Here’s to the first paper a month post for 2012! For January I decided to blog a paper I heard about on the excellent Nature podcast about a deliciously simple and elegant experiment to test a very simple question: given how much time and effort boa constrictors (like the one on above, photo taken by [...]
(Cross posted to Bench Press) We’ve blogged before about applying gaming technology to science, but much of that has been about using games or gaming system chips. A recent Wired magazine article reveals another interesting use case: taking the capabilities of something like Microsoft’s Xbox360 Kinect system and applying it directly to science research! Apparently, [...]
There’s only two more days left in 2011, so time for my final paper a month post for 2011! Like with the paper I blogged for last month, this month’s paper (from open access journal PLoS ONE) is yet again about the impact on our health of the bacteria which have decided to call our [...]
(Cross posted to Bench Press) A few years ago, I blogged about an ingenious crowdsourced game called Fold.It. The concept was pretty simple: Use human intuition to help solve complicated three-dimensional protein folding challenges which is oftentimes as effective but significantly faster & cheaper than computational algorithms Pool together lots of human volunteers Turn the [...]
November’s paper was published in Nature in 2006, and covers a topic I’ve become increasingly interested in: the impact of the bacteria that have colonized our bodies on our health (something I’ve blogged about here and here). The idea that our bodies are, in some ways, more bacteria than human (there are 10x more gut [...]
Another month, another paper (and unlike with last month, this time I’m on time!) This month’s paper is about stem cells: those unique cells within the body which have the capacity to assume different roles. While people have talked at lengths about the potential for stem cells to function as therapies, one thing holding them [...]
I’m pretty late for my September paper of the month, so here we go “Omics” is the hot buzz-suffix in the life sciences for anything which uses the new sequencing/array technologies we now have available. You don’t study genes anymore, you study genomics. You don’t study proteins anymore – that’s so last century, you study [...]
Another month, another paper, and like with last month’s, I picked another genetics paper, this time covering an interesting quirk of immunology. This month’s paper from Nature talks about a species of fish that has made it to the dinner plates of many: the Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua). The researchers applied shotgun sequencing techniques to [...]
Another month, another paper (although this one is almost two weeks overdue – sorry!) In my life in venture capital, I’ve started more seriously looking at new bioinformatics technologies so I decided to dig into a topic that is right up that alley. This month’s paper from Nature Biotechnology covers the use of next-generation DNA [...]
Another month, another paper. This month’s paper from Science is not the usual traditional science fare I’ve tended to blog about. I heard about this on the Science magazine podcast (yes, I subscribe to it). In it, two economists basically find a way to run a randomized clinical trial to see what microfinance does! For [...]