more genomics…

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Leona

Check out this post about the future of biology at broad perspectives (formerly futurememes) on more interesting developments in the world of genomics. To quote briefly from the post,

“The two biggest current revolutions are in personalized genomics and synthetic biology”…

Yep. That’s as expected. And that’s why we need more open-ness.

And also more education. I wonder if the curriculum for biology is being expanded to include the dazzling array of technologies and attendant moral and legal issues. If in a few generations’ time people are going to have to be able to make informed choices about what to do with bits of their own DNA, their own personal biology, I hope they’ll know enough to make the right decision.

Open Genomics

Posted on April 12, 2008 by Leona

Interesting little site, this: http://sgc.utoronto.ca/.

It reminded me of Andrew Hessel’s talk at SciBarCamp about how scientists are now able to create their own biological entities from scratch, by writing software. Yep – writing genetic code; creating your own baby bacterium that has never existed anywhere on earth before. This isn’t a process that uses vectoring either; the sneaking of foreign genetic material into a host organism seems quaint and old-school in comparison to the new synthetic biology that’s available now. Continue reading →

It’s not your grandmother’s planet

Posted on February 12, 2008 by Leona

Is it just me, or is the pop science world finally starting to tune in to the earth sciences?

It isn’t all high-school geography fodder either: forget about lava cones and knowing your stalagtites from your stalagmites – media on the hip new earth touches on everything from geohazards to lithospheric insights about our evolutionary past (litho-what?). Continue reading →

Visualisation of large datasets

Posted on January 18, 2008 by Leona

Go to http://visualcomplexity.com and check out a rather interesting collection of images based on large / hierarchical data sets. Pretty neat, huh?

None of us can hold thousands of variables in our heads and not get confused. So, with some creative imagery, we can tackle monstrous datasets by offloading some of the information processing to visual centers in the brain, allowing us to grasp the overall structure of the system we’re looking at.

A lot of the ‘radial’ looking graphs are done by mapping hierarchical tree-format data to the unit hyperbolic disc. It is one of my favourite visualisation methods because it lends itself to more user-friendly methods of browsing data – panning zooming and scanning.

With obvious uses in GIS-related (mapping and earth sciences) and biological sciences (think genomics) , visualisation of complex datasets has taken off in lots of other fields – the VC site lists “knowledge networks” as it’s biggest category!