Poker Night

Heads up to the bay crew. It's poker night once again. If you want to lookm like a pro, memorize these hand names. My personal fav, the Motown hand!

Penguins a proof of intelligent design

For those who have seen this documentary, you'll be suprised to know that the "march of the penguins" has been embraced by the creationist. Why is that you may ask? Well, aparently: "To think that natural selection or even the penguins themselves could come up with the idea to migrate miles and miles multiple times each year without their partner or their offspring is a bit insulting to my intellect. How great is our God!". Of course this doesn't have to do with food availability and reproductive sucess driving behavior, but what do I know...

IA updates

IA updates in the hisouse.

So you think you're a nerd...

These guys put all us wannabe nerds to shame. PBS has a new webcast-only show called NerdTV featuring interviews with some of the all-time greatest nerds ever. The show is hosted by Cringely, who maintains a pretty solid nerd-blog himself.

Since most of us mortals will never achieve such heights of nerdness on our own merits, buy some geek gear instead.

Look out Qiagen - Silica column recycling is here

Basically the commercial DNA isolation kits we all depend on are all about the silica spin column. They're what make the kits fast and reliable, justifying their high cost in comparison to alternative old-school methods. This article describes a new product called maxXbond, basically a two-buffer system that's supposed to remove residual DNA and other crap from the columns after use. The columns can then be re-used for prepping new samples (at least 20 times over they claim). Sounds like the days of miniprep kit mass consumption are over. If I had shares in Qiagen I'd be selling them about now (if this stuff actually works)...

Supposedly they have patents pending, but I haven't yet been able to find them in either the US or European databases. I also couldn't find anything on what's acutally in the solutions.

NCBI's Wide World of Viruses

The rapidly increasing heap of sequence data filling up the NCBI database is making it tougher and tougher to find a specific sequence on demand. In my experience seaching for viral sequence, it's almost impossible to avoid getting back lots of irrelevant crap. Searching on "rhabdovirus" for example, the first hit is "Rattus norvegicus myxovirus (influenza virus) resistance 2 (Mx2), mRNA". Thankfully NCBI is working on a viral genomes resource where you can search a database consisting exclusively of virus and viroid sequence. Also cool is the taxonomy section where you can browse the database by species or family. Only problem is its not complete yet, but I'm definitely going to keep an eye on their progress as this will be super-useful.

science blogs

OMFG. too much to read.
IA updates are in.
Also found a ton of fairly decent competition for the bayblab in some other science blogs:
Simple trend (biotech bizz)
Molecular approaches to cancer
Humans in science
Longevity in science
Science, Politics and Ethics
Uncovering and discovering
Life Science tools of the trade
The scientist errant
ScienceBase
Science Nerd depot
The eyes have it (?)
World science

It will take me sometime to figure out which ones I will actually read regularly and which are just crap.
WARNING: These blogs are not intented to substitute or replace following the goings ons of the BAYBLAB, they are mearly mentioned here to augment science surfing pleasure.