mindlace

At least 16 organisms from a diverse array of evolutionary lineages deviate from nature’s standard code in the amino acid “meaning” they assign to specific codons. evolution encoded, sidebar
I had no idea there was deviance in the amino acid encoding - that’s extraordinary! The larger article gives a wonderful overview of how the basic encoding techniques […]

The cover story for last week’s nature is all about fusing membranes. There are a number of circumstances where membrane fusion occurs; in the article they mostly talk about lipid-coated viruses. In lipid coated viruses, they essentially have a membrane like a regular cell. (This is one of three major coating strategies)
Although this is the first […]

Heat vents create heat gradients, which create chemical gradients.
Being able to stay at a particular place in those gradients
conferred selective advantage. Therefore microbes developed
a way to react to incoming infrared photons; the energy of heat
was information; it was “seen”.
Eventually some of these bacteria through tides or tectonics
find themselves in shallow water; suddenly there is a new, […]

The other day I came across some nicely artistic photos of decaying animals. They remind me how interested I am in the process of decay, which made me think about what a decay-centered biology career would be like, which made me think of the nine billion biology careers I could have, which made me come […]

In Adam’s Curse, Bryan Sykes makes the argument that theY chromosome has ~150k years left, at best. Unfortunately, the book isn’t available in the states yet.
In an exhaustive review of temperature-indicating phenomena, Jones P and Michael M find that The last 20 years have been hotter than the last 1800. Jones says “The climate sceptics are […]

My stay here may be somewhat short lived as I’ve found Syncato, a weblogging tool so utterly drenched in acronyms it can’t help but be the l33t thing to do.
It uses Sleepycat’s XML database and a plethora of additional open-source xml manipulation API tools to build - in python (woot!) a REST based system for working […]

The curious thing about this notion of [incarnate and discarnate][a] and [distance of difference][b] is the question of *why* do processes retain integrity when so many of their constituents change over time?
[a]: http://mindlace.net/index.php?p=8
[b]: http://mindlace.net/index.php?p=6
On the one hand, it appears that all the cards are stacked against you, in the quest for processes that persist over time. […]