There are a lot of biologists out there with physics and engineering envy, and it shows in the occasional awkward and sometimes downright ridiculous borrowing of terminology.

Take the term 'integrated circuit' for example. The term refers to putting the components of an electrical circuit on a chip, made of the same material as the circuit components. The reason is this:

For your Tuesday morning meditation:  what do you get when you cross the Mandelbrot set with Eastern religion? Buddhabrot:



Melinda Green made this amazing picture, has more on her website, plus links to more creations and instructions for making your own.

I stumbled on this amazing set of videos: physics legend Hans Bethe giving lectures on theoretical physics to his retirement community neighbors.

It's not as crazy as it sounds - a running joke around Ithaca (where I grew up and where Bethe's university, Cornell, is located) is that one of the top physics departments in the US is at the Kendal retirement community in Ithaca. In spite of the miserable weather, a large number of Cornell professors choose to retire there.

Few people can lecture coherently on quantum theory at age 93 (Bethe's age when he gave these lectures in 1999). Hans Bethe was incredible.

Sigh - I was going to recommend this piece about recent human genome research in Scientific American, by a leading researcher in comparative genomics, Katherine Pollard, until I came to the last paragraph:

Experimental and computational studies now under way in thousands of labs around the world promise to elucidate what is going on in the 98.5 percent of our genome that does not code for proteins. It is looking less and less like junk every day.

Anyone, especially a genome scientist, who implies that most of our genome is packed full of functional sequences should back that up with some specifics, starting with answers to these two questions:

Drs. Fred Cross and Eric Siggia have produced a steady stream of outstanding systems-level studies of one of the most important biological oscillators: the cell division cycle. I'll have more later today on their fascinating new paper on phase-locking the cell cycle, but in the mean time, check out their recent methods paper, which has some great movies of live-imaged yeast cells doing various cell cycle tricks, visualized with fluorescent proteins:

Human alcoholic tendencies go way back, as described in one of the most interesting paragraphs I've ever read in a scientific paper: