Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
Posted in Biology on Jan 3rd, 2012
How is it you can drink saliva all day long and never run out of the stuff? Sorry to put the image of spit-drinking in your mind, but you’re doing it right now, am I right? And the more you think about it, the more you do it. Before today is over, you’ll have swallowed [...]
Posted in Biology on Nov 18th, 2010
Hey, so I totally scooped the New York Times with my post last week about animation and molecular biology. Only two days ago they came out with this article: Molecular Animation – Where Cinema and Biology Meet. I’m sure they were peeved about my piece, and they probably rushed theirs into production as a result, [...]
Posted in Biology on Nov 18th, 2009
In a Zoomable User Interface (ZUI), you can move up and down the scale of a spatial dimension easily. This feels very natural when you’re zooming through something that you have some physical intuition about, like a picture of the inauguration, or a map of the planet. It can be very disorienting when you’re zooming [...]
Posted in Biology on Mar 18th, 2008
I just finished reading Sean Carroll’s book The Making of the Fittest. Subtitled “DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution”, it’s the follow-on book to Endless Forms Most Beautiful. In this book Carroll devotes several chapters to demonstrating how, against our natural intuition, there really is enough time (given a few hundred million years) [...]
Posted in Biology on Feb 15th, 2008
Do you suppose, if your house was knocked over by Hurricane Fifi, that you might feel more slighted than if the same damage had been done by a storm with a more muscular name? Generals have long understood the value of giving their military operations intimidating names like Rolling Thunder and Urgent Fury. If you [...]
Posted in Biology on Jan 17th, 2008
Want to buy a slightly used genome? Back in 2000, Craig Venter and Francis Collins (and Bill Clinton) announced the completion of “the” human genome. Not to take anything away from that achievement, but genomes are just as varied as humans. Whose genome was the human genome? Or to come at it from another direction: [...]
Posted in Biology on Dec 4th, 2007
We live in some kind of golden age of microscopy. In the old days, people relied on stains that made cells look like this. Useful, but not too pretty. It kills the cells too, but more to the point, no matter how useful it is, a picture like this is never going to land you [...]
Posted in Biology on Nov 7th, 2007
I came across this Andy Grove interview in Newsweek in which he is complaining bitterly about the pharmaceutical industry. The piece begins with the statement that during the time that former CEO Grove spent at Intel, “the number of transistors on a chip went from about 1,000 to almost 10 billion.” And I thought to [...]
Posted in Biology on Oct 3rd, 2007
Among the last of a proud breed, this Castanea dentata, or American chestnut, stands alone in a Kentucky field. It is one of the very few mature flowering chestnuts that has so far eluded the fungal disease known as chestnut blight. What you see in the picture is a tree so valuable that it is [...]
Posted in Biology on Sep 7th, 2007
I gave a talk at the second O’Reilly Ignite Boston event tonight, and I was lucky enough to meet Hari Jayaram who was also there to present. Hari is a crystallographer at Brandeis with several Protein Data Bank entries under his belt, including the notorious coronavirus nucleocapsid of SARS fame. Along with several other friends, [...]
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