New Pathways Make Hormones Look Like Snails - Check it out....very interesting....

Brownian Movement In Clarkia Pollen: A Reprise of the First Observations - Brian J Ford an interesting insight into the discovery and development of the concept of Brownian Movement.

Animations

Some great animations about how the immune system functions. The textbook they come from is one of the best I've come across. Requires Flash 5.

Stuff I've been working on...

Clonique
Notes on cloning. A DIY guide to creating your own mini-me!

Skinique
“I’ve got you…under my skin” is the sound-track to this one….

Emedicine
I can’t take credit for this one…but it’s a great site for medical info and heaps of cool links and interactive stuff. Chocka’s with trivial facts/case studies and reviews of the latest literature.

AccessExcellence
Some good stuff about the history of biotech, and links to some picture galleries. This is a commercial site, so beware of bias etc…but not too shabby.

Still to come…been working on blogs about:
psych/neuro/nutrition/chemistry/immunology…

Food for Thought…
What if DNA had a half-life, kind of like Telomeres, which get shorter with every cell-division. Say after 5000 generations, DNA becomes ‘exhausted’ and cancer (poorly suppressed mutations) becomes more prevalent. I can think of many reasons against this, and a few for, but it’s good to exercise the brain either way…

How do you stop an assassin

who has no identity?

profiles: helen berman:- "Many people have compared managing academics to herding cats. While some say this is unfair to academics, others argue it is grossly unfair to cats. Academics have deeply held views on how things should be done and can justify their approach and, because they are intelligent individuals, these approaches rarely coincide and quite often are diametrically opposed. Cats, on the other hand, are just being playful and enjoy the attention." "This is daily life to Professor Helen Berman at Rutgers University. She runs the Protein Data Bank, which has collected together in a uniform way the structures of some 17,000 proteins, all of which were the results of years of work by crystallographers around the world. In time, the data bank will play a huge role in increasing our understanding of nature as well as new drug treatments for disease."	profiles: larry smarr:- "eloquence and charm, and his clear tactical thinking, are as strong as his talents in theoretical physics." "All the time he was just following his own interests, and went where they took him. "Nobody has ever been able to tell me what to do," he says. "I believe I am at most use to society when left to do what I want."" "Larry is a delightful person and as you can imagine for someone with so many accomplishments he is full of energy all the time..." "major force in promoting distributed models of computing" ""The trouble with having a lot of money is that it takes possession of you and these people spend all their time with tax accountants. I don't want to do that. I feel I have been treated appropriately. I have the greatest luxury, which money cannot buy, and that is being left alone to follow my dreams and have enough resources to sort out the ones that are real. The fact that I have been allowed to do what I want and have never had a boss, I would not trade for millions of dollars.""	book reviews: Science by the book - "Tom Wilkie argues that scientific computing holds the answer to the questions posed by Schrödinger in his classic book What is Life?"
molecular structure -	genetic computing - defence against the flood - Douglas Kell suggests that genetic computing can offer a solution to the data mining and predictive modelling challenges of today.	data mining - dig deep for the power of knowledge - Brian Cogan discusses the merits of data mining and why the processes involved help us towards a better understanding of statistics and information.
genetic computing - defence against the flood - Douglas Kell suggests that genetic computing can offer a solution to the data mining and predictive modelling challenges of today.	Linking bioinformatics and basic research	wow
Out of the Minds of Babes	The dawn of biocomputing?	DNA METHYLATION - The silent superhero
RNA PROCESSING - Nonstop destruction	yeh baby - bring it on!	Nature Molecular Biology 2002 - Highlights - Free access

Could Parkinson's Disease be Viral?

This article talks about the fact that the four main character’s in a sit-com from the seventies all developed Parkinson’s Disease later in life. Coincidence? Environmental factors? Viral? One argument against the viral theory is that spouses and children of PD sufferers would also develop symptoms, but there is a possibility that it may attack some people because of a defect in their biochemistry, whereas others may carry it without harm to themselves, or may not even carry it at all, because the receptors to which it binds, or the means by which it is able to sustain itself may not be provided by that persons biochemistry. I’m intrigued by the possible viral origins of many conditions, especially allergies, and cancer, which may be caused by endogenous retroviruses. This could also be totally wrong, but it’s interesting to consider all possibilities.




The Myelin Project

A great example of determined people forcing science to serve mankind rather than vice-versa.

NCI Flicker "Flicker is a method for comparing images from different Internet sources on your Web browser. Scientists around the world often work on similar image data. More of this data is being published on the Internet each year. In the case of 2D protein electrophoretic gel images, maps identifying proteins in these gels are becoming increasingly available. Visually comparing 2D sample gels against these 2D gel database maps may suggest putative protein spot identification in many cases. Flicker was originally developed for comparing 2D protein gels across the Internet."

BioInformatics Utilities (AF13-1) " BioInformatics Utilities API's for parsing abstracts downloaded from Pubmed website,Patent website, Swissprot website,DNAProportions & Hydrophobicity which provides different functionalities , DNA Proportion calculations and Hydrophobicity."

Jump4DNA (SW20-1) "Jump is a new Java application that can be used to view Molecular Biology sequences. This is an alpha/demo release with with some functionality unavailable at present. Jump can open/save plain text and Genbank data files, sequences can be edited, the plasmid site markers defined and JPG images of the plasmid map saved."