A great new website from the Royal Society has come online (http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/). It is has a timeline with important scientific milestones published in royal society journals available for download (free access). I am a history buff so this is a great one and a good complement to other similar sites like classics in PNAS (http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/classics.shtml). [...]
Just finished building a Linux analysis and development machine for the house. I wanted to share a little of the experience and the materials because it is a great way to save money on analysis machines. Generally this machine runs about 40% faster than last years MacPro 3 Ghz Dual Quad Core machine with 8 [...]
There has been a recent trend in biology (and as is relevant to me, ecology and evolutionary biology) to learn and push programing in very “high-level” languages and frameworks such as python and R. This tries to get the programmer to defer much of the programmatic stuff to the language itself so the scientist (in [...]
Just published a paper in the Journal of Biogeography that describes a way in which to use the maximum likelihood biogeographic reconstruction method lagrange to integrate over the posterior distribution of dated phylogenies as produced from BEAST. It is great to see some of that dissertation get out there (a year later)!
There has been some new about the “girl that doesn’t age” link. Most of the news is interested in the potential for understanding her condition and how that relates to a modern anti-aging cure. I read about the story on /. and found some of the comments pretty interesting (that is always the case with [...]
Some really interesting things are going on in the alignment and phylogenetics world. Rapid and Accurate Large-Scale Coestimation of Sequence Alignments and Phylogenetic Trees Kevin Liu,1 Sindhu Raghavan,1 Serita Nelesen,1 C. Randal Linder,2 Tandy Warnow1,* Inferring an accurate evolutionary tree of life requires high-quality alignments of molecular sequence data sets from large numbers of species. [...]
So we just published a paper describing how we make some big trees in BMC Evolutionary Biology. It is titled “Mega-phylogeny approach for comparative biology: an alternative to supertree and supermatrix approaches“. This contains the tree mentioned in the New York Times article (see below) and describes the general method for making the trees in [...]
I play the banjo and this is my lame plug. I have some youtube videos and am advertising them.This first song is Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine followed by Bonaparte’s Retreat. This second one is Whiskey Before Breakfast. OK, there will be science here next time.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged banjo |
“semaphoront: The object of a phylogenetic-systematic study is according to WILLI HENNIG not the individual organism as such, but always only an organism at a certain, relatively short, period of time or even only a point of time in its individual development (ontogenesis).”from from Günter Bechly’s Glossary of Phylogenetic Systematics these are my thoughts at [...]
