what Birren mentioned was about bacterial genomics, not the human microbiome. But here's what I tweeted about Birren's talk (TWEET!):
B. Birren-E. coli K-12 can be assembled into 1 scaffold for hundreds of $s with Illumina seq & new jumps
Let's unpack this below the fold.
When we sequence a genome, we actually sequence small pieces (with the…
kcollins | September 14, 2010A shout out to Vincent Caprio for posting this interview with Larry Bock and blogging about the festival on his website. Thanks for helping us get the word out!
NanoBusiness Alliance Interview - Larry Bock, Executive Director, USA Science & Engineering Festival
Posted on September 1st, 2010
This month's interview, 6th in our series, is with Larry Bock, icon of the Nanotechnology Community. I had the pleasure of meeting Larry in Washington, DC in February 2002. We walked the Halls of Congress together and Larry was one of the key players in advocating for the National Nanotechnology…
drorzel | September 13, 2010I needed a band-aid this morning, and when I was getting it out, it occurred to me that there are some subtle details of packaging technology that pretty clearly mark this as the future, not the past. I'm not sure when the transition was, but if you're around my age or older, you can probably remember the useless little red strings that used to be an integral part of the band-aid packaging. In theory, you were supposed to pull on the string, and use it to tear the paper wrapper around the bandage, but in practice, the damn thing always just pulled straight out of the package, and you ended up…
oracknows | September 10, 2010I hate to do this to Bora again. I really do. I'm also getting tired of blogging all these crappy acupuncture studies. I really am. However, sometimes a skeptic's gotta do what a skeptic's gotta do, and this is one of those times.
As you may recall, a mere week ago I was disturbed to have discovered the publication of a truly horrifically bad acupuncture study in PLoS ONE. It had all the hallmarks of quackademic medicine: an implausible hypothesis, trying to correlate mystical concepts of meridians and qi to anatomy and failing miserably, and dubious statistical modeling. That PLoS ONE…
kcollins | September 7, 2010Shout out to CrazyEngineers for a recent interview with Festival Director Larry Bock
Larry Bock - Celebrating Science & Engineering
CEans,
Mr. Larry Bock is the Founder of Nanosys Inc. He is a General Partner of CW Ventures, a $100M life sciences venture capital fund, and a Special Limited Partner to Lux Capital a $100M nanotechnology-focused venture capital fund. He is a Member of the Board of Directors of FEI Corporation (NASDAQ: FEIC), the leading supplier of tools for nanotechnology research. He has found and/or grown about 4 dozen companies. He is the inspiration behind the most…
kcollins | September 2, 2010It is less than six weeks until the start of the USA Science and Engineering Festival. The excitement is starting to build. Check this out! Host Sponsor Lockheed Martin's CTO Ray O Johnson is interviewed by EarthSky (another Festival Sponsor) about why we need to re-invorate interest in science in our schools here in the US or we will fall behind in new developments and technologies. He talks about the role of the USA Science and Engineering Festival in his interview.
The mission statement for the USA Science and Engineering Festival is: is to re-invigorate the interest of our nation's youth…
drorzel | August 18, 2010We picked up a used copy of Charles Mann's pop-archeology book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus a while back. I didn't read it at the time, because I was a little afraid that it would be rather polemical in what I think of as the Neil Young mode-- wildly overstating the awesomeness of pre-Columbian cultures, and exaggerating the evil of the European invaders (Neil's recorded some great stuff, but the lyrics to "Cortez the Killer" are pretty dopey). It came up several times recently in discussions elsewhere, though, and seemed like it would make a nice break from the…
dgmacarthur | August 17, 2010More huge news in the sequencing industry, following on from the public share offer from Pacific Biosciences - relative newcomer to the field, Ion Torrent, has just been bought by Life Technologies for an impressive US$375 million in cash and stock, with an option to increase by a further US$350 million if "certain technical and time-based milestones" are met by the end of 2012.
Ion Torrent made a splash with its launch at this year's Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting in February (here's my coverage from the meeting). The company has developed a sequencing technology based on…
drorzel | August 17, 2010So, I blew off stuff I should've been doing, and went to see a matinee of the Scott Pilgrim movie this morning (it's very much not Kate's sort of thing, and I would feel guilty ditching her with SteelyKid to see it during the evening or on a weekend). Actually, first I went to Borders for half an hour to read the last volume of the comic, so I could compare the two endings-- I should probably buy these, because I really like the story, but I balk at shelling out that much money for something that I can read in half an hour in a bookstore.
I liked it a lot, but then, I'm a sucker for this sort…
oracknows | August 9, 2010The longer I'm in this whole skepticism thing, the more I realize that no form of science is immune to woo. For example, even though I lament just how many people do not accept evolution, for example, I can somewhat understand it. Although the basics of the science and evidence supporting the theory of evolution as the central organizing principle of all biology, much of the evidence is not readily apparent to those who don't make it a calling to study biology, evolution, and speciation. It's not like, for example, gravity, which everyone experiences and of which everyone has a "gut level"…
gregladen | August 8, 2010Georges Bank is a very large shallow area in the North Atlantic, roughly the size of a New England state, that serves as a fishing ground and whaling area (these days for watching the whales, not harpooning them) for ports in New England, New York and Eastern Canada. Eighteen thousand years ago, sea levels were globally at a very low point (with vast quantities of the Earth's water busy being ice), and at that time George's Bank would have been a highland region on the very edge of the North American continent, extending via a lower ridge to eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and…
sciencepunk | August 7, 2010This is an adaptation of the talk I gave at Westminster Skeptics in the Pub on Monday 2nd August. You can hear an audio transcript of the talk at the Pod Delusion website.
I was invited to stage the talk again at the Winchester SITP, a recording of which is here.
I'm very much a child of the skeptical community. I started writing about bad science in 2004, in a scissors-and-glue zine titled War On Error (a very droll play on words at the time, and a lot easier than coming up with a twist on Overseas Contingency Operation). Eventually this moved online, morphing into SciencePunk. Over…
drorzel | August 5, 2010A reader emailed me with a few questions regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, one of which is too good not to turn into a blog post:
What is a photon from an experimental perspective?... Could you perhaps provide me with a reference that discusses some experiments and these definitional issues?
The short form of the experimental answer is "A photon is the smallest amount of light that will cause a detector to 'click.'" (For some reason, hypothetical light detector technology has never really advanced past the Geiger counter stage-- even though it's all electrical pulses these days, we…
drorzel | July 28, 2010
The Art of Sleeping in Seminars | Department of Physics at the U of I
"Through long years of experience, we have accumulated the following useful set of rules. These should be helpful to beginning research students. However, we have also observed seasoned veterans making some of these simple errors. For advanced students, these rules can also be applied to regular courses. "
(tags: academia education presentations silly)
Blog U.: Rethinking Research "Productivity" - Library Babel Fish - Inside Higher Ed
"My frustration with graduate training is that from my (admittedly removed)…
lbock | July 23, 2010 As a founder and organizer of the upcoming inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival, I'm in frequent contact with a wide range of teachers, students, innovators, community leaders, entrepreneurs and decision makers in science and technology across the country.
One thing that I continue to learn from these experiences: There is a growing need out there, even a grassroots desire, among average Americans to understand and connect in meaningful ways with the vast array of science and technology impacting their lives today -- provided that this information is presented to them through…
sastyk | July 20, 2010The first two pieces of this series were largely comic pieces. This one is more serious. I have said this before, but I'll repeat it - I came to science blogs for one reason, and one only - because there was no one else talking about facing up to our material limits on this kind of site, with this kind of audience. I didn't come for the money (you may or may not believe me on this one, but as I keep saying, it isn't that I probably don't have a price, it is just that it isn't a few hundred bucks a month) - I've donated everything I've ever earned here (well less than 1K, given that they…
clock | July 19, 2010It is with great regret that I am writing this. Scienceblogs.com has been a big part of my life for four years now and it is hard to say good bye.
Everything that follows is my own personal thinking and may not apply to other people, including other bloggers on this platform. The new contact information is at the end of the post, but please come back up here and read the whole thing - why I feel like I must leave now.
Sb beginnings
Scienceblogs.com started back in January 2006. On that day, several of my favourite science bloggers moved to this new site, posting the URL on their farewell…
kcollins | July 15, 2010
Amgen, a leader in biotechnology, and the Amgen Foundation are committed to supporting science education programs and are proud to be a sponsor of the USA Science & Engineering Festival to further encourage bright young minds to explore a future in science and strengthen science literacy.
Jean L. Lim, President, Amgen Foundation
"Amgen applauds the Festival for bringing together leaders in science education to create an exciting educational event for students and the community," said Jean J. Lim, president of the Amgen Foundation. "The Festival can leverage the passion and expertise…
jdupuis | July 14, 2010Usually every day brings one or two interesting things at InsideHigherEd, but today is a bonanza.
The Ed Tech Sonic Boom
Today, we are able to leverage a set of well-developed and stable technologies to build in pedagogically advanced active learning methods into a wide variety of courses and modes of instructional delivery. To be a great teacher it is no longer a prerequisite to be a dynamic and gifted lecturer. Rather, faculty can partner with learning designers, librarians, and teaching specialists to create dynamic, student-centered courses that allow students interact and create with…
gregladen | July 13, 2010National Center for Science Education staff will be featured at two key panels at the Netroots Nation 2010 conference in Las Vegas at the Hotel Rio. Details below the fold.
"The ABCs of the Education Culture Wars"
Time: 4:30pm - 5:45pm
Date: July 22, 2010
Steven Newton, NCSE
Dan Quinn - Texas Freedom Network
Michael Bérubé - Literature Professor, Penn. St. Univ.
Judy Jennings, Ph.D. - Texas Board of Ed. candidate
Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Ph.D. - Texas BOE candidate
Activists and leaders on the right have spent the past three decades running "stealth" candidates and funding pressure groups…