It’s been a busy week, deadline-wise, but I did see a few cool things on the interwebs which seemed worth sharing:

Tarantulas molting, courtesy of my high school biology teacher and ExploraVision coach extraordinare, Mr. Stone (his blog is cool too).

Keeping with the nature theme, find the cuttlefish!. The octopus video is cool too. Thanks to my commute being a bit longer, I listen to Science Friday podcasts as well as Story Collider, which is a pretty cool Moth-meets-science storytelling podcast.

Sometimes papers use pretty strong words in their titles (see for more context). On that note, some letters from John Nash (see also) were recently declassified by the NSA wherein he seems to predict fundamentals of cryptography and computational complexity. In more Rivest news, he coded up the cryptosystem.

In sadder news (also not so recent now), De Bruijn passed away. I’ve started a bioinformatics project recently (maybe more like “started”) and DeBruijn graphs are a pretty useful tool for making sense of data from next-generation sequencing technologies. Here are some animations describing how Illumina and 454 sequencing work.

Maybe when it gets warmer I will put together a worm bin — I miss the curbside composting of Berkeley.

I get a lot of positive comments about this shirt, but Topatoco are discontinuing it. Speaking of potatoes, Lav has a nice post with some links to papers on the importance and history of potatoes.