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Small Worlds - a very interesting flash game.

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1. Adopt a Microbe (linked to this last year around this time, it's been updated).
2. Cell Size and Scale

A good read ...

... on agriculture and what most of us take for granted, can be found here.

Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is. This is something the critics of industrial farming never seem to understand.

h/t Mike at the Big Stick.

The Eagle Has Landed!

Today is the 40th Anniversary of one of the greatest achievements in all of human history. On this day 40 years ago, Neil Armstrong became the first man to step on the moon. Caption: Picture of Buzz Aldrin standing next to the US flag planted on the moon.

To celebrate this outstanding scientific achievement, here is some link goodness celebrating it:

1. Apollo 11 Fast Facts (FoxNews)

2. Phil Plait writes what Apollo 11 meant to him (Bad Astronomy Blog)

3. A 10 year old played a role in getting Apollo 11 home (CNN)

4. Remembering Apollo 11 - The Big Picture (Boston Globe)

5. NASA's 30th Anniversary Page for Apollo 11 (NASA)

6. NASA's 40th Anniversary Page for Apollo 11 (NASA)

7. Wired Science Article on next 40 years for NASA (Wired Science)

8. A list of the Apollo 11 Science Experiments (LPI)

9. A PDF to the Apollo 11 Preliminary Science Report (NASA)

And no linkage list is complete without a link to a Top Ten List:
10. Ten Things You Didn't Know About Apollo 11 (Popular Science)

Enjoy!

Hysterical

Oh man, I've got to stop laughing ... it hurts!

h/t PsD.

Linkage ...

... to some web-based resources I've had to use lately.

Libshuff (Sequence Library Comparison) - To determine whether or not your various DNA (in my case microbial) libraries are statistically similar or not. It's hosted by UGA.

DNADIST - In order to use the web-based program above, you need a DNA distance matrix file. It's a part of the Phylip package. There is an online resource for this though hosted by the Pasteur Institute (which is what is linked above).

Or, if you don't want to use libshuff like I am, you can use UniFrac.

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Astronomy
SEDS Messier Catalog
TUMOL - The Ultimate Messier Object Log (Software)
Stellarium - Open Source Planetarium (Software)
Astronomy POTD - NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day

Microbiology
The Microbe Zoo

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Bureau of Communication

Funny stuff.

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Sol Light - Creators of the LightCap

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Adopt a Microbe

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Check this website out:

Hunters Hope dot Org

Found it through a comment on Peter King's Monday Morning QB writeup for the NFL's week 9.

Good Guy of the Week

Jim Kelly, retired quarterback, Buffalo.

Kelly, who never could get the Bills over the Super Bowl hump in his Hall of Fame career, has a new mission these days -- to get every state to test for 54 potentially fatal diseases that could be diagnosed at birth. Only one state, Minnesota, tests for that many today.

He's on this mission because of the death of his son, Hunter, in 2005, from a rare brain disease called Krabbe Leukodystrophy. The disease (leukodystrophies afflict one of every 100,000 American births) could have been diagnosed at birth, but New York State did not test for the illness when Hunter was born in 1997.

"The tragedy for Hunter, and for so many children born with fatal illnesses, is that they're simply born in the wrong state,'' Kelly said the other night. "If you don't think that's something that just tears at your heart every day ...''

I've known Kelly for a long time, and I've always found him to be one of the biggest life-of-the-party guys I've covered. He was a prolific pre-curfew beer man in his Bills training-camp years, when the Buffalo players were as tight as a team could be. But when I saw him the other day, I saw he'd changed. There was a grimness to a once-carefree guy, with more lines on his face than I remembered. The grimness is not from giving up; it's a grim determination.

He's already seen governors of three states -- New York, Pennsylvania and Kansas -- and gotten each to increase dramatically the number of diseases tested for at birth. When babies are born, their heels are pricked and a blood sample taken to test for diseases. With Kelly's lobbying, New York has increased from 11 to 44 diseases tested for, Pennsylvania from 11 to 29, and Kansas from four to 29.

Parents can buy a kit to screen their children for the maximum number of diseases for less than $100, but Kelly, and his foundation, want the tests to be done for every child as a matter of course. Considering that the costs of caring for children with one of many known leukodystrophies can run from between $500,000 and $1 million per year, it seems like early-testing money would be well spent.

"I never won a Super Bowl,'' said Kelly, "and for a long time that really bothered me, obviously. But this is real. This is life. My Super Bowl victory will be to get every state to adopt universal newborn screening so we can save lives that are now being lost needlessly. When that day comes, that victory will be 10 times better than any Super Bowl.''

Because New York now tests for Krabbe, Kelly met a perfectly healthy boy, now a year and half old, who was diagnosed at birth and successfully treated. "Little Elmer,'' he said with a grin. Now his goal is to meet a lot more Elmers. If you'd like to help, or learn more about Kelly's mission, you can go to www.huntershope.org.

There is simply no reason that we shouldn't be performing these tests.

September Eleven Dot Net

It's a site worth checking out. Gary Suson has done an excellent job memorializing that day, though I'm sure he wishes, like all of us, that he didn't have to.

September Eleven Dot Net

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Divided We Fail.

Linkage - Electric Vehicles

Global Electric Motors (GEM)

Green Vehicles

Kurrent

Tesla Motors

ZAP Electric Cars

ZENN Motor Company

For those of us truly feeling the pinch of gas, I doubt we'll be able to afford the Tesla, but most of the others are feasible. Especially the NEVs (Neighborhood Electric Vehicles). You'll just have to get your city politicians to drop the town/city speed limits to 35 MPH or less.

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Desktopography - A cool site with lots of desktop images. From their "About" page ...

At their best, desktop wallpapers bring animation to often lifeless computer screens, reflecting the personality of the user and acting as a calling card for creative talent. The desktopography project arrived in 2005 as a place to download nature / topological themed wallpapers with edits from selected designers.

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The Pickens Plan - T. Boone Picken's website where he touts his new plan. Essentially to make a move into wind power. This move into wind power will also free up the natural gas used to generate electricity and allow it to be shuttled into the liquid fuel (as compressed natural gas [CNG]) market, thereby reducing our dependency on foreign oil. This dependency currently plays to the tune of ~700 billion dollars annually.

Bentham Open Access Journals - These all look to be relatively new journals, and they don't appear to be indexed by two of the major indexing sources (MedLine/Pubmed and Scopus). However, you've got to start somewhere, right?