So I’ve been doing social hour posters for a while for our lab. Maybe I’m getting lazy. This round’s poster comes in two varieties: raw and interpreted. (You can click to get larger images.)

I’ve set up a new site for comics, now this can revert to being a random thoughts blog. Maybe I’ll add little notes on the subject contained within the comic. There’s a new comic there right now, Winged and a Prayer. There’s a captcha, so hopefully commenting will be easier.

Did you know that the gender of bees is based on ploidy? Female bees (workers and queens) are diploid, with two copies of each chromosome (like humans). Male bees (drones) are haploid, containing only one copy of each chromosome (like sperm and egg cells). Fertilized eggs turn into female bees, unfertilized eggs into males.

Worker bees can actually start laying eggs, but unlike queens the worker bee cannot mate. She cannot produce new workers or queens – only male drones. The worker bees only do this when the queen has died and the hive is queenless – thus, it’s a sort of last gasp effort to get the genes out.

From Nature News:

When scientists released a draft of the human genome sequence six years ago, they said the data belonged to all of us — but until now, they have been the only ones able to play with the data therein.

I call bullshit. That data has been publicly available, you can download it from NCBI’s FTP site. Go ahead and play.

It makes me sad that most research is published under restrictive copyright licenses and is generally inaccessible to the public. But the fruit of the Human Genome Project *is* available. Find a different hyperbole, please don’t needlessly promote the image of science as a monolithically inaccessible tax dollar sink.

Created using the cheezburger factory.

I’ve done it myself, using Exploratorium’s online recipe.