Biology Goes Open Source
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Why Pfizer and Novartis are literally giving genetic information away.
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Christopher Lydon's RadioOpenSource is one of the best programs on radio. It's not about open source code, but about radio modeled on open source values and methods. As the show puts it, Open Source has become one of the most talked-about experiments in public media &#151; a civil union of online and on-air communities that trust each other to talk about pretty much anything.  \
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Blog: Open source and your Mac.  What a combo!  Here's a great open source program for keeping your MacBook Pro cool.
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Synthetic biology aims to create new creatures by establishing a standardized set of DNA parts and then installing them like interchangeable electrical components in stripped-down breadboard organisms.
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Open-source developers attempting to reverse-engineer the mysteries of private networking software turn to genomics research. They're applying algorithms developed by biologists to decipher the secrets of closed networks. By Danny O'Brien.
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Synthetic biology turns a bacteriophage into an E. coli eliminator.
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Cobra, a .Net-based programming language, is being readied for open source release as an all-in-one solution to address multiple needs in software development.Now in a beta stage of development, plans call for offering the language as an open source offering later this month under the MIT license and having a general, 1.0 release ready some time this year, said Chuck Esterbrook, the author of Cobra. Cobra runs on .Net and Novell's Mono, which enables .Net applications to run on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS, and Windows."The idea is to take productivity boosters that are currently scattered among different languages and bring them together in one language so you can get the benefits of all of them at the same time," Esterbrook said. Cobra is intended as a general-purpose language for building any type of application.Users would get static and dynamic binding, which is featured in Objective-C and Boo; the expressiveness and quick coding of Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk; and the runtime performance of C#, Java, and C++, the Cobra Web site says. First-class language support for unit tests, now highlighted in D, also would be part of Cobra.Also featured is a software contracts capability for object-oriented programming. Software contracts serve as an interface to the methods they describe, Esterbrook said. This capability currently is featured in the Eiffel and D platforms.Cobra could save developers work. Citing the example of a program developed in Python and then ported to C++ for performance reasons, Esterbrook said Cobra is different in that it offers both rapid development and performance.Cobra serves as a compiled language that has optional dynamic binding, providing improved error messages and performance, Esterbrook said. Development of Cobra is being done on both Macintosh and Windows; it also is being tested on Linux.Additional refinements in Cobra include defaulting to accurate decimal math and detailed postmortem exception reports. Cobra offers "a practical synthesis of already-proven features that are currently scattered across multiple languages," the Cobra site states.Cobra's naming was derived from its taking its syntax from Python. Until Microsoft's Lang.Net Symposium in Redmond, Wash., last week, the project was in a stealth mode, with fewer than 10 serious users.
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Scientists have taken a first step toward making synthetic life by transferring genetic material from one bacterium into another, transforming the second microbe into a copy of the first.
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Standardized open-source code for storage management is finally on its way, group announces.
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At work we're mostly an OSS shop.  Partly because I have a strong bias towards OSS but cost, reliability, security, etc are all leading factors.  For the last several months now I've been in an interesting position to prove the benefits of OSS in a real-world environment.  We've had to extend a number of OSS tools to fit into our production environment.  These are significant additions and non-trivial.  Open Source allows you to STAND on the shoulders of gods.  For example we've been having a problem with the Jakarta DBCP  connection pool.  It was running out of connections in highly threaded environments and is slow.  Certainly slower than would be necessary.  Long story short.  Last night  ...
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PC Magazine - Opinion: Microsoft's open-source pledge is a good step.
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New publications, experiments and breakthroughs in biotechnology--and what they mean.
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It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL.  Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion â helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash.  But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups. read more
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This is what the future looks like.  Heavy adoption of open source at the core of commercial software so that developers can focus on pushing the envelope on innovation, not reinventing wheels that provide no discernible differentiation.
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Neuroscientists use coral and jellyfish DNA to create colorful arrays of neuronal connections in mouse brains.
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Researchers say they have created the entire genome of a bacterium by stitching together its chemical components.
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Scienctists have discovered widespread transfer of bacterial genes into the genome of numerous invertebrates.