England’s rock art
The Northumberland and Durham Rock Art Pilot project has released a new website cataloguing England's Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Rock art. There's some truly beautiful pieces shown there - this is my favorite:
The Daily Mail also has an article on this project.
Genbank is simply awe-inspiring
What can you say, but just.. wow:
From its inception, GenBank has doubled in size about every 18 months. The traditional GenBank divisions contain over 80 billion nucleotide bases from more than 76 million individual sequences, with 15 million new sequences added in the past year. Contributions from Whole Genome Shotgun (WGS) projects supplement the data in the traditional divisions to bring the total beyond 190 billion bases. Complete genomes (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genomes/index.html) continue to represent a rapidly growing segment of the database, with some 200 of more than 570 complete microbial genomes in GenBank deposited over the past year. The number of eukaryote genomes for which coverage and assembly are significant continues to increase as well, with over 190 assemblies now available, including that of the reference human genome.
From: Benson et al, 2008.
The Encyclopedia of Life online
The Encyclopedia of Life has gone online. Unfortunately, she's currently dead in the water:
We are currently experiencing an extremely high volume of traffic on our web site. As a result,
you may have difficulty accessing our site. Our apologies for the inconvenience. Please try again soon.
Fortunately, Carl Zimmer has a nice shiny piece on it in the NY Times - The Encyclopedia of Life, No bookshelf required:
Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page descriptions of every species known to science. On one page is the blue-footed booby. On another, the Douglas fir. Another, the oyster mushroom. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the book would have to be more than 300 feet long. And you’d have to be ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered.
Rod Page, who has been rather critical of these projects in the past ("Let's hope that the fate of EoL will be different to that of the similarly ambitious All Species. Oh, and then there's SpeciesBase...") has unfortunately promised to behave himself...
Visualising English Nouns
Simply beautiful -
We present a visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning. Each of the tiles in the mosaic is an arithmetic average of images relating to one of 53,463 nouns. The images for each word were obtained using Google's Image Search and other engines. A total of 7,527,697 images were used, each tile being the average of 140 images. (...) Thus the poster explores the relationship between visual and semantic similarity. For a large part of our language the two are closely correlated as shown by the extent of visual clustering within the poster.
The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
My new "favorite" blog - The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
The Drummond Lab Blog: Computational Biology and Evolution
I'd like to be the first to welcome Alexei Drummond's research group to the world blogging arena. Their new blog, Computational Biology and Evolution, proposes to be "a heady mix of computational science, evolutionary biology and other things that matter".
Alexei's interests are:
- Statistical models and algorithms for understanding biomolecular sequence evolution, structure and function
- Genomic sequence analysis
- Coalescent-based population genetics
- Virus evolution
- Evolutionary theory, complexity theory and their intersection
- Bioinformatics software
He has also been behind some of the shiniest new bioinformatics software out there (e.g. BEAST and Geneious) and has a good line-up of students working on interesting problems, so this is definitely a blog to watch.