Buttercups, Belfast, ME ift.tt/VxjdN8Q Buttercups in a field. An utterly common and banal flower, yet still beautiful all the same. ...

Buttercups, Belfast, ME ift.tt/roR9ez8  A wide spread of buttercups, threading through the stalks of taller grass around them....

Diatomaceous apples, Belfast, ME ift.tt/F2tlRMq Apple tree leaves spread with diatomaceous earth as an organic pesticide, giving them a patchy muddy look....

Diatomaceous apples, Belfast, ME ift.tt/gIMo6se Another view of spotty earthen apple leaves. I love the stiff curvaceous shapes they hold. ...

Red cover crop, Belfast, ME ift.tt/DsfM50l Red influorescences on part of the mixed cover in the fields. ...

Old red tractor, Belfast, ME ift.tt/x4lejCN  Old red tractor, now serving its final purpose in life as farmland decoration....

Old red tractor, Belfast, ME ift.tt/YeZGa49  Old red tractor from the front....

Old red tractor guts, Belfast, ME ift.tt/3Fr9ulK Mechanical guts of this old red tractor, the sort of pre-electronic systems that will never much be built again, any more than belt-driven factories will be. ...

Old red tractor wheel, Belfast, ME ift.tt/3wYlNMC  Wheel of the old red tractor, resting in soft surrounding grass....

Violets, Belfast, ME ift.tt/TwatyHi  Violets in the grass in Belfast....

I've learned @Benchling isn't letting academics use their API. I think it's a bad business decision: academic developers are most likely to experiment with extensions, build value-adding software, and spin out companies based on the platform. No free-to-play space, no App Store

Published today: "Studying pathogens degrades BLAST-based pathogen identification" (nature.com/articles/s4159…): an examination of a growing biosecurity risk from emergent dynamics in public databases, and how purpose-designed tools beat BLAST in identifying dangerous pathogens.

New blog post: "BLAST vs. custom tools for pathogen identification" jakebeal.blogspot.com/2023/04/blast-…

New blog post: BLAST vs. custom tools for pathogen identification dlvr.it/Slw7CG

New article just published: "Functional Synthetic Biology", in Synthetic Biology , lays out a roadmap for shifting to more fluent and function-centric means of collaborating in biological engineering. doi.org/10.1093/synbio…

Today's moment of bureaucratic zen: an online publisher that uses article IDs instead of page numbers is concerned that that citations in our proof have article IDs instead of page numbers. 🤦

This panel at #SynBioBeta2023 will discuss emerging biorisks associated with technology advances and practical approaches for reducing these risks. synbiobeta.com Jaime Yassif Jake Beal Sophie Peresson Dr. Becky Mackelprang DNA Script EBRC

Some cool looking work from CSSB Lab here - I'm particularly enjoying seeing it because these types of spatial computation logic are what I was working on when I first got sucked into synbio 15 years ago.

New blog post: How do you describe genetic construction plans? dlvr.it/Sypdz2

I am done with Twitter / X, and have moved to bsky.app/profile/jakebe…