On nucleosome positioning

One of the topics I’ve been tracking with some interest lately has been nucleosome positioning. I’m going to briefly highlight some of my recent readings on the subject …

Recent Blog Highlights

• The May Scientiae Carnival is up. This month’s theme: Career paths, perspective, and changing self-mage. (Hosted by Cat Nap).

• A great piece on the history of the platypus is up over at What You’re Doing is Rather Desperate.

• See Jane Compute has a set of posts on “Is computer science a science?” (See Part 1, Part 1A, Part2, Part 3 is promised soon …)

• I saw Jorge Cham give a talk yesterday. It was an hour lecture on the value of procrastination. While the talk was content-light, it was incredibly funny and entertaining.

• Be sure to get your art break in today by visiting Drawing the Motmot.

Biophysics of Transcriptional Regulation

I saw a seminar this week by Leonid Mirny, a MIT physicist with a joint appointment in the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. It was an interesting talk on how biophysical models concerning how regulatory proteins search for their sites on DNA has interesting implications for genome structure.

Architecture of campus …

Courtesy PhD Comics:

I’ve worked in Red Brick Wonderland, Modernist “It cost HOW much?”, Gothic Envyist and Neo-Penal at different times during my career already!

Mighty Piwis

Last year Kathryn O’Donnell and Jef Boeke published a review in Cell on Piwis and their role in maintaining transposon silencing in the germline genome. Together with an additional short review by Seto et. al. on Piwi proteins, a compelling picture of Piwis is just beginning to emerge …