Master Class 2009. THE CURRENT CATALOG OF LIFE By Ed Regis In their futuristic workshops, the masters of the Synthetic Genomics, Craig Venter and George Church, play out their visions of bacteria reprogrammed to turn coal into methane gas and other microbes programmed to create jet fuel 14. August 2009 — John Brockman is a New York City literary agent with a twist: not only does he represent many of the world's top scientists and science writers, he's also founder and head of the Edge Foundation (www.edge.org), devoted to disseminating news of the latest advances in cutting-edge science and technology.
Over the weekend of 24-26 July, in Los Angeles, Brockman's foundation sponsored a "master class" in which two of these same scientists — George Church, a molecular geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and Craig Venter, who helped sequence the human genome — gave a set of lectures on the subject of synthetic genomics. Church is also founder and head of the Personal Genome Project, or PGP. . [ Permalink ] The American Beer Style You Haven't Heard Of - Clay Risen - Food. Bernt Rostad/flickr After thousands of years of brewing, it's not every day that someone comes up with a new beer style.
But in the last few years, West Coast craft brewers have been churning out what looks like a porter but tastes like a sweet India Pale Ale. Everyone loves it. In its debut as a category at this year's Great American Beer Festival, it garnered 53 entries; only 15 of the 79 categories had more—and those were mostly stalwarts like blonde ale and barleywine. The problem is, no one can decide what to call it. According to the Brewers Association, which runs the festival, it's the American-Style India Black Ale.
The real story is that the Pacific Northwest has long been the home of quality craft brewing in this country, and locals want something to show for it. Not everyone is happy with the name, though. This would make sense if anyone outside Cascadia thought of it as a distinctly regional style. My own suggestion would be American Black Ale. FASTX-Toolkit. Introduction The FASTX-Toolkit is a collection of command line tools for Short-Reads FASTA/FASTQ files preprocessing.
Next-Generation sequencing machines usually produce FASTA or FASTQ files, containing multiple short-reads sequences (possibly with quality information). The main processing of such FASTA/FASTQ files is mapping (aka aligning) the sequences to reference genomes or other databases using specialized programs. Example of such mapping programs are: Blat, SHRiMP, LastZ, MAQ and many many others. However, It is sometimes more productive to preprocess the FASTA/FASTQ files before mapping the sequences to the genome - manipulating the sequences to produce better mapping results.
The FASTX-Toolkit tools perform some of these preprocessing tasks. Available Tools FASTQ-to-FASTA converterConvert FASTQ files to FASTA files. Tools demonstration Visit the Hannon lab public galaxy server to see a demonstration of these (and other) tools. News 02-Feb-2010 - Version 0.0.13 Dec-2009 - Version 0.0.12.
Dark Patterns: Black Hat, Anti-Usability Design Patterns.
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