radicalcut

Unrelated to VR but still: if anyone here hasn't yet watched drmeister's talk about Clasp and his "molecular metaprogramming" project, please do. Absolutely fascinating stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X69_42Mj-g

Also recently discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9721801

The "Perl Power Tools" project has been revived by brian d foy: https://metacpan.org/pod/PerlPowerTools

Is there an article or initial analysis somewhere summarizing all that's known right now about this scary NSA/PRISM business (with links to sources ideally)? Or is it still too soon for such a thing?

I'm participating in a Google Student Ambassador program at my university and since I've always stressed the importance of privacy (especially in the era of the cloud) I feel obligated to educate my friends and colleagues about this.

> and will probably always be

I seriously doubt that. What goes around comes around.

Yeah, they do. And there's quite many of them actually. :-) Clojure might be big in the startup bubble, but that's about it I'm afraid.

I can't know how will this turn out eventually but I really hope for this (or something like this) to be a turning point for the music industry.

I love music, I really do, but at some point I became so disgusted by the way the industry works that I almost stopped caring. There surely is a better way to distribute music which would allow musicians to earn more money and the consumer to spend less at the same time by leaving out labels and distributors.

Thanks a lot for advice. I have still more than a year ahead before I need to make a decision so there's enough time to ask around when I narrow my choices. I haven't even made my mind whether I want to get into neuroscience or stay in molecular/cell biology.

Sadly, the situation as you decribed is almost the same with PhD students in the lab where I currently work on my diploma thesis and in some around in the institute. Having seen what I've seen (troubles with disertations and giving the PhD defense go-ahead) that's definitely something I want to avoid.

When I was young my attitude was similar but in my elementary school and high school two foreign languages were mandatory (English, German or Fench) so I didn't have any other choice. I live in Czech Republic.

At that age I couldn't care less but now that I'm thinking of doing a PhD in Germany (from what I've heard a very affordable country with many great life science labs) I'm very glad that I remember at least basics even that I haven't actually spoken German for six years.

I think that learning two major foreign languages should be mandatory. Almost everybody can learn one language quite well after +/- 10 years during childhood and to learn at least basics from the second one should not be that much of a problem too.

Human cells may have tens of times more forms of proteins expressed from these 23,000 genes if you take into account alternative splicing of pre-mRNA and many other post-translational modifications. These are all processes which prokaryotic organisms like M. genitalium generally lack.

Even when we look aside from the level of DNA/RNA there are huge differences in morphological organisation of eukaryotic cells when compared to most prokaryotes: dynamic compartmentalisation of cytoplasm, different types of cytoskeleton, vesicle trafficking, complex signal transduction networks instead of usually simple two-component regulatory systems... So the simulation of whichever human cell type could be much more complicated than one could initially thought.

I don't want to sound too much pessimistic, as someone with background in both CS and molecular biology I'm truly excited about this, but I still had to cool myself down a little bit after reading the article. I can't wait to read the original paper.