Are scientists afraid of blogs and tweets?
Nature has a nice wee article (no subscription required to read this one, FTW!) on the state of what one might call “informal” peer review – t...
Category: Strategy
Functional roles for noise in genetic circuits
I have a thing about noise (see my ramblings here). And as folks try to turn elements of biological circuits into well-behaving engineered parts, I’ve been tryi...
The subtlety of life – clever codon usage
Here’s a paper from September I haven’t had a chance to comment on. Zhang et al reported in Science (review, paper – subscription required) how two almost...
The new germ theory
Lizzie Buchen from Nature (link below) wrote a great article on some cool work folks are doing to change the way we view bacteria. For example, one group (like ...
The Short Lifespan of a Tweet: Retweets Only Happen Within the First Hour
For some, Twitter is a social network and for others it is just a broadcast medium. Judging from the latest data from social media analytics and monitoring serv...
Do we need a DIYbio academy?
Among my many ideas I have lying around is some form of institute to support the DIYbio community. This is different from the meet-ups happening in places like ...
Take back the graph! Facebook, The Cloud, and a return to the basics of social networking
“Take back the graph!” was @mattmiz‘s reply to my rant that The Cloud was shite, Facebook was poison, and that the future will be peer-to-peer...
Fed up with platic bags
One thing I've noticed here in the US is that there is trash everywhere, collecting in the "unspace", places where there is no movement or wind o...
StatusNet – can this lead to P2P social networking?
StatusNet is the open source microblogging platform that helps you share and connect in real-time within your own domain. via status.net I keep coming back to t...
Back to the future: Mag+, BERG, and hypercard
If 2009 was the Year of the Netbook, it's getting to be pretty clear that 2010 is the Year of the Digital Book Reader. The Kindle and Nook are simple reade...