Friday, May 22, 2015

Weekly Links May 22th ,2015



“MUST READ”
    •      At his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out “what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years.”
DISRUPTION, REVOLUTION
Now, however, lots of people are talking about CRISPR — particularly after a group of researchers in China recently used the technique to edit nonviable human embryos. Though the embryos would never turn into humans, this was the first time anyone had ever tried to edit the genetic material of homo sapiens, and the April 18 publication of the results sparked a massive outcry.
TOOLS/TECHNIQUES
    • The federal government opened the door to a new era of genetic medicine on Thursday by introducing a standard way to ensure the accuracy of DNA tests used to tailor treatments for individual patients.
  • Behind the Bench: Sanger Sequencing by CE 4: Bi...
    • Part four of a six-part series, here’s an overview of how data is converted by a capillary sequencing instrument from an analog signal to a digital one, assigned a base call (or fragment length) with a quality metric, and lastly variant reporting.
Sanger data-analysis-software.gif
HEALTH/MEDECINE
    • Arcturus BioCloud is a biotechnology startup on the outskirts of San Francisco that hopes to give science hobbyists the ability to gene splice their way to super bacteria with a few clicks on their laptop.
“You don’t need a lab,” co-founder Jaime Sotomayor said of the Arcturus platform. That’s because his team has created a lab in the cloud that will do the work for you with a combination of robotics, artificially intelligent software, and synthetic biology.
COMPANIES
SOMETHING DIFFERENT
    • We all want to work smarter—that’s why productivity is such a hot topic—but are we getting ahead or just spinning our wheels? Tracey Foulkes, CEO of Get Organised South Africa, says too many of us are in the "busy business of busyness." 
"We’re always rushing from meeting to meeting and drowning in work," she says. "It’s not about doing more; it’s about making wiser choices."
    • People think they’re adding value, but if they aren’t doing what they need to do, in reality they’re not. You’re only valuable to your organization when you are doing what you’re hired to do."
  • The Last Day of Her Life - NYTimes.com
    • Sandy Bem, a Cornell psychology professor one month shy of her 65th birthday, was alone in her bedroom one night in May 2009, watching an HBO documentary called “The Alzheimer’s Project.” For two years, she had been experiencing what she called “cognitive oddities”: forgetting the names of things or confusing words that sounded similar. She once complained about a “blizzard” on her foot, when she meant a blister; she brought home a bag of plums and, standing in her kitchen, pulled one out and said to a friend: “Is this a plum? I can’t quite seem to fully know.”

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