Just released last week by the makers of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha is kind of like a search engine, calling itself a "computational knowledge engine," with the lofty goal as a "long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone."From their homepage you can link to a page showing examples of how to use it, but I was interested in seeing how much biology Wolfram Alpha knows, and I've got to say I'm impressed with

Ever find yourself trying to remember a series of steps you recently did in Linux? Try typing the command "history" at the command line (without the quotes). You'll see a long list of your most recently used commands.

For those of you writing abstracts that will get you to Hawaii this fall for IGES (due June 1) and ASHG (due June 2), just follow this template from Piled Higher and Deeper.Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

Nature Reviews Genetics just published an excellent paper on interaction analysis by Heather Cordell. This masterfully written review starts by defining interaction, then delving into strategies to statistically model it in human genetics studies.

If you're doing an analysis with variables that naturally vary on a continuous scale, like age or smoking pack-years, NEVER be tempted to categorize individuals into groups - there's nearly always a better approach that utilizes the full distribution of values. It may seem convenient for a particular analysis you're doing but you'll take an enormous hit in power and precision.

AAAS and the Food and Drug Law Institute (FDLI) are holding three 2-day meetings in Washington DC on personalized medicine, addressing the scientific discoveries, business models, and policy changes that are necessary to develop personalized treatments and diagnostics.

A tip of the hat to Lifehacker for pointing this out.Ever been nailed by a reviewer or a thesis committee for using too many acronyms without defining them well? There's an easy way built into MS Word to find and highlight all the acronyms in a document.

Jason Moore at the previously mentioned Epistasis Blog has begun compiling a list of 100 papers every grad student should read, broken down by discipline. Right now the list is in its infancy, but it's a good start. I'll post here when the list is updated again.100 Publications Every Graduate Student Should ReadUPDATE 2009-05-08: The list has grown substantially since yesterday.

Here's a paper in Nature Reviews Genetics highlighting two recently published methods for mapping regulatory sites. Most currently used procedures rely on ChIP, where you can only examine sites one protein at a time.

Last week I posted a short tutorial on how to merge datasets using R. R is a free and open-source statistical computing software and programming language (get R here). The only downside is a steeper learning curve because the documentation is sparse and often difficult to understand at first.

OpenHelix offers free access to a handful of their tutorials on genomics and bioinformatics resources, including the UCSC Genome Browser, Seattle SNPs, Genome Variation Server, and the VISTA Comparative Genomics tools.