I’ve been working in a laboratory almost a full year now. And I have learned a very crucial fact: experiments rarely work as you like and often don’t work at all.

Considering my last post was four months ago, it is time to evaluate the success of this experiment. This blog was an experiment in the world of science writing. It started as a journal to document my progress on Distributed Neuron. Life and school got in the way, limiting my programming time. Wanting to keep this blog alive, I began writing about science. This was quite enjoyable but alas required too much time and commitment. My updates slacked, slowed and finally disappeared.

The summer is almost upon me. Exams are bearing down but hope is on the horizon. I’m staying at my university this summer to continue my research. Ten weeks of blissful, uninterrupted research (read: frustrating results and unexpected failures intermittently interspersed with glimmers of hope). It will be good.

As always, Distributed Neuron lumbers on. Inch by inch the code is being laid down. Much of the internals have been changed or rewriting. Infact, the entire goal of the project has drastically shifted (several times). I am, however, confident that my current iteration and vision is the one that will make it to the finish line. If the finish line is a Nobel Peace Prize or the dumpster remains to be seen.

This summer will be no less busy than the school year but I desire having a forum to speak about my ideas and updates, regardless of viewership. I am moving this blog back to the original foundation - a journal to document my progress on Distributed Neuron. Perhaps an article or two on science will be written but the bulk will be small updates regarding my code, ideologies and philosophic quandaries encountered while programming.

Onwards.

I just finished my last exam, which is fantastic. This has been the semester from hell. I apologize for my lack of posts on Distributed Neuron. Considering my…

• 21 credit coursework (Organic Chemistry, Physics II, Genetics, Biology, General Psychology)
• Independent lab work
• Fraternity responsibilities
• BPR3 coding

…free time has been a rare commodity. Something had to go and it unfortunately was Distributed Neuron on the chopping block (not to mention my social life!).

But don’t worry, I’ve got a veritable stockpile of papers that I want to discuss. I’m also resuming work on Distributed Neuron the project. I’ve got some interesting new ideas which I think are both novel and clever. More details on that in the future.

For now, I need to go pack. Be on the lookout for some articles in the near future!

I know, my blog has been less than spectacular lately, receiving very little attention. I’ve been incredibly busy. Luckily I should have some more time in the near future and even more time next semester.

Suffice to say, coursework and labwork is making my life busy. My pet project, Distributed Neuron, has gotten even less attention. I do have some major changes in the pipeline which I’ll blog about at a later date. For now though, my time is being diverted to scholarship and lab work.

And of course, I’m also working on BPR3. I’m really pleased how things are turning out. Uriel designed us a beautiful style for the site and I’ve been coding my busy little college butt off trying to get everything running. We are currently alpha testing with a small group of enthusiastic bloggers. Mum’s been the word lately, but Dave posted a teaser snippet at BPR3 so I suppose I can show it as well. Enjoy:

Unrelated, but this was my 100th post at Distributed Neuron. Hooray!

Everyone knows there are magnetic fields all over the earth. It is how your compass works. For the first time a map Earth’s entire magnetic field has been made.

The first global map of magnetic peculiarities - or anomalies - on Earth has been assembled by an international team of researchers.

Magnetic anomalies are caused by differences in the magnetisation of the rocks in the Earth’s crust.

The magnetic signature of the Earth’s crust has been measured for many decades by a multitude of groups; but now, for the first time, the data has been combined to give a truly worldwide view of the phenomenon.

It would be interesting if some enterprising avian researcher would combine this magnetic information with migration charts of migratory birds. Birds are well known for their magnetoreception, it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation to magnetic “landmarks” and migratory paths.

More information on the project can be seen at the project home - World Digital Magnetic Anomaly Map

Arizona State University is making some great advances in the field of nanotechnology electronic storage. Their new technique is called programmable metallization cell (PMC). It is apparently one tenth cheaper than equivalently sized flash drives and a whopping 10,000 times more energy efficient. Put together, this means you can have tremendously small storage capacities in tiny packages which use equally tiny amounts of energy.

PMC memory stores information in a fundamentally different way from flash. Instead of storing bits as an electronic charge, the technology creates nanowires from copper atoms the size of a virus to record binary ones and zeros.

In research published in October’s IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, Kozicki and his collaborators from the Jülich Research Center in Germany describe how the PMC builds an on-demand copper bridge between two electrodes. When the technology writes a binary 1, it creates a nanowire bridge between two electrodes. When no wire is present, that state is stored as a 0.

The first thing that came to my mind while reading this was potential neural applications. Imagine taking this tiny storage unit and coupling it with a paper thin battery. Throw in a “Utah” electrode arrays and you have a portable brain imaging implant that can hold hours, days, weeks worth of information. This could be excellent for research in a number of areas, from behavior studies to epilepsy treatment.

The article describes how a terrabyte of information could be stored on a thumbdrive. Imagine how much could be stored on the size of a pin, or a sliver of paper. More than enough for an implant. A mouse could receive one of these paper thin implants and perform some behavioral test (such as running a maze).

Researchers would have an exact readout of the brain areas selected coresponding to time. Include a transmitter in the implant to get data back off the device and you have a mouse that can perform any number of tests and provide excellent data without the need for bulky or interfering equipment.

Hat tip Foresight Nanotech Instititute.

BPR3 has published the official icons. If you are a blogger, these allow you to identify which of your posts are about peer-reviewed articles. If you are a reader, these let you know that the blogger has read the original publication and isn’t just spewing pre-processed information from the mainstream media.

For more information, check out the announcement.

Currently, the only aggregation of these posts are by hand or using a crude Technorati search. Fret not though, we are rolling out the aggregation soon! As soon as I can finish it, that is. I’ve been making good progress and have a rough working prototype finished. Once we polish off a few more features we plan to roll it out to some beta-testers, then distribute for mass consumption.

Keep an eye out here or at BPR3 for more details as they come.

Want to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper up close? Now you can.

A 16 billion pixel image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper has been posted on the internet, giving art lovers a detailed view of the 15th Century work.

Experts will be able to see segments as though just centimetres away and examine otherwise unavailable details.

It is visible at http://www.haltadefinizione.com.

“You can see how Leonardo made the cups transparent, something you can’t ordinarily see,” he said. “You can also note the state of degradation the painting is in.”

Shelly at Retrospectacle posted an interesting article highlighting a phenomena well known to computer scientists - collaboration. This particular article highlights the “SuperHappyDevHouse”, an all-day event where coders and designers come together and work on projects. Shelly points out that this type of collaboration, as well as other more technologically oriented collaboration, is rarely exhibited by other science fields.

Coders are accustomed to communicating with each other must faster than their laboratory-bound counterparts. Some Google employees told me how they are barraged each day with a phalanx of email. Countless message boards, IRC channels, and other sites allow isolated programmers to share with each other.
[...]
By comparison, there are few chemistry message boards, and only the open access journals like chemistry central include a comments thread alongside every peer-reviewed research paper, and conferences are dry, twice-a-year poster and powerpoint affairs.

I couldn’t agree more. As a computer science major turned biology major, I have seen both worlds. For the most part, I learned all my computer science skills through the internet. I taught myself languages, databases, programming concepts through internet tutorials. If I had questions, I asked on forums and newsgroups. IRC was available for instant communication with experts.

When I first migrated to biology, I attempted the same thing when I had questions. I looked for biology forums, in particular neuroscience. I looked for IRC channels and newsgroups, tutorials and guides. I looked but found nothing. Science blogs were interesting and satiated my desire to become fully immersed in science but offered little to answer specific questions I had.

Why is this? My thoughts about why after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry

Another sad example of too much power in the wrong hands. Here is the Patriot Act being applied to harmless technicalities, resulting in professors being stripped of their jobs and sentenced to years in prison. Just when I think I can’t get any more disappointed in my country, I read something like this. Good work US government.

Mail harmless bacteria, go to jail

This has caused scientists to get caught in the crosshairs, such as Thomas Butler, a microbiologist at Texas Tech who worked on Yersinia pestis (the bacterium that causes bubonic plague) among other organisms.

After initially being investigated for charges including bioterrorism (later dropped) following his report of missing bacterial vials, he was sentenced to 2 years in prison for a collection of other charges unrelated the original incident, producing a chilling effect upon the microbiology community: no one is safe from prosecution, and even a simple mistake can land you behind bars, stripped of your job and defending yourself with your retirement savings.

This isn’t the only case like this, either. Just last week, a University of Pittsburgh geneticist, Robert Ferrell, plead guilty to charges of failing to follow proper procedures in mailing samples, after being investigated initially for charges related to bioterrorism that were dropped (similar to the Butler case), and another professor awaits trial;

More of the story over at Aetiology.

Quote from my organic chemistry textbook:

If you had to memorize how each of them reacts, studying organic chemistry would not be a very pleasant experience

Oh, I wasn’t aware Ochem was a pleasant experience to begin with. Silly me.