Links for the week of November 15th, 2009

If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.

  • Personal Genome Project – George Church's massive public sequencing experiment, collecting multi-decade lifestyle, disease, and phenotype data on a cohort of eventually 100,000 or more people who have been completely sequenced, with all the results being totally public. In the next decade all signs point to sequencing becoming essentially free and instantaneous, at which point any notion of genetic privacy is going to go out the window, so why not help society learn what public genetic information means. Church is volunteer number 1, at the insistence of the ethics committee, which is richly ironic, since Craig Venter was expressly prohibited from sequencing himself by Celera, and did it anyway. I just submitted my application to participate.
  • Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower – Multiple "whistleblowers" from within the International Energy Agency supposedly casting doubt on their oil production predictions. Would be a lot more convincing if they weren't insisting on anonymity.
  • Scientists in Germany Draft Neanderthal Genome – Why didn't somebody tell me we were going to clone the neanderthals?
  • Building With Whole Trees – A Wisconsin forester-architect, who shapes small diameter trees into useful forms for his designs. Almost looks like elvish building!

Published by

Zane Selvans

A former space explorer, now marooned on a beautiful, dying world.

Leave a Reply