Recently we have seen a lot of attacks on Sen. Obama from both Sen. Clinton's campaign and the Republicans. Individually they each seem pretty innocuous, particularly because they rely more on fear mongering and criticisms of style rather than substance. When you step back and look at all the attacks however, a pattern begins to emerge. First, some smalltime operator makes a statement, sends an email, or posts a story that fans the flames of... Full Post
Well, here is another quick hit from AGBT 2008. This year there were over 550 attendees and they still had to turn away over 200 people. No doubt all the interest is due to the next-generation sequencing technologies, giving labs and companies all over the world the ability to sequence DNA. Of course, just being able to generate the data does not mean you know how to deal with them. To that end, in this... Full Post
The draft sequenced of the maize genome was officially announced today. Here is some other coverage. Full Post
Later this week, we will announce the completion of the maize genome draft sequence (for the more aural-oriented crowd, an radio story featuring Rick Wilson should be posted here soon). Maize has a large genome (slightly smaller than human) that is highly repetitive (about 80%). These facts made a whole-genome shotgun approach to sequencing infeasible. Therefore, we took a BAC-by-BAC approach, similar to what was done for the Human Genome Project. Further work on the... Full Post
As previously reported, Lawrence Lessig was considering a run for Congress. Turns out he decided not to run, having decided it would not help his Change Congress movement. Below is a video with his full explanation. In short, there is no way that he could have won and feared that his loss would be viewed as a loss for the Change Congress movement. Full Post