My views on anything

In album CHBC

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Crazy, 1000 people are following me on Google+ 🙂

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Reshared post from +Ewan Birney

Myself and some others are looking for someone (or a small team?) to make an html5 "site/app" (think the FT "app") – using the local cacheing ability in html5 for open access scientific papers. It would provide the ability to register "streams" (ie, topic areas), update easily when opened, and provide a sensible viewing sensibly. Is anyone interested (and/or know some who is). We could discuss light weight funding and back ends for this. Drop me a message if you are interested…

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DNA research performed on samples gather from the Tyrolean Iceman (5300 years old) showed that Ötzi the ice mummy had brown eyes, brown hair and was lactose intolerant.

When comparing Ötzi's genome they found out that the most similar living humans can be found on Sardinia and Corsica.

See the paper "New insights into the Tyrolean Iceman's origin and phenotype as inferred by whole-genome sequencing": http://goo.gl/44b03

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Being able to get your daily intake of energy from your coffee – I see massive potential 😉

One a more serious note. The following seems like a valid point although I think it's quite tricky to find out and decide if part of a sequence is contamination or that it's bacterial sequence that has moved in by gene transfer.

"Rose thinks that more examples of HGT could come from DNA sequencing projects. Bioinformatics software is usually programmed to remove sequences from eukaryotic genomes it deems as "contaminating" DNA, he notes, including sequences that seem to be bacterial. So it is possible that some genetic sequences in higher organisms that originated in bacteria are being thrown out by current sequencing efforts, he says."

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Bacterial gene helps coffee beetle get its fix : Nature News & Comment
Rare example of gene transfer that provides clear evolutionary benefit.

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After SOPA and PIPA now also the Research Works Act (RWA) is doomed to fail because of online public pressure. Today even Elsevier withdrawn themselves from backing this bill making it to die soon! I guess great job done by +Michael B. Eisen and others!

Does this mean that this year the online protestor is following up last years offline protestor as +TIME Person of the Year?

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We won the Battle of the Research Works Act. Now let’s win the War for Open Access.
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things

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