Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
Posted in Biology on Nov 28th, 2006
Video blogs are getting more and more interesting. This one, My JoVE, isn’t really a blog so much as a repository of valuable information for biologists, but it aspires to become a kind of video journal. JoVE stands for Journal of Visualized Experiments, and they’re trying to attack two big problems in biological research: “low [...]
Dogma is a funny word to appear so prominently in a science like biology. Any picture, any model, any theory currently in vogue is resting on the shifting sands of biological weirdness. I love, for instance, the fact that the Nobel Prize in medicine this year was awarded for major form of genetic regulation that [...]
Posted in Biology on Sep 29th, 2006
A few years ago, PBS ran a series called, simply, DNA. It included some of the spiciest, most inspiring animations of biological molecules in action that I’d ever seen. I longed to linger over them and savor them, but they came and went so fast in the show, and until this evening I had no [...]
Posted in Biology on Sep 22nd, 2006
The Public Library of Science has the laudable goal of making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. In the current sclerotic journal system, the flow of money greatly impedes the flow of information, and important scientific results are locked away behind expensive subscriptions. If you’re inside the privileged White Coat [...]
Posted in Biology, Uncategorized on Aug 22nd, 2006
This is a picture of one DNA sequencing machine: the Applied Biosystems 3730xl DNA Analyzer. It costs a few hundred thousand dollars and it’s starting to show its age, but it’s still the sweetest thing on the market if you want to sequence DNA accurately and fast. Here’s another DNA sequencing machine: RNA polymerase. It’s [...]
Posted in Biology, Uncategorized on Aug 3rd, 2006
Someone I work with went to SIGGRAPH this week and posted a link to a cool movie he saw. SIGGRAPH (which stands for Special Interest Group Graphics) is the biggest computer graphics conference on the calendar, and it happens to be in Boston this year. Anyway, I followed this link and stumbled upon the juiciest, [...]
Posted in Biology on May 15th, 2006
I often muse about the difference between the biology world and the software world. They’re ramming into each other more and more these days, and sometimes the result is more like a car accident than a gentle merger. Bioinformatics and systems biology are two rapidly growing fields where you are as likely to find a [...]
Posted in Biology on Jan 6th, 2006
The Scientist web site has gone live with a new look, and as a result they’re making the entire site freely available for a few days. The bad news is that they will snatch this boon back under their subscriber walls in a few days. The good news is that their current cover story happens [...]
Posted in Biology on Sep 22nd, 2005
I knew it would come to this: dirt is officially good for you. The “hygiene hypothesis” has received another shot in the arm in a recent talk by Professor Peter Openshaw of Imperial College, London: How ‘Dirt’ Could Educate The Immune System And Help Treat Asthma. What is the hygiene hypothesis? It’s the idea that [...]
Posted in Biology on Aug 24th, 2005
Why is molecular biology so different from engineering? Engineers build things using well-understood systems, the details of which, while sometimes complex, were originally specified and documented by other engineers. Molecular biologists, on the other hand, are uncovering the bizarre workings of an almost impossibly remote alien world hidden from all but the most obsessively persistent [...]
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