Anthropology as a Subversive Art: A Review of Through These Eyes

This is a review of the film Through These Eyes , by Charles Laird. The film explores the historical moment during the Cold War in which the National Science Foundation funded educational curricula and programs to advance education in the sciences. Through These Eyes focuses on the history of one course of study as a part of these programs, a year-long course called "Man, a Course of Study" that presented fifth-grade students with materials designed to have them explore what it means to be a human being, by combining biology, primatology, and some anthropology.     

These Are Not the K-mers You Are Looking For: Efficient Online K-mer Counting Using a Probabilistic Data Structure

K-mer abundance analysis is widely used for many purposes in nucleotide sequence analysis, including data preprocessing for de novo assembly, repeat detection, and sequencing coverage estimation. We present the khmer software package for fast and memory efficient online counting of k-mers in sequencing data sets. Unlike previous methods based on data structures such as hash tables, suffix arrays, and trie structures, khmer relies entirely on a simple probabilistic data structure, a Count-Min Sketch. The Count-Min Sketch permits online updating and retrieval of k-mer counts in memory which is necessary to support online k-mer analysis algorithms. On sparse data sets this data structure is considerably more memory efficient than any exact data structure. In exchange, the use of a Count-Min Sketch introduces a systematic overcount for k-mers; moreover, only the counts, and not the k-mers, are stored. Here we analyze the speed, the memory usage, and the miscount rate of khmer for generating k-mer frequency distributions and retrieving k-mer counts for individual k-mers. We also compare the performance of khmer to several other k-mer counting packages, including Tallymer, Jellyfish, BFCounter, DSK, KMC, Turtle and KAnalyze. Finally, we examine the effectiveness of profiling sequencing error, k-mer abundance trimming, and digital normalization of reads in the context of high khmer false positive rates. khmer is implemented in C++ wrapped in a Python interface, offers a tested and robust API, and is freely available under the BSD license at github.com/ged-lab/khmer.     

Still Quiet After All These Years

Some 14?years ago, I published an article in which I identified a prime site for bioethicists to ply their trade: medical responses to requests for hormonal and surgical interventions aimed at facilitating transgendered people??s transition to their desired genders. Deep issues about the impact of biotechnologies and health care practices on central aspects of our conceptual system, I argued, were raised by how doctors understood and responded to people seeking medical assistance in changing their gender, and there were obviously significant issues of regulation involved as well. Yet mainstream bioethics was conspicuous by its relative absence from the discussion. Here, I return to the matter and find that, while the conceptual issues are just as profound and their connection to health care practice and policy just as intimate, even as transgender issues have become much more socially visible, bioethical engagement with gender reassignment has increased only slightly. I set the little movement that has occurred against the backdrop of the situation as I saw it in 1998 and conclude, once again, by trying to make the bait for bioethicists inviting.     

米哈你的眼睛

“米哈”组织下的导盲犬作为盲人的眼睛在加拿大魁北克几乎成了传奇,它们在普通的家庭寄养长大,从一开始就肩负着重要使命,并为了种种伟大的目标而默默努力……     

Eyes without a ribbon

Eye and ear employ specialized glutamatergic synapses that feature an elaborate electron‐dense projection—the synaptic ribbon. Despite major efforts, the function of the synaptic ribbon has remained enigmatic, because its brick‐stone‐like core‐component RIBEYE has remained hard to crack genetically. In an elegant study, Maxeiner et al ( 2016 ) genetically deleted RIBEYE in mice. This abolished retinal ribbons and impaired exocytosis at the presynaptic active zone of bipolar cells.     

Through A Daughter's Eyes

After a scientist dies, his second life begins—he begins to live in what he has done, and in his pupils.