Bytesizebio.net Website Review

THE MUSINGS AND RAVINGS OF A COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGIST ABOUT SCIENCE, COMPUTERS, MUSIC AND, YOU KNOW, STUFF. So today’s group meeting got a bit heated as Nafiz, Ashley, and Xiao touched on the finer points of how to cross validate. Machine learning So I saw this Tweet from Michael Eisen a couple of days ago: about how Iowa is leading the US  in renewable energy, specifically wind-based. Having lived in Ames for over a year, I can tell you there is no shortage of wind in Iowa. There is no shortage of windmills either, but also there are quite a few cows. And cows are a serious source of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than CO2. So: does cow methane actually offset the greenhouse gas saved in Iowa by wind fa*ms? Let’s check. Coal, which is used in most Iowa power plants generates roughly 1kg CO2 for every 1kWh energy produced Interestingly, dairy cows and beef cows have different methane emissions. A dairy cow is twice as gas*y So: while cows in Iowa produce quite a bit of methane, they are definitely not “destroying whatever gains” generated by wind TL;DR: NIH are scaling back funding on model organism databases, which will degrade annotation quality.  This can have far-reaching implications in many aspects of biology and computational biology. There’s a letter you can sign electronically, please do. detailed post on why this is important, but for the meantime, read the letter below. Funding cuts to model organism databases will have a I am writing to alert you to an important issue concerning the future of the Genome Ontology Consortium (GOC), but also all of the model organism databases (MODs).  The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), which funds several of the MODs and the Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium, has announced there will be decreased funding for these resources over the next few years.  A news article stated the funding for the yeast, worm, fly, zebrafish, and mouse MODs, plus the GO Consortium, will be decreased by 30% over the next