The blueprint of a small organism’s cellular machinery has been unveiled, offering the most comprehensive view yet of the molecular essentials of life. But the research also shows just how far biologists have to go before they understand the complete biochemical basis of even the simplest of creatures.
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Grabbing one of the three laptops in her office at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, Jasmin Fisher flips open the lid and starts to describe how she and her collaborators used an approach from computer science to make a discovery in molecular biology. Fisher glances across her desk to where her collaborator, Nir Piterman of Imperial College London, is watching restlessly. “I know you could do this faster,” she says to Piterman, who is also her husband. “But you are a computer scientist and I am a biologist and we must be patient.”
A broadcaster doing a Moon package for BBC5’s Pods and Blogs interviewed me about the ApolloPlus40 Twitter feed I’ve been working on for Nature.
New experience to be on the receiving end of an interview. The segment containing my interview is available for download here: [mp3, 4:18].
Scientists have estimated that fewer than 3,500 breeding Neanderthal females lived in Europe at any one time between about 38,000 and 70,000 years ago — using a faster and potentially much cheaper method than sequencing whole genomes.