castanyes blaves

Not surprisingly, given the nature of this blog, I'm pretty favourably disposed towards Google's Linux-based Android platform, even though I don't possess the only phone currently using it, T-Mobile's G1.

But it's hard to tell just how well it's doing against the iPhone, say. If any one knows, it's T-Mobile, so I was interested to receive this morning some tantalising tidbits from Richard Warmsley, head of Internet and Entertainment at T-Mobile UK.

Despite being pressed by me, he wouldn't get into specifics (now, there's a surprise) about sales, saying only that they had exceeded expectations. But he did reveal that according to their market research, G1s were selling at 70-80% the rate of iPhones. Even allowing for margins of error and any tendency to talk up such numbers, this suggests a healthy uptake.

Study leader Dr Mike Modo, from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, said: "This works really well because the stem cell-loaded particles can be injected through a very fine needle and then adopt the precise shape of the cavity.

"In this process the cells fill the cavity and can make connections with other cells, which helps to establish the tissue."

He said over a few days they were able to see cells migrating along the scaffold particles and forming a primitive brain tissue that interacts with the host brain.

• remove duplication and solve all NULL values on row issues (e.g. gnf)
  
• limits on external attributes
• limits on est and gnf attributes
• indexed expression tables
• new hardware

• increase result batch size?
• merge 3 GO categories?
• Remove unused tables?
• Canned queries?
• Stop user ability to re-send a query?
• Keep analysing the logs and make it more automated and informative -- keep an eye on what is happening
• Maybe limits on formats for "gimme all for X" --> goes to the FTP link
• Maybe new FTP dumps for "gimme all attributes for Y+Z" --> goes to the FTP link
• More complicated combinations --> cached them on a "dynamic FTP"
  

By re-sequencing a handful of candidate genes from previous genome-wide association studies, University of Cambridge and Roche 454 researchers have identified four rare variants and one common variant in an antiviral gene called IFIH1 that protect against type 1 diabetes or T1D. Since the variants appear to curb the gene's activity, the team proposes that functional IFIH1 may contribute to T1D.

The Atacama desert lies on the western edge of South America, covering much of northern Chile and parts of Argentina. It is the closest one can get to Mars while remaining grounded on Earth. High atop the Socompa volcano on the Eastern edge of the Atacama desert, the atmosphere is thin, the ultraviolet radiation is intense, and the climate is dry. Nevertheless, the improbable has been found: life. Near the rim of the 19,850-foot-high Socompa volcano, researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder's Alpine Microbial Observatory found a thriving, complex microbial community that appears to be supported by gases emanating from volcanic vents around the rim.

The Atacama desert is the driest place on Earth. Weather stations in the Antofagasta region of Chile average one millimeter of precipitation per year, and a number of weather stations in the Atacama have never recorded rainfall throughout their entire operational life. The extreme climate there is often compared to the surface of Mars. It is believed to be so similar that a Science article, published in 2003, used it in an attempt to re-create the experiments that Viking One and Two performed on the Martian surface. It is also a proving ground for equipment that NASA plans to send to Mars one day. Given the geologic similarities, the discovery of life in such a hostile place suggests that life could exist elsewhere as well.

• The Silicon Fen area of influence generates £100bn per annum. In contrast to that, the national transport inversion in the area is disproportionately small.
• Measures taken in restricting car access to the City centre have stopped and even decreased the volume of private car traffic in the last 10 years. In contrast, the access to the centre has increased steadily, and the Park and Rides are now at 2.2-2.5M per year.
• The property bust in the economic downturn will probably last for 2009 and 2010, and number of dwellings and transport needs will spike back after 2010. The property market is already thawing from the late 2008 or early 2009 freeze. Projections of 75000 new homes by 2021 will only need to be shifted by two years, to 2023.

So this is actually old-ish news, but I saw this press release about paper published last year describing the ability of the fungus Gliocladium roseum to naturally synthesizes diesel compounds. The paper from Gary Strobel @Montana State and collaborators describes that G. roseum produces volatile hydrocarbon on cellulose media. Extracts from the host plant (Eucryphia cordifolia) were also able to support growth of the fungus alone. This production of products have been dubbed “myco-diesel”. G. roseum is an endophyte of E. cordifolia I wonder what kinds of advantages it might provide for the fungus or the plant to produce these hydrocarbons.

I wonder if it is better to focus on these organisms that have already evolved a way to make these hydrocarbons directly from cellulose rather than the multistep process of making easy to process sugars from different starting plant materials and then ethanol or other hydrocarbons from yeast or bacteria growing on that sugar. Growth rates, amenability to grow in bioreactors, etc certainly are considerations in building production systems, but I wonder whether these kind of finding represent inroads to solving our problems or if they are peripheral to the current bioengineering approaches that are underway.

Some of the earlier press releases I had missed it seems:

* Rainforest fungus makes diesel
* Diesel Fuel From a Tree Fungus?
* NPR
* Google news

G. A. Strobel, B. Knighton, K. Kluck, Y. Ren, T. Livinghouse, M. Griffin, D. Spakowicz, J. Sears (2008). The production of myco-diesel hydrocarbons and their derivatives by the endophytic fungus Gliocladium roseum (NRRL 50072) Microbiology, 154 (11), 3319-3328 DOI: 10.1099/mic.0.2008/022186-0

A little detective work traced the problem to default date format conversions and floating-point format conversions in the very useful Excel program package. The date conversions affect at least 30 gene names; the floating-point conversions affect at least 2,000 if Riken identifiers are included. These conversions are irreversible; the original gene names cannot be recovered.