This is a great illustration of collective phenomena.

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

This is a great illustration of collective phenomena. If you look closely, each dot is just moving around in a regular circle; but because the different circles are out of phase with each other, when you back away you see waves steadily moving across the screen. It's a simple demonstration of how large-scale, collective phenomena can emerge from very simple small-scale behavior. Things like this happen all over the place: water waves and sound waves, for example, work in basically the same way, with the small back-and-forth motions of individual molecules leading to compression patterns moving through the air. 

Originally from http://i.imgur.com/ckxfccq.gif , and found via Jane Shevtsov and W Younes.

Painless upgrading of R and bioconductor

Painless upgrading of R and bioconductor

I keep forgetting how to do this, so I thought I would write it down.

* Install new version of R
* Copy old library to new directory e.g. cp -R ~/Library/R/2.15   ~/Library/R/3.0
* Run R
* update.packages(checkBuilt=TRUE, ask=FALSE)
* source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
* biocLite(ask=FALSE)

This is interesting, researchers have found a new longer form of PTEN a tumour suppressor gene.

This is interesting, researchers have found a new longer form of PTEN a tumour suppressor gene.  They found that unlike the normal form of PTEN that is isolated within a cell this version can move to neighbouring cells.  They also showed that the longer version of PTEN helped reduced the size of tumours both in mice and in the petri dish.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/06/well-known-tumor-supressor-has-a-surprise-double-role-killing-cancer-cells/

thewirecutter.

thewirecutter.com is a nice sight that aims to give you a quick and easy way to find the best of different product categories e.g. TVs etc.
http://thewirecutter.com