I’m generally fascinated by human evolution. I’ll post something interesting about it soon, but for now, here’s a couple of developments that I came across recently that will probably factor into some future cool things:

PLoS One: A 28,000 Years Old Cro-Magnon mtDNA Sequence Differs from All Potentially Contaminating Modern Sequences 

The cool thing about this one is that they determined that the existing DNA from cro-magnon samples has not been contaminated by modern human DNA (meaning from the people who’ve handled the remains). That’s good.

ScienceDaily: Complete Neanderthal Mitochondrial Genome Sequenced From 38,000-year-old Bone

And this one is just about sequencing DNA from neanderthal samples. Neanderthal’s are cool in and of themselves. The very idea that two (possibly three) human species co-existed is pretty sweet. And now we’ve got mitochondrial DNA for both of ‘em. 

Yay, science.

A while ago, I ran across this page about sequence logos. The description of what a sequence logo actually is is a little obtuse (it’s an aligned sequence of binding sites, but what’s the zero position in the graph?). Regardless, they’re pretty cool.

I’m a designer/information architect/information designer and I like data visualizations. This kind is pretty simple - one might even say crude, but it fulfills its purpose in a pretty nifty fashion. I’m not a molecular biologist (is there a cool intertubes acronym for that? If so, I might be using it often - let’s say it’s IANAMB just to humor me) so I have no idea if these are actually useful, but I still think it’s pretty sweet.

Above image: T. D. Schneider and R. M. Stephens, Sequence Logos: A New Way to Display Consensus Sequences