The Tomato Genome Sequencing Project is go. You can keep track of the progress of the international team at this site. The tomato lucky enough to have its genetic code read is Solanum lycopersicum var Heinz 1706. Here’s Nigella Lawson’s recipe for tomato salad. There might also be a picture of Nigella cradling her tomatoes […]
Read MoreCourtesy of the Anonymous Economist and friends I now know more than I want to about competitive eating. The one fact I already knew—that many of the best eaters are thin—has been further explained by this statement from the International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOCE). Yes, they exist; their monthly journal is called The Gurgitator. […]
Read MoreThe “file not found” error message on counsell.com features Maryam, the daughter of my friend Nicholas, whom I last saw when I turned up one week early for his and Hind‘s Christmas dinner party. We shared a frozen pizza in his kitchen. Hind was on a train. This week computational-biologist-turned-epidemiologist Nick became the second one […]
Read MoreFollowing on from my James D. Watson link, yesterday a colleague of mine lobbed me a review copy of DNA and the Criminal Justice System by David Lazer. Click the smaller image below to see an interesting diagram it reproduces from a textbook in use in the early half of the twentieth century (unfortunately it’s […]
Read MoreHow we mocked Dr Who for its low budget conviction that most of the planets and moons in the Universe (firm enough for humanoids to be chased across by stuntmen in monster suits) resembled abandoned gravel pits. Who’s laughing now?
Read MoreThe Medical Research Council (MRC) currently has links to six press releases on the front page of its Website. One of them is about work by the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) on HIV and another is about work on the pufferfish genome by a group at the Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre—now […]
Read MorePooterGeek is number three hit on Google for “cure for stupidity“. Sadly, number one is James D Watson indulging in that favourite activity of previous Nobel prizewinners: talking cack.
Read MoreThis is a learned society I’m not going to be joining any time soon.
Read MoreInsert Joke Here is quoting Richard Dawkins on the bracing effects of atheism: “There is deep refreshment in standing up full-face into the keen wind of understanding … Safety and happiness would mean being satisfied with easy answers and cheap comforts, living a warm, comfortable lie. The daemonic alternative urged by my matured Devil’s Chaplain […]
Read MoreOh woe, a university chemistry department is closing. “What is to become of British biomedical research?” whine the great and the good of the scientific and medical establishment. Michael Rees, the head of the BMA’s medical academics committee, is a laugh a line as he cries: “If this trend of closures continues, it will cut […]
Read MoreIt takes a professional philosopher to choose, of all the arguments for the existence of some kind of god, the most exquisitely wrong: “A philosophy professor who has been a leading proponent of atheism for more than 50 years has decided that God may exist after all. “Antony Flew, 81, now believes scientific evidence supports […]
Read MoreThe nerds at Slashdot have been discussing the book Mathematics and Sex by Australian mathematician Clio Cresswell. She was once voted one of the 25 most beautiful people in Australia. For a mathematician she’s pretty fine [large jpg], but for a cookery writer she’s no great shakes. Amongst other gems, the book applies insights gained […]
Read MoreI am pulling out of the Genome Campus when I notice the car in front of me has a registration which is just a couple of characters away from spelling out “deontic”. First I think, “A near miss like that’s a bit of a shame.” Then I think, “Yeah, but what is the size of […]
Read MoreI discovered this week that a man for whom I have immense professional admiration possesses a comb-over of apocalyptic awfulness. It is not so much a hairstyle as a standing test of his subordinates’ loyalty; an oxbow lake of glossy, hypnotising vanity skirting the rear of his polished head as if in mocking apposition to […]
Read MoreIf you can get hold of a copy of today’s International Herald Tribune there is a superb and surprisingly beautiful front page photograph illustrating an item about the pink locusts in the Canaries. It was taken by Carlos Guevara for Reuters.
Read MoreIf this is real it’s amazing. UPDATE: The site I linked to has free registration, but you could have a browse through these to see if you can find a simple click-through link.
Read MoreAs the International Herald Tribune reports, modern medical science has finally succeeded in curing an unvaccinated rabies victim of the disease—albeit using a pretty extreme approach: “[D]octors at the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin put the critically ill teenager into a drug-induced coma and gave her anti-viral drugs, although it is not clear which if any […]
Read MoreWhen the subject of British public attitudes to genetically modified organisms comes up at Genome Campus breaktime conversations I tend to make two standard contributions. I rail against the “Frankenfood” hysteria of the UK tabloid press (not to mention the bloody Archers) that has all but prevented a rational debate on the subject. I advance […]
Read MoreWonderful, wonderful BBC Radio 4. In how many countries can you come back from a run, stagger into the shower and turn on national radio at 10:30am to hear the scientific history of the year 1907? Almost inevitably the story started in Cambridge, at the British Antarctic Survey. Depending on what you believe, the explorer […]
Read MoreThis is the most profound and extraordinary scientific result I have read about in months, and I only found out about it because it was linked to in last week’s Fark. (If you visit Fark, you might want to follow its lead to The Sun to see if you can parse the first sentence of […]
Read MoreI saw this poster yesterday on the noticeboard at work. The Cambridge Philosophical Society lectures are public. To quote the society, they are “open to all who are interested”. Sadly, even the touts had run out of tickets for this one: Professor Peter Littlewood Department of Physics ‘Quantum phase coherence: from coupled pendula to Bose-Einstein […]
Read MoreChristopher Reeve is dead. The obituary on Radio 4 is already taking the “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” approach a bit too far by claiming that Reeve “avoided typecasting”. I, for one, remember his Henry V with profound admiration. Good lad, though, as Will Rubbish would say.
Read MoreMy rant about the British and sex before I went away got a result: two hot scientist babes contacted me privately to offer me correction. First, Helena, a specialist working on pathogenic species for the Wellcome Trust, pointed out that, despite my checking it twice, I had misspelled “chlamydia”. Then Leasey, co-author on this Nature […]
Read MoreFirst of all I hung out with Claire as she researched her new book, talking to various bright Cambridge dons about Europe and Britain and religion and immigration and anti-Semitism and the state of the World today. Her questions were so good and the resulting conversations were so long and wide-ranging that there is far […]
Read MoreRelated to my own essay, this week’s Lancet also has an editorial about terrorists and the advantages of keeping genome data free. As you’ll discover if you follow that link from outside a subscribing institution, you can’t read the article, entitled “Keep Genome Data Free”, unless you hand over $30.00.
Read MoreSaturday’s Telegraph magazine’s weekly Social Stereotype invented a media-friendly academic called “Damian”*, so it’s perhaps not the best time to tell you that I’ve been commissioned [dahling!] to do the cover story for an upcoming edition of geek glossy Linux User. It will be an update of this piece about the human genome project(s) that […]
Read MoreThis is a fun, skeptical report on the various genome projects. I didn’t catch it when it first appeared in Ha’aretz: ” The circumstances which led to a visit by the head of the U.S. National Human Genome Institute astonished scientists in Israel. Collins has received many invitations to participate in scientific conferences in Israel, […]
Read MoreYou might have received something like the following in your forwarded-email-funnies recently: “Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and […]
Read MoreI am a member of The British Association. This excellent organisation exists to link scientists in the UK with the untrained laity. The Cambridge branch has stopped holding meetings because of lack of activists to organise them. Everyone in this town can manipulate partial differential equations and sketch out a timeline of the Precambrian anyway. […]
Read More
Recent Comments