An interesting news post on /. about “where are the science heroes” or at least where are the new ones. link “As a kid I was (and still am) heavily influenced by Carl Sagan, and a little later by Stephen Hawking. Now as I have started a family with two kids, currently age 5 and [...]
For those of you that don’t know about IRC. It is a kind of chat room system that has been around since the 80′s and the early days of the internet. There is already a small presence of evolutionary biology on IRC but a couple of us (specifically Brian O’Meara and myself) decided to make [...]
Among the programs I develop, one called phyutility has the largest user base with over 1248 downloads. The original impetus for the development of the program was two fold: 1) to complete some work on the metazoan phylogeny (Dunn et al., 2008) and 2) to complete some work on megaphylogenies (Smith and Donoghue, 2008 and [...]
Just a short comment. This weekend I was at the UNC planetarium to check out some of the videos they offer. Just recently went to the Hayden Planetarium at the AMNH and was hungry for some more astronomy. I ended up checking out one of the 15 minute lectures (ok, I thought it was a [...]
I got a mention in the New York Times today for a large tree that is in press at BMC Evolutionary Biology (to be published today). Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life This is work done when I first started at NESCent with my coauthor’s Michael Donoghue and Jeremy Beaulieu at Yale. We [...]
A ramble follows… As previous posts have eluded, I am working on building large trees and the software to do that. I have found out a few things along the way, such as the fact that linux is still better for some things (some would say, quite a lot of things) than mac (especially easy install [...]
Just published a paper in Science (October 3, 2008 issue) with Michael Donoghue. It is titled Rates of Molecular Evolution Are Linked to Life History in Flowering Plants . Basically, we found that rates of molecular evolution in 5 large plant phylogenies are linked to generation time (life history). The largest phylogeny was of Commelinidae [...]
