nodalpoint.org

If you're here looking for Duncan Hull's blog, it has moved to O'Really?. Nodalpoint lives on at nodalpoint.org.

Nodalpoint has been obviously indexed by Google for a long time now, but did you know it is also indexed and counted by Google Scholar too? See Mistaken Identity: Google thinks I'm Maurice Wilkins for details...

If you are interested in running a Drupal site with PubMed content you should check the screencast below. It explains how it can be done with existing Drupal modules. I'm working with a student from the University of Szeged on a PubMed module for Drupal. So in the future this should become a bit more straightforward ;)

Hi,
python 2.6 is going to implement a new kind of data (like lists, strings, etc..) called 'named_tuple'.
It is intended to be a better data format to be used when parsing record files and databases.

You can download the recipe from here (it should be included experimentally in python 2.6):
- http://code.activestate.com/recipes/500261/

Basically, you instantiate a named_tuple object with this syntax:

> Person = NamedTuple("Person name surname")

"Person" is a label for the named_tuple; the following fields, 'name' and 'surname'

Nature Publishing Group are organising a workshop on science blogging, this Saturday 30th August 2008 at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. Why would you care? Because there are:

1. Lots of interesting people...
2. ...talking about a range of interesting subjects ...
3. .. in a distinguished venue that has recently been refurbished. It is also home to the fantastic Christmas lectures and much more besides.

To cap it all, I think it will be great fun too. So if you're going, see you there. If you're not, it is never too late to publish your fantasy science funding entry. Much of the conference will be televised and blogged, making it available online too.

Primer-BLAST combines primer design (using Primer3) and a specificity check with BLAST.

Fantasy Science Funding is a fun game that anybody can play. You select a Science funding body of your choice, imagine yourself as its all powerful chief executive, and decide which areas of scientific research you would "hire and fire". What could be easier? Here is how Fantasy Science Funding works...

The NIH has published, in 2000, a definition of bioinformatics which is supposed to be the 'official' one:
- http://www.bisti.nih.gov/CompuBioDef.pdf

I partly disagree with that!! Or at least, I think it is incomplete.

Bioinformatics is not only providing services and tools for scientists and for analyzing data.
It is also a scientific discipline, in which you make an hypothesis, you write down your assumptions, you manage to find a way to demonstrate it, and then you share your results with other scientists and confront with them.

I'm not much of an evolutionary biologist, but Jonathan Eisen asked for help and I can't resist. So, in the name of Science, and via the goodness of nodalpoint, here is some deserved Google Juice for various Trees of Life on the Web.

• Jonathan Eisen's "Tree of Life" blog
• Tree of Life Web Project
• Tree of life (science) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Green Tree of Life at Berkeley
• Fungal Tree of Life Project
• Beetle Tree of Life project
• Fly Tree of Life project
• Mammal Tree of Life project
• Cypriniformes Tree of Life project
• Liverwort Tree of Life Project
• Early Bird Tree of Life project
• Angiosperm Tree of Life project
• Cnidaria Tree of Life Project
• Decapoda Tree of Life Project

There, I've done my bit for Science, now it's your turn. Spread the ❤ link love ❤,and since we will soon be celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, why not marvel at the coral / shrub / lungs of life too?

(CC-licensed Tree of Life picture by Phitar)

Eureka Science News just launched - it's an intelligent science news aggregator based on machine learning (for classification) and clustering of recent news from all major science sources - I'm a microarray analyst, so I used the same techniques I use to cluster genes, but this time to cluster news! It's fun to use skills in other contexts - I hope you will enjoy the site!