Optimal Tweezers

I was intrigued to hear recently that Paul Nurse was a speaker at The Moth, a very cool storytelling collective in NYC. Paul Nurse is a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, who achieved fame for identifying the molecular stopwatches that regulate the timing of cells’ division and growth; I figured that his story would somehow relate to his life in the lab, or some saucy story of academic intrigue, but it turned out that the story–while still quite saucy–was much more personal for him. (more…)

I’m in New Hampshire at the Proteins Gordon Conference, living it up and learning about all sorts of things. Unfortunately, it’s a confidential conference–I can’t give any details of the work being presented here, so I can’t write at all about the brilliant work I saw today on the ________tonic modeling of the behavior of ___________ ________ation in the _____rqui____ ________some.

So you’ll just have to wait for that to come out in publication.

In hard times, how does a cell quickly search through its own DNA to find the genes that will help it survive? The genomes of even the smallest organisms are enormous, and searching along all of the DNA in a cell to find a single site is a complex challenge if you want to do it in any reasonable amount of time. For a sense of scale: all of the DNA within a single human cell, if you unraveled it and stretched it out in a single strand, would be about as tall as you are! (more…)

Two friends of mine at the Berkeley School of Information, Ben Cohen and Ljuba Miljkovic, have put together a really fantastic final project for a course in user interface design: a redesign of the BART ticket kiosks.

Check out their vastly improved approach, at bartkiosk.com. They’ve created an elegant and simple workflow–and made it beautiful, to boot. I’m hoping that the BART management people hear about it, and realize what a great thing has been dropped in their laps. (more…)