There’s a new episode of BBC’s Discovery: Feeling the World out this morning. It’s only 26 minutes long, and the full piece is definitely worth a listen, but if you don’t have 26 minutes, the meat of the post can be summarized in 8 minutes: 3:20-7:54: Introducing the subject, developing drought tolerant varieties of maize [...]
Posts from ‘March, 2010’
What is the Joint Genome Institute?
They’ve produced an incredibly slick video to answer that question for the general public. Of course now I want a video like this to introduce my own research…
The two genomes of maize
I recently go back from the maize meeting. I mentioned before that big part of the reason to do poster presentations is to get comfortable discussing ones research with people who haven’t specialized in the exact same subject. In my case, my poster got a fair bit of interest which was great. (Although I was [...]
Marriage vs The PhD
If you have been associated with academia for any length of time you probably already read PhD comics, but anyone who doesn’t read it already should definitely check out today’s comic “Marriage v The PhD”
Paintings of the last supper reflect growing abundance of food.
“The last thousand years have witnessed dramatic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food…. We think that as art imitates life, these changes have been reflected in paintings of history’s most famous dinner.” – Brian Wansink (Cornell University) Read more at Discoblog. Note that these results are normalized to head size, [...]
Regarding Scientists…
Finally, let me speak up for scientists. In my experience, the vast majority of scientists are honest, sometimes slightly nerdish people who are grateful to be able to work on something about which they have a passionate interest. Scientists can be arrogant: but overall they do not deceive themselves, or the public. From an article [...]
Getting back in the saddle
I got back from the maize meeting in Italy last night to find my DSL connection at home was dead again. I’m now at work and think I’m pretty much caught up with the backlog of internet related stuff that accumulated during my absence. So if you e-mailed me, tweeted at me, or commented on [...]
Gene Annotation Won’t Kill You
I just got out of a meeting about how we’re going to improve the annotations of the maize genome. It’s got me riled up. But first, what is gene annotation (in twenty words or less):
Transcriptome Sequencing!
One of the themes, looking over the abstracts and talks for this year’s maize meeting before I leave is that a year from now we can expect to have much more detailed information about where genes are expressed in corn, and at what levels. One of the great dividends of the dropping cost and increasing [...]
Helitron Capture Creating New Genes?
One of the things that has made annotating genes in the maize genome so difficult (there are currently two sets of gene models one with only 32,000 genes, which is low estimate, and the other with 100,000 is far too many) is the presence of large numbers of gene fragments that have been captured and [...]