The Race to Read Genomes on a Shoestring, Relatively Speaking
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If the cost of sequencing a human genome can drop to $1,000 or below, experts say it would start to become feasible to tell what diseases people might be at risk for.
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While bigger competitors stumble over each other, Bio-Reference keeps growing.
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Science & environment: An ambitious project to create the most detailed picture of human genetic variation yet has been launched by British and American scientists
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Analysis of the BEA acquisition from Reg reader input â¦
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I think I've mentioned this before but on Saturday Feb 12th I'll be talking  about the Jakarta FeedParser at CodeCon  in San Francisco.  I published an outline  of the talk on the FeedParser wiki.  I'm hoping to have a 0.5 release done before then and havepotentially another suprise in the works.
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Genetics pioneer Craig Venter has news from the frontiers of biology.
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A "barcode" gene that can be used to distinguish between plant species has been identified.
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Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.   As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.   He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.   He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.
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Human genome researchers have said we have about 10,000 or 20,000 fewer genes than they originally estimated.
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At the last day of the Web 2.0 Summit, attendees learned that having their genome mapped will set them back $300,000 and that&#160;Google&#39;s founders really stress over the prevention and extermination of evil.During a panel of former Google employees, they confirmed to moderator and conference chair John Battelle that, yes, Larry Page and Sergey Brin do factor heavily into business and technology decisions whether they will have evil consequences.WeatherBill CEO David Friedberg belonged to Google&#39;s Corporate Development team and, when negotiating acquisitions, it wasn&#39;t unheard of for either Page or Brin to ask hard questions about the deals if they sensed that the members of companies&#39; management teams had an evil streak, he said.Meanwhile, entrepreneur Bret Taylor, who developed products at Google for four years, said Page and Brin were excellent at steering product teams to think big while reminding them always keep in mind the question of evil.Earlier in the day, genetics maverick J. Craig Venter informed attendees that mapping a person&#39;s genome these days costs about $300,000, but that, as happened with calculators, the price will tumble over time. For instance, if you can wait a couple of years, the cost will probably be closer to $100,000. That&#39;s a bargain compared with the about $70 million that it cost to map Venter&#39;s genome.Venter&#39;s genome is posted on the Internet. He joked that there might come a day when singles on the dating scene will be able to do a Google search for potential mates&#39; genomes, especially if they might at some point consider becoming fruitful and multiplying.The son of a man who died of cardiac arrest at age 59 and of a woman who is still playing golf at 85, Venter has identified genes in his map both for heart disease and longevity. However, he estimates that scientists will need a critical mass of 10,000 human genomes in order to engage in the type of analysis that will lead to major, unequivocal insights about genetic traits.And in a rare display of corporate affection, representatives from Internet archrivals Google and Microsoft sat beside each other at a panel on online maps and exchanged pleasantries.The slightly surreal moment came about halfway through the a panel titled &quot;Edge: Mapping.&quot; Brian McClendon, engineering director and product manager of Google Earth, commended his Microsoft peer Erik Jorgensen, general manager of Live Search, for Microsoft&#39;s support of&#160;Google&#39;s Keyhole Markup Language (KML).KML is the language used to create data files for both Google Maps and its sister desktop application Google Earth. On Monday, Microsoft announced that its&#160;Live Search&#160;engine&#39;s local search component has gained support for KML, giving it access to the wealth of mapping data created with KML and available on the Web.Microsoft and Google can &quot;duke it out&quot; for customer acquisition, but &quot;the fight shouldn&#39;t be on file formats, so cooperating on this makes all the sense in the world,&quot; Jorgensen said during the mini lovefest.
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Evolution has gotten faster, and scientists think they know why: Microbes are swapping DNA from one species to another, giving the Darwinian process an added boost.
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Unraveling the genetic map of diatoms -- microscopic sea creatures -- could pay big dividends in defending the world's ecological systems. By Kristen Philipkoski.
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J. Craig Venter, genome scientist extraordinaire, takes his genome analysis to a new level of detail, showing humans are not 99.9 percent similar to each other as previously thought.
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Researchers get a new tool to determine protein structures.
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The race to create life from scratch is underway. But how close are scientists to making a synthetic organism?
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Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
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Interactive, detailed maps of the human brain and genome will spur new discoveries.