Yep, Santa dropped by before the busy Holiday Season to help with the 17th edition of the Bio::Blogs digest. Welcome and enjoy!

New blogs

This last month we welcomed one interesting blog that will have a lot to add to the community. Alexei Drummond is showing us his bag of goods at the Computational Biology and Evolution, self described as “a heady mix of computational science, evolutionary biology and other things that matter”.

Also Pedro suggested a good look at Thirst for Science, a blog that is surely “drinking the koolaid” and has opinions on a myriad of scientific subjects, from RNAs to population genetics.

Not camera shy

Deepak, from bbgm is definitely not camera shy, and he pitches his opinions on business and scientific intelligence.

I believe there will be a time when life science companies will begin looking at biological, chemical, etc information as a core enterprise asset, rather than something for the research crowd

Watch the videocast too.

Just rambling

Publicly, Pedro rambles this month about the possibilities of predicting functional association by mRNA localization

As expected, more specific mRNA localization terms (localizations 30) are more informative for prediction of functional association since fewer terms are required to obtain the same or higher likelihood of interaction.

And he also rambles about the hot hyped topic of personalized medicine. And he is concerned

that all the attention the genomics side of personalized medicine will distort the relative importance of nature versus nurture.

And he is not the only one posting about it.

Frilas

Frilas is the way freelancers are known in Brazilian newspapers, and Pavel, from Freelancing Science, blogs about the possibility of using Virtual Machines to distribute software.

So creating a virtual appliance for, let’s say, BLAST, would mean installing a fresh copy of our favourite linux under VMWare Server with nothing more than necessary libraries, copy of BLAST executables and possibly a web interface. Voilla. Virtual appliance for BLAST, anybody?

Say wha?

Duncan is still worried about the Semantic Web. Nuf said.

Is there a new Omic?

Keith Robinson, from Omics! Omics!, wants to shrink us all. Maybe it would be good to meet the aunts during Xmas. HE wonders about who or how they are shrinking our (mine, yours, theirs) genomes.

The genome is finished — but not so finished. Bits and pieces are still getting polished up, and while they are generally dull and monotonous a gene or two might still hide there

Already tomorrow

Yep, it is already tomorrow there (no matter what day is here!) and after posting about his perl variables and the election, Neil, who is always doing something rather desperate, tells us about interesting blogs that cover some stem cell subjects. Check it out.

My sardine

This month I posted the last SciView interview in 2007, you might want to take a look. Dr Roderic Page was interviewed and he just said

My sense is that large projects don’t always scale well. You don’t get 10x more out of a project simply because it has 10x as much money. You get administrative layers, and a lot of politics. If the big project is really lots of little ones, then it may well succeed. Barcoding is really lots of little projects — everybody grabs their favourite beastie and sequences it.

among other things. Take a look.

Happy Holidays

Bio::Blogs #17 is very short. Everybody is busy finishing their papers and the shopping list. It will be back next month, maybe here, maybe somewhere else if you want to host it. On the meantime, please to not give this to any of your good friends.

Happy Holidays!!!!