Our new bioinformatics and molecular evolution lab website is now up and running and you can see it at http://bioinf.nuim.ie

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Just posted this on ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/James_Mcinerney/blog/29011_Goods-thinking_versus_Tree-thinking

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Linus Pauling was one of the most curious of Nobel prize winners.  Along with Marie Curie he is one of only two people to have won Nobel prizes in two different categories - in Pauling’s case, these were Chemistry and Peace.  He is the only person, so far, to have won two unshared Nobel prizes. […]

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Now and again a scientist comes along who was just as interesting away from science as they were as a a scientist.
Marie Curie surely fits this description.
She won her first Nobel prize along with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel in 1903 and this prize was in Physics.  Her second Nobel prize she won on […]

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It’s quite a shame that we don’t know more scientists by name.  However, unlike pop-stars, politicians and even economists, we know very few scientists by name.  The ones we tend to know are the ones that massively changed how we view the world.  Such is the extent of the contribution that must be made by […]

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I have just arrived back from the annual meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE 2011) in Kyoto, Japan.  This was a fantastic meeting with a huge number of speakers and posters.
Unfortunately, in large part due to the Tsunami in March of this year, the number of attended of the meeting was […]

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So, the first hundred days are upon us and indeed it would not be possible to imagine a more difficult time to come into government.  The larger party - Fine Gael - campaigned on the basis of a “five-point plan”, so I thought I would review this plan and see how the election promises match […]

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It is becoming more commonplace - every few months we are hearing about a new bacterium or virus that is threatening humanity.  They seem to pop up all the time with scientists appearing on TV looking worried, with politicians deciding to impose restrictions on the movement of humans or food or animals or whatever.
It seems […]

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In the past couple of weeks there have been reports of a new deadly strain of E. coli that has caused more than 2,000 illnesses in Europe and it seems it has now moved to the US.
I have a few things to say about it.
First of all, it is a pretty regular E. coli.  It […]

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In 2012 I, along with three other Irish academics will organise one of the largest molecular evolution conferences in the world that year.  There will probably only be one other meeting that is bigger than it in that year.
We will bring 1,300 delegates to the conference and probably about 200 of them will bring a […]

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