The Encyclopedia of Life, about which I blogged and wrote about in the New York Times, has gone live earlier than previously scheduled. So go check it out. A few people have left comments here, and others are blogging too. I’m very curious to see what hard-core bioinformatics folks think as they take this baby out for a ride. Deepak Singh at business bytes genes molecules has some complaints, and Rod Page has a lot of them.

Continue reading “Encyclopedia of Life: Up and Running and Generating Debate” →

“Original art by Vesalius, the founder of modern anatomy. Taken from Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden. As student of social science, I find the concept of man studying himself awesome.”

Carl: A skeleton gazes at a skull, its hand draped lazily over the cranial vault. This image signifies more than just an anatomy lesson. Andreas Vesalius, the anatomist who drew it and many others, created a visual fault line that divided the ancient and the modern. Medieval European anatomists looked back to ancient authorities such as Galen for enlightenment. Anything they saw for themselves that did not seem to fit into the ancient systems must be their own errors, to be resolved by more careful reading of the Greeks and Romans. 

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My latest story for the New York Times is up: it’s a sneak peek at the Encyclopedia of Life–a web site that will ultimately contain detailed pages about all 1.8 million known species. Right now it’s just a demo site, but on Thursday, there will be thousands of pages up, each with details on a different species. Will it reach its goal? As I point out in the article, previous attempts have failed. Their remnants are littered across the Web, such as the All-Species Foundation. But the scientists behind the Encyclopedia of Life have a lot of tools, like wikis and text-mining, that their predecessors lacked. Check it out on Thursday and come back here to tell me what you think.

Continue reading “Wikipedia of Life?” →

Helen writes, “I am getting married soon, and I wanted to get a tattoo to commemorate who I was before, something to remember my old name (as I am going to take my future husband’s surname when I get married), but I also wanted it to be a secret. So this is what I got…”

Carl: Helen wrote her name in ASCII, the lingua franca of computers. Before ASCII was developed in the 1960s, computers often had no way to send text to one another, with dozens of different systems for representing letters and numbers. Even after ASCII was created, it didn’t become common until 1981, when IBM used it for the first personal computers. Now ASCII is ubiquitous–a rare thing for such an old computer technology.

Continue reading “God, the Void, and a Tattoo” →

The history of science is rife with fateful meetings. The astronomer Tycho Brahe hires a young assistant named Johannes Kepler, who will go on to discover in Brahe’s observations the law of planetary motion. A bright but aimless British physicist named Francis Crick is introduced to a boisterous young American biologist named James Watson. The two soon discover they share a curiosity about a strange molecule called DNA. And on a warm afternoon in the early spring of 1838, the young Charles Darwin climbed into an orangutan’s cage.

Continue reading “Man Meets Ape” →