Image from http://greenebeancoffee.com/
Join our weekly coffee break this Monday at 3:30 in the graduate student lounge. Coffee will be provided by the Glor & Garrigan Labs. Bring a mug!
EEB Monday Coffee Break
EEB Readings, Nov. 8-12
Lesser Antillean bullfinch. Image from http://www.birdinginstlucia.org/birdfieldguide/photos.htm
Monday: Speciation reading group. 2PM in Hutch 341. Ch. 10 on Reinforcement from Coyne and Orr.
Tuesday: EEB Journal Club. 12:30 in the Bryant Room. The 1000 Genomes Project Consortium (2010) A map of human genome variation from population-scale sequencing. Nature. [doi link]
Wednesday: Island biogeography discussion group. Noon in Hutch 341. Ricklefs’s chapter in The Theory of Island Biogeography Revisited. Contact the Glor Lab if you want to get in on lunch.
Wednesday: Bartuszevige A.M., Gorchov D.L. and Raab L. 2006. The relative importance of landscape and community features in the invasion of an exotic shrub in a fragmented landscape. Ecography 29:213-222. [[doi link]]
Friday: Elements of Evolutionary Genetics reading group. 10AM in the graduate student lounge. First half of chapter 3 from Charlesworth & Charlesworth.
EEB Seminar and Happy Hour Tomorrow
“If our ignorance is infinite…”
Every first year feels it constantly. Second years feel it in droves, especially around qualifying exam time. A PhD student’s career is capped by a defense that makes sure you still feel it a little. What is it? Stupidity! Here’s a good article from the Journal of Cell Science with a new perspective on “The importance of stupidity in scientific research.” – Dan McNabney
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Seminars & Workshop on High Performance Computing
Of interest to the growing number of EEB folks who make use of High Performance Computing (HPC)… Carlos Sosa, an IBM Academy of Technology Visiting Member, will present a series of lectures and a workshop Friday, November 19th on HPC using the BlueGene platform (the U of R Center for Research Computing makes one of these available to researchers, details here).
At 10am in the Gowen Room in Wilson Commons, Sosa will provide an overview of IBM’s efforts in high performance computing and a summary of some of his work in biomedical informatics at a special plenary lecture, “High-Performance Computing Solutions Development at IBM”.
From 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m in Goergen 108, Carlos will present an overview of Blue Gene hardware, software, and application porting.
Following the Blue Gene presentation, there will be a Blue Gene workshop, where demonstrations of porting and parallelizing software for Blue Gene will be given using a molecular docking application as an example. The presentations are open to all, but registration for the Blue Gene workshop will be required. I will post registration information here when those details become available.
Another Spec to Demo
We’re shipping off the demo NanoDrop today, but have a spec here to demo – the BioTek Epoch. The BioTek Epoch is a new competitor to the NanoDrop built by a company that’s been in the plate reader business for decades. This machine is capable of doing 16 NanoDrop style 1-2ul samples simultaneously, or even reading an entire 96 or 384 well plate of larger samples (>25 µl). With some help from Danna Eickbush, we did a quick test this morning and found BioTek Epoch capable of accurately detecting and characterizing smaller concentrations of DNA than the NanoDrop (the NanoDrop crapped out around 10 ngµl, whereas the Epoch was still giving us reasonable results down to 3 ng/µl). We’ll have it for another week, so please stop by if you’d like to give it a spin.
EEB Coffee Time
Disclaimer: this image may not resemble product offered by Glor & Garrigan Labs.
The Glor & Garrigan Lab’s are hosting coffee time today in the graduate student lounge at 3:30PM.
Special Seminar Tomorrow: Mark Siegal on Causes and Consequences of Robustness
Image from the Siegal Lab's home page: https://files.nyu.edu/ms4131/public/
Mark Siegal just gave an excellent seminar on regulators of genital form and function in Drosophila. He speaks again tomorrow morning at 10AM in Hutch 316 on “Causes and consequences of robustness: variation in single-cell traits in yeast.”
Rochester Breaks Into Top 10 on Daily Beast’s List of Smartest Cities
The Daily Beast has made an annual tradition of using data on education (e.g., % population with degrees) and intellectual environment (e.g., libraries per capita, year-to-date nonfiction book sales) to rank the smartest major metropolitan areas in the United States. This year Rochester cracked the top 10, just behind Washington, D.C. and just ahead of Portland, Oregon (take heart Portland, in my book you’re still leading the nation in hipsters per capita).
EEB Readings, Nov. 1-5
Monday: Speciation reading group. 2PM in Hutch 341. Polyploidy and Hybrid Speciation from Coyne and Orr.
Tuesday: EEB Journal Club. 12:30 in the Bryant Room. Xia et al. (2009) Complete resequencing of 40 genomes reveals domestication events and genes in silkworm (Bombyx). Science 326:433-436. [doi link]
Wednesday: Island biogeography discussion group. Noon in Hutch 341. Gillespie & Baldwin’s chapter in The Theory of Island Biogeography Revisited. Contact the Glor Lab if you want to get in on lunch.
Wednesday: Martin P.H. and Marks P.L. 2006. Intact forests provide only weak resistance to a shade-tolerant invasive Norway maple (Acer platanoides L.). Journal of Ecology 94:1070-1079. [[doi link]]
Friday: Elements of Evolutionary Genetics reading group. 10AM in the graduate student lounge. First half of chapter 3 from Charlesworth & Charlesworth.