When preparing images for publication, it is good practice to check how accessible they are for colour blind people. Using a simple bit of code, it is possible to check an image – or a whole figure – in ImageJ for accessibility. For example, Figure 1 from our recent paper. Originally looked like this: Using the script we can see how it appears to people with different types of colour blindness.

I recently finished An Essay on Science and Narcissism by Bruno Lemaitre. I found this book really insightful and thought I would write some notes about it here. The book was published in 2016 although I only just got around to reading it. You can grab a copy for free here.

Generating movie files for publication can be a bit tricky. We have a protocol for making them for microscopy data, which simplifies things. However, we recently got this question from a journal: How can we do this? What information is needed for movie files?

We have a new paper out. It’s about how chromosomes get shared during cell division. The paper in a nutshell In science-speak Misaligned chromosomes outside the exclusion zone become ensheathed in multiple layers of endomembranes. This event consigns the chromosome to missegregation and generates a micronucleus. In normal language Cells can make mistakes when they divide.

I found this great puzzle hidden in an app aimed at children. There are 300 lightbulbs in a row, labelled 1 to 300, each with an on/off switch. We count from 1 to 300 and flick the switches as follows: on “1” all lightbulbs are switched on. On “2” lightbulbs 2, 4, 6, 8 etc.

A colleague said to me “Everyone is running on fumes with Easter being so late this year.” Really? Is it late? I admit to being completely perplexed by this religious date and its movement around the calendar. I always feel like I am the last to know when it is, let alone whether it is early or late. Let’s have a look at what constitutes an early or a late Easter. The data are available here. This is a quick post with no code example (sorry).

I run two pi-holes on my home network (details here). The older of the two was in need of a refresh. Here are some notes on how I did a reinstall. For those that don’t know, a pi-hole is a simple ad-blocking solution. You can donate to the project here. Problem The pi-hole itself can be easily updated over ssh using pihole -up however the OS also needs occasional updating for security.

It is an annual event on quantixed to post the papers I have selected for what is now called MD9A8 (the module formerly known as MD997 Frontier Techniques and Research Skills in Biomedicine). Previous selections are grouped here.

A quick post about a puzzle called Wordle that is currently taking over the internet. It’s a mastermind-like game where the object is to guess an unknown 5-letter word. Puzzlers are encouraged to share their results after completing a puzzle. Here is an example for puzzle 192. So how do you know if your performance on today’s puzzle was any good? Why not benchmark your effort against the crowd?

This recent tweet made me chuckle. It does seem that many structural biology papers have a title that begins “The structural basis of…”. I took a quick PubMed survey to look at its popularity. First a search of "structural basis"[ti] AND "journal article"[pt] gives us the number of research papers with “structural basis” in the title. This plot of the number of papers with this title each year is levelling off.

As 2021 draws to a close, it’s time to check back in on a previous post. As a recap, Garmin Connect offered four challenges to run 3 x 505 km and 1 x 505 km, one in each of the four quarters of 2021. Completing all four would mean running 2021 km in 2021 . I used an R script to check my progress throughout the year (available here). Each quarter gave a set of results, the final set for the whole of 2021 is shown here.