Farewell, Unit 16. Like many projects, Unit 16 was a casualty of the pandemic. We had a great run (started Unit 15 in 2009, continued in a new location in 2018, up to sixteen active members at our pea…

After more than five years in commercial development, Spiral Genetics has released version 7 of our BioGraph genomic analysis platform. It’s now free for academic use and the full source is up on GitH…

Know thyself. The Human Genome Project formally began in 1990 and was declared complete in April 2003. After thirteen years and billions of dollars, researchers produced a sequence of more than 3 bill…

I’ve seen many fascinating things under the scanning electron microscope. Pollen, various crystals, diatoms, and even viral particles. But nothing could have prepared me for the Fall of 2019, when I d…

…from your friendly neighborhood bug (~500x).

Aligning Milly’s electron beam is tricky business. It’s a process involving hours (or even days!) of pain and uncertainty that might, just possibly, result in a better microscope imaging experience. T…

‘cause a SEM party got diatoms.

Enjoy some random pollen samples.

Yak shaving: Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.—Wiktionary I didn’t realize just how lucky I was …

As the manifesto says: If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it. But you don’t truly appreciate how much you own until you need to move it. Moving our nine-year-old hackerspace turned out to be the major…