Just Another Genome Hacker,

In the weekend of 23 - 24 april 2005 I participated in the VanUden-Reco Stellendam Regatta on board of Taraké, a brand new Hanse 371. She’s a Judel and Vrolijk design, and if you know that Rolf Vrolijk is the designer responsible for the winning America’s Cup boat Alinghi, then you know that she was build to sail fast. And it showed. The first day we finished second in our class (SW), some 5 minutes on corrected time behind Gorgeous, a Jeanneau Sun Fast 40. On Sunday, we made good a lot of distance on her under gennaker while Gorgeous was flying a spinnaker. In the last straigth line before the finish, we put in an extra effort, crossing the finnish line about a minute behind her. Because we have a sligthly better rating (83,4 versus 79,5) we knew that on corrected time, the difference would be in the range of seconds. So we were a bit dissapointed to end second also the second day. But our skipper already had a feeling that the results of the second day were not quite correct. The message that the organisation’s computer had crashed only added to that. And indeed, today I found out that we indeed finnished first on corrected time, on Sunday. Because Gorgous dropped from a first place to a fifth place, she also lost her first place overall to us!

And today I got a phone call with the question if i could jump in for someone to participate in the North Sea Regatta onboard a Grand Soleil 45.

I wanted to post some boating related pictures in the Coolest sailing pictures on the net thread on the clubracer.be forum, but apparently they don’t like leechers, so I repost them here so that I can link to them.

This is what you get when you play with . You can also make your own.

To push research forward, scientists need to draw from the best data and innovations in their field. Much of the work, however, is patented, leaving many academic and nonprofit researchers hamstrung. But an Australian organization advocating an open-source approach to biology hopes to free up biological data without violating intellectual property rights.

The battle lies between biotech companies like multinational Monsanto, who can grant or deny the legal use of biological information, and independent organizations like The Biological Innovation for Open Society, or BIOS, and Science Commons. The indies want to give scientists free access to the latest methods in biotechnology through the web

BIOS will soon launch an open-source platform that promises to free up rights to patented DNA sequences and the methods needed to manipulate biological material. Users must only follow BIOS’ “rules of engagement,” which are similar to those used by the open-source software community.

Article about envirogenomics in the dutch newspaper “De Standaard“: Van veel genen is geweten dat ze de kans op een ziekte, bijvoorbeeld astma, verhogen. Maar welke invloeden uit de omgeving het laatste duwtje geven om de symptomen tot uiting te brengen, is veel minder bekend. Een gedurfd Europees onderzoeksproject over envirogenomics wil ieders persoonlijke risico op ziekte voorspellen, en de weg wijzen naar preventie.

…And Biology Is Mathematics’ Next Physics, Only Better.

Although mathematics has long been intertwined with the biological sciences, an explosive synergy between biology and mathematics seems poised to enrich and extend both fields greatly in the coming decades. Biology will increasingly stimulate the creation of qualitatively new realms of mathematics. Why?

In biology, ensemble properties emerge at each level of organization from the interactions of heterogeneous biological units at that level and at lower and higher levels of organization (larger and smaller physical scales, faster and slower temporal scales). New mathematics will be required to cope with these ensemble properties and with the heterogeneity of the biological units that compose ensembles at each level.

The complete article, written by Joel E. Cohen, is freely available at The Public Library of Science

Question: what use is knowledge if you can’t share it? Young genomic scientists will take the opportunity to exchange their knowledge on January 20th 2004. This will be the day for Ph.D.-students, postdocs and other young scientists working in genomic research to gather for the first symposium of GeNeYouS, the Genomics Network for Young Scientists. Informative lectures, professional workshops and an interactive forum make up this symposium.

The Canadian Medical Association Journal traditionally runs an offbeat research paper in their Christmas edition, for which there is apparently huge competition. This year, Tintin goes to the neurologist. The feedback is fun to read too. Surprisingly, this story has been picked up by other news portals who presented it as genuine science.

This is the whole future here, too. This is the future of Boston’s economy and Boston’s development, and of Boston’s traditionally limitless perception of itself as the, you know, Athens of America. The future has moved out of the dusty library stacks and into pristine laboratories in dozens of places on both sides of the river. The image of Boston’s public intellectual no longer is a tweedy gent with leather patches on his elbows, discoursing on economic history, the way it was in the 1920s and ’30s. It’s not the rag-wool-sweatered computer phenoms out along Route 128, as it was in the high-tech 1970s and ’80s, and it’s not a shark in a suit, like the financial-services whiz kids of the 1990s. It’s someone in a white coat, working in the spotless heart of a new building, looking at the future one fly at a time.

The article “The Swelling Wave” is the very personal account of a journalist who meets a computational genomics researcher. It deals about the unstoppable wave of information and knowledge that genomics is bringing, but also about the problems that researchers in this field face in the current political climate in America.