Category Archives: Biology

Using Food Crops for Fuel

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Conrad Halling

Yesterday in The New York Times, Elizabeth Rosenthal authored an article, “Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food Prices and Hunger Fears,” in which she described the conversion of food crops to fuel. Astonishingly, according to this article, 98% … Continue reading →

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The Many Trees of Life

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Conrad Halling

John Gruber posted tonight on daringfireball.net, “‘Tree of Life’ site goes live.” The link is to a web site for a new movie, “The Tree of Life.” As a biologist, I found Gruber’s post confusing, because I immediately thought of … Continue reading →

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The Most Sequenced Bacterial Genomes

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Conrad Halling

Nick Loman, a bioinformatician in the Mark Pallen Research Group at the University of Birmingham, listed the most sequenced bacterial genomes yesterday on the group’s Pathogens: Genes and Genomes blog. This sparked quite a few interesting comments and variations of the … Continue reading →

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Metabolizing Caffeine

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Conrad Halling

I do not drink coffee that contains caffeine because I metabolize caffeine very slowly. I can drink a cup of coffee on Monday and still feel the caffeine buzz on Tuesday, even after not sleeping very well on Monday night. … Continue reading →

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Best April Fools’ Day Post

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Conrad Halling

April 1 brings an abundance (nay, a surplus) of April Fools’ Day joke posts. The best is “Reverse Translation Discovered?” by Iddo on the Byte Size Biology blog. Today, a press release and a paper by a joint group of … Continue reading →

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Phestival of Phage

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Conrad Halling

Monday, March 21, 2011, began the “Phestival of Phage” at MicrobiologyBytes. The first entry in a week-long series of posts: “When the Going Gets Hot, the Phage Get Going” Tuesday’s entry: “Mycobacteriophages: More Diverse Than Expected” Wednesday’s post: “Plastic Phages … Continue reading →

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Evidence for a Fourth Major Branch of Cellular Organisms?

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Conrad Halling

Dongying Wu, Martin Wu, Aaron Halpern, Douglas B. Rusch, Shibu Yooseph, Marvin Frazier, J. Craig Venter, and Jonathan A. Eisen have published a paper in PLoS ONE titled “Stalking the Fourth Domain in Metagenomic Data: Searching for, Discovering, and Interpreting Novel, Deep Branches in Marker Gene … Continue reading →

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