Samhain13 - Slashdot User

Reversing Undesirable Fish Evolution 216

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 05, 2009 @01:54AM from the make-them-bun-shaped dept.

TaeKwonDood writes "Your granddad's approach to fishing — throw the little 'uns back — may have hurt their evolution, but we can reverse that, says a group of researchers, with a change of policy. Fish have been 'reprogramming' themselves to be smaller and live longer. Welcome to evolutionary dynamics, Lamarck. But, no, they are serious. And it can be fixed within 12 generations. What do the smart people out there think about this? Are they using the term 'evolution' the wrong way?"

350,000 Linux (Virtual) Desktops Land In Brazil 109

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 19, 2009 @01:12PM from the rip-helio-gracie dept.

xufem writes "Millions of Brazilian schoolchildren will soon be 'brought up right' running Linux on over 350,000 seats each using PC sharing hardware and software from Userful and KDE. This is world's largest virtual desktop deployment and probably also the world's largest Linux deployment, and seems to have been selected over OLPC by Brazil. Definitely a moment to celebrate — and just in time for Brazilian Carnival which starts tomorrow!"

The Presidential Portrait Goes Digital 295

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday January 15, 2009 @10:21AM from the oh-oh-obamania dept.

alphadogg writes "Barack Obama's election to US president has already brought a string of firsts, and on Wednesday there came another. The official presidential portrait was shot on a digital camera for the first time. The picture was taken by the White House's new official photographer, Pete Souza, and issued by The Office of the President Elect through its Web site. It was taken on Tuesday evening at 5:38 p.m. using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, according to the metadata embedded in the image file."

Hippies Say WiFi Network Is Harming Their Chakras 432

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 08, 2009 @01:58AM from the what's-with-all-the-negative-waves dept.

Anti-Globalism writes "A group of hippies is complaining that a recently installed WiFi mesh network in the UK village of Glastonbury is causing health problems. To combat the signals from the Wi-Fi hotspots, the hippies have placed orgone generators around the antennae." Although there have been many studies that show no correlation between WiFi and health issues the hippies say, "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."

Sending Secret Messages Via Google's SearchWiki 160

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday November 26, 2008 @01:23AM from the your-mission-should-you-choose-to-accept-it dept.

We discussed the advent of Google's SearchWiki when it was introduced a few days back. Now Lauren Weinstein offers a thought experiment in transmitting coded messages using SearchWiki, with a working example encoded into the results of this Google search.

Comment Cancer genomics (Score 1) 60

by Samhain13 on Thursday May 22, 2008 @01:20AM (#23501238) Attached to: Career Choices for Computational Biologists?

I work as a molecular biologist at a large pharma company and we had a fabulous speaker come the other day (damned if I can remember his name) and talked about the sheer amount of data that is coming in for cancer genomics. As a cancer researcher, this seems like a goldmine, if only the data can be harnessed correctly.

Additionally, the new sequencing technologies (for RNA and DNA) are making microarrays obsolete to some researchers, but the increase in data presents a new challenge.

These areas seem a lot more interesting to me than modeling and docking, which don't seem (to me) to involve much need for an intensive computer background.

The good news is that you've got a few years to figure it out, and you will go to many seminars in that time. I'd be more concerned with joining the right lab...

Good luck.

Slashdot Top Deals