Questioning economic growth

Questioning economic growth

Our global economy must operate within planetary limits to promote stability, resilience and wellbeing, not rising GDP, argues Peter Victor.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7322/full/468370a.html

First, there is mounting evidence that this growth is largely unrelated to measures of happiness. Second, in recent decades, increasing inequality has accompanied
much of this growth, leading to problems ranging from poor public health to social unrest. Third, the prospects for real improvement in the developing world are likely to be diminished if developed countries continue to encroach on more ecological space.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now accepting grant proposals for Round 6 of Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative to encourage innovative and unconventional global health solutions. Applicants can be at any experience level, in any discipline, and from any organization, including colleges and universities, government laboratories, research institutions, non-profit organizations and for profit companies.

Grant proposals are being accepted online until November 2, 2010 on the following topics:

New! The Poliovirus Endgame: Create Ways to Accelerate, Sustain and Monitor Eradication
New! Create the Next Generation of Sanitation Technologies
New! Design New Approaches to Cure HIV Infection
Create New Technologies to improve the Health of Mothers and Newborns
Create Low-Cost Cell Phone-Based Applications for Priority Global Health Diseases

Initial grants will be US $100,000 each, and projects showing promise will have the opportunity to receive additional funding of up to US $1 million. Full descriptions of the new topics and application instructions are available at: http://www.grandchallenges.org/Pages/default.aspx

Sequencing tools for genomes (<500M)

RATT: rapid annotation transfer tool aka Big Brother Annotator

RATT is software to transfer annotation from a reference (annotated) genome to an unannotated query genome.

It was first developed to transfer annotations between different genome assembly versions. However, can also transfer annotations between strains and even different species, like Plasmodium chabaudi onto P. berghei or Salmonella enterica onto Salmonella virchow. RATT is able to transfer any entries present on a reference sequence, such as the systematic id or an annotator’s notes; such information would be lost in a de novo annotation. Furthermore, RATT checks whether gene models have changed between the two sequences and can correct changed start and stop codons, or frameshifts.

Please visit the http://ratt.sourceforge.net page for examples.

Algorithm based automatic contiguation of assembled sequences (ABACAS)

ABACAS is intended to rapidly contiguate (align, order, orientate) , visualize and design primers to close gaps on shotgun assembled contigs based on a reference sequence. It uses MUMmer to find alignment positions and identify syntenies of assembly contigs against the reference. The output is then processed to generate a pseudomolecule taking overlaping contigs and gaps in to account. MUMmer’s alignment generating programs, Nucmer and Promer are used followed by the ‘delta-filter’ utility function. Users could also run tblastx on contigs that are not used to generate the pseudomolecule.

abacas.pl -r -q -p [Options]

IMAGE (Iteratively Mapping and Assembly for Gap Elimination) is a top secret pipeline to improve existing capillary/454 genome assembly using Illumina reads. But it is not a secret any more.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/image2/

http://ratt.sourceforge.net

http://icorn.sourceforge.net

http://abacas.sourceforge.net/

Solving urgent climate problems with bio-synthetic engineering

Solving emerging problems by bio-synthetic engineering. Craig Venter tries to make synthetic organisms to make biofuel.

Craig Venter: On the verge of creating synthetic life

This will not likely solve the problem unfortunately. Something must be done fundamentally to shift the principle of economic growth. But blindly blaming and denying science and technology is equally stupid. We should try to shrive to be better and not to be illogical morons.

Leishmania donovani: killer parasites among neglected poor people. Can we help people when a local gorverment does not care them?

Most of the people have never heard about Leishmania donovani. I am sure you know about malaria.  Leishmaniasis is similar to malaria but it is more deadly. Once you are infected with Leishmania donovani and they over come your immune system, you will face certain death unless treated properly. Unfortunately available drugs are very toxic and they can kill ~5% of patients.

Cigarettes may cause sexual impotence due to decreased blood flow to the penis.

This can prevent you from having an erection. People in University of Waterloo did some research of the effectiveness of the health warning of smoking on a package, and found it makes some people stop smoking. You can see some example down below. Canada and Qubec have comprehensive health care systems so they do not want to waste tax money to treat diseases related to smoking. Quebec is a part of Canada but I think they have their own health care system. A package in Japan and probably in USA does not carry such a warning.