links for 2009-04-16

Just feeds my confirmation bias. Online and print are such great complements to each other…

"within five months of losing cross-promotion from the newspaper, Taloussanomat.fi‘s unique users and page views were down 22 percent and 11 percent respectively"

"What's necessary, however, is that everyone does their job – and that includes the reader. Since we've lost all of the pre-publishing ratchets and filters, it's up to the online viewer to be more aware, more discriminating, and – this is crucial – more vocal, once information is published. It's critical that we don't just read new media: We need to reflect, interact, respond. We need to be the new sources of friction, adding our voices to the fabric of published information. That's the only way to keep media healthy – as a team sport."

Cool!

"One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can't go that way, it's toward the road."

Hehehe. I so have a few stories around this topic.

Really cool technique for coupling enzymatics with electronics to make a label-free sequencing system.

"The natural α-hemolysin nanopore alone is not capable of DNA sequencing. Oxford Nanopore is using protein engineering techniques to adapt the nanopore for the detection of DNA bases." [via Zoe McDougall]

"Harvard scientists have cleared a key hurdle in the creation of synthetic life, assembling a cell’s critical protein-making machinery in an advance with both practical, industrial applications and that advances the basic understanding of life’s workings."