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When gaming is NP-hard
by @ulaulaman about #candycrush #bejeweled #shariki #nphard #computerscience Shariki is a puzzle game developed by the russian programmer Eugene Alemzhin in 1994. The rules are simple: (...) matching...
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Dragons in a Desolate Land
Ring-tailed dragon Ctenophorus caudicinctus, from here.The comb-bearing dragons of the genus Ctenophorus are an assemblage of 28 (and counting!) species of medium-sized lizards found around Australia....
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All active kinase states are similar but...
CDK2 bound to inhibitor staurosporine (PDB code: 1aq1)…inactive kinase states are different in their own ways. This admittedly awkward rephrasing of Tolstoy's quote came to my mind as I read this new...
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#MicroTwJc 46: FtsZ placement in Bacterial cells
An In depth look at how bacteria divide in "FtsZ placement in Nucleoid Free Bacteria"!Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0091984Statistical Websites:1-way...
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Certified nutritional microscopist
Whaz that? TPP knows more than a little bit about microscopes, but how do you get certified as a nutritional microscopist? And by whom are you certified? The nutritional part was puzzling as well,...
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April 2014 Desktop Calendar
This moss and lichen combo is from my trip last month to Yosemite National Park. I only did photographic collecting and I am still improving my California identifications, thus I was planning to post...
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Reproducibility in molecular modeling research
When I was a graduate student, a pet peeve of my advisor and I was the extreme unlikelihood of finding structural 3D coordinates of molecules in papers. A typical paper on conformational analysis would...
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Khat - more dope stupidity
Khat consists of the leaves and young stems of Catha edulis, a shrub from the horn of Africa, where for centuries, wads of the leaves have been chewed for their stimulating effect. Rather than being...
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Paul Ryan. Budget proposal. April 1st?
Oh, those funsters of the GnOPe! All those cuts to social welfare programs and federal pensions; no one could seriously propose such a thing, so it's an April Fools joke! Why if it's not, you'd get...
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The only reason zebras have stripes is to ward off flies
Written with Angela White. Zebras’ stripes have baffled biologists since Charles Darwin. Many hypotheses have been proposed regarding their purpose but, despite hundreds of years of study, there...
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Springy things
It's about time that some springy things happened. A few clumps of snowdrops are now in flowering. Both early and standard crocus have begun flowering, which sort of belies the "early" concept, and the...
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United States of Koch & Adelson - Bought and paid for
You want to see the bill of sale? Well, just look at the list of donations from "individual donors", citizens in every conservative sense, a for-sale universe where money is speech and corporations...
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"Designing drugs without chemicals"
As usual Derek beat me to highlighting this rather alarming picture from an October 5, 1981 issue of Fortune magazine that I posted on Twitter yesterday. The image is from an article about...
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RNA-seq progress, problems and plans
I've been growing the cell preps for the RNA-seq analysis, as shown in the planning figure below. I did Day C's cultures, freezing 1 ml of cells for later transformation testing if needed, and 2 ml of...
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TGIF on a dreary week
Today has been a mixed bag, an ending of a semi-miserable week. It's been 40-ish all day, gray, damp, and very windy all day. Today was a research symposium for biology students, and TPP was pleased to...
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A new record!
Well, anything on the cheerful side is most welcome right now, and last month's blog traffic was a new record totaling over 27,000 page reads, an average of just under 900 pages per day. Thanks...
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The greatest mass extinction may have been the doing of microbes
The worst time to be alive in Earth’s history is unarguably the end-Permian, about 250 million years ago. It is the period when the greatest-ever extinction event recorded took place, killing 97% of...
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Life and Lemons: Testing and Results
When we last met I told that I was recovering from a seizure(s) and detailed a bit about how my short memory was fried or at least seared. After a few more weeks of recovery and numerous doctor visits...
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Why do religious people have more friends?
It’s a fairly well-attested fact that religious people tend to be happier, to be more socially engaged, and to have more social support. Well, there are nuances depending on the country you look at,...
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Heron rookery in early spring
The Phactors, other guests, and our country-living hosts all took a pre-dinner nature walk to work up an appetite. The destination was the banks of a nearby river where the great blue herons had...
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