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A Year in The Life of a Computer
What does a year in the life of a computer look like?Well, something like the map below! This is a map every bit of of mouse movement, every mouse click and every keyboard press I have done on my home...
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Jurassic Wedding
You will have seen the instant internet classic of a dinosaur crashing a wedding... I got married this year and just had to do the same. Fortunately my wife agreed! I am a biochemist, but cloning a...
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PixelTool
Many classic games like Transport Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon and Theme Hospital have pixel art graphics using a limited number of colours. These graphics are tricky to draw and take a lot of skill,...
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3D Lightning 2
About a year ago two redditors happened to take a photo of the same lightning bolt, but from different places, and I use them to make a 3D reconstruction: 3D Lightning.Well, it happened again!The two...
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3D Wood Grain
Using a block of wood and a plane Keith Skretch made something amazing. He snapped a picture of the wood, then planed a thin layer off, snapped another picture, planed another layer off, and repeated...
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This one goes out to the cilia biologists...
Have no idea what this is about? Try reading about cilia and hedgehogs...
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Tides
Ocean tides are one of the most amazing but overlooked natural wonders of our planet. As the Earth rotates relative to the sun and the moon, their gravity drags the Earth's water about, raising and...
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Forgotten Futures - New York
What if cities looked like this? The 1920s view of cities of the future was glorious; huge buildings towering into the sky, multi-layer roads, rail and pavements, airships and aircraft, and the bold...
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Trypanosome Lego
Trypanosomes and Leishmaniaare the two tropical parasites that I do most of my research on. These cells seem to have a lot of modularity in controlling their shape, and have quite a lot of flexibility...
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Tengwar - Transliterating Font
This blog post is about a Tengwar font I designed. It automatically converts text as you type into accurate Elvish script. You can download it for free here. Just make sure you enable ligatures,...
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Smooth Videos - AKA Correcting NASA
What makes a video look smooth? Your eye is extremely sensitive to problems with videos, and for any video to look smooth it has to have:A high frame rateA steady cameraRoughly even brightness each...
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Partial Solar Eclipse 2015
[Obligatory partial solar eclipse post, as seen from Dresden, Germany]
View ArticleLight-Years of DNA
Light-year, and DNA. Not two scientific terms you expect to see on the same page, but over your lifetime your body will produce around one light-year of DNA! That is about one trillion kilometres....
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Pebbling in colour
The Pebble Time is finally out! This fantastically simple, yet massively functional, little smartwatch is now shipping to the Kickstarter backers who pledged their renewed support to the company that...
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Ergodic Analysis
My review paper about ergodic analysis came out on Thursday. Does ergodic analysis sound terrifying? It's actually quite a simple concept and it is a powerful method for extracting information about...
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Looking at the structure inside cells
How complex and structured is the inside of a cell? It's hard to imagine, but the internal organisation of cells is typically precisely controlled by molecular skeletons and scaffolds, giving cells the...
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TrypTag.org
The website for one of my new major research projects is now live!TrypTag.orgTrypTag is a project to tag every gene in the trypanosome genome with a fluorescent marker to see where it goes in the...
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Molecular Cell Biology of Protozoan Parasites - Ghana 2017
Things change fast in Ghana! Three years ago, I helped teach a course for young African scientists in the University of Ghana in Accra. This January I got the chance to do the same again, and it has...
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Moving in a straight line - sounds simple, right?
One hundred years ago Asa Schaeffer blindfolded his friend and challenged him to walk in a straight line. He did three loops of a spiral, before tripping over a tree stump. This wasn't a cruel prank,...
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How to be a parasite
For an organism to become a parasite it has to adapt to live in a host. This might mean it needs to grow faster, invade cells or tissues, or avoid being killed by the immune system. It can also...
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How happy are your HeLa cells?
Figure 1. HeLa cell nucleus happiness scale. HeLa cells expressing FUS eGFP were asked how they felt. The morphology of the nucleus and nucleolus, visible via FUS eGFP localisation, was used to infer...
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How does a cell swim fowards?
“Why are they swimming backwards?” This is one of the most common questions I get asked whenever I show a video of Leishmania parasites swimming.Swimming Leishmania at 200 frames per second (8× slower...
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Tryp/Leish Stickers!
It's been a busy year starting my lab... But in more important news, T. brucei, T. cruzi and Leishmania stickers!
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Trypanosomatid cell structures
These are my oft-requested diagrams of trypanosomatid parasites. They're heavily inspired by the amazing illustrations of trypanosomatids by Keith Vickerman, like this classic, though with a more...
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