nodalpoint.org

BIOS - Biological Innovation for Open Society
an Open Source inspired Open Access regime for biological enabling technologies

Where are you research scientists to be found for hire? Particularly around Palo Alto? Need 5 of you. Recruiter.

A valid question: should computer scientists experiment more? (ps)

Interested to see that two small molecule databases aimed at biologists are entering the public domain.

PubChem and ChEBI

anyone care to comment on the pros and cons of these systems from the bio point of view?

Confused? Well, there was the "first draft genome" (2000), then there was the "almost finished genome" (2003) and now they are filling in the gaps. It's all explained admirably here.

A CMS (such as Drupal, on which Nodal is built), is a great way for a research group (or anyone else) to whip up a website.

I was investigating a few CMS resources recently and came across a couple of very useful sites. CMS Matrix allows side-by-side comparison of up to 10 CMS tools at once, from an extensive list. OpenSource CMS is a great site - they have set up demo sites where you can try out a wide variety of CMS software.

When I gave one of my first talks at my current workplace on Perl, BLAST and genomic analysis, a nameless audience member asked me a question I have never forgotten. "It strikes me that what you're doing is rather desperate", she said, "wouldn't you be better off doing some experiments?"

At the time, I was rendered almost speechless (there is no polite way to answer such a question), but I've since learned that many biologists (at least at my current workplace...) are not aware of the paradigm shift brought about by computational biology. Namely, rather than stumble about choosing research topics and experiments almost at random, you can make intelligent use of information (i.e. process it computationally) and use that as a way to direct and focus your research.

The folks at the UGA CSB Lab seem to understand that, so next time you're faced with such a question, direct your questioner to something like this Powerpoint (sorry) slide.

Hi

I've created an RSS newsfeed for my science news webzines (science news RSS). The webzines cover a wide range of scientific topics including chemistry, biology and biomedicine (as well as some bioinformatics and genetics)

Thanks

David Bradley Science News Writer

This item edited to point to the new location of my science newsfeed

Okay here is an interesting bit of news. My two bit for the Gmail invite !

Whatizit: An analysis tool that tries to make sense of a paper for you. You can upload an abstract of a paper, or a document of PDF file.

From the EBI newsitem:

The Rebholz group have released the annotation tool 'Whatizit'. It identifies protein-protein interactions, mutations and terminology from submitted text. Whatizit can tell you the meaning of words found in your text, depending on the kind of information you want to see highlighted.

Hi Guys !

Okay its final. See previous post.

biobar (a toolbar for firefox/mozilla) version 1.2 is now released in its final form. The toolbar is now slimmer than before and accomodates searching 26 different databases.

Get the version here :

biobar firefox

Biobar Mozilla

You may also be interested in the bioFOX project. This is another mozilla/firefox project which provides bioinformatics analysis tools from the context menu (right mouse) on selected browser text.

bioFOX