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This evening, Beto and I went to Chiluca and focused on doing a lot of laps in the overhanging 20 m long cave. We need to develop more endurance for climbing the new routes at Tepozotlán!

Mexico has launched a race-based genome project to determine if a genetic basis exists for its growing health crisis. The goal is to glean insights into genetic differences, believed to be unique to its population, that may play a key role in chronic diseases like asthma, diabetes and hypertension.

Several life sciences firms, including Applied Biosystems (ABI) of Foster City, California, Somers, NY-based IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences and Affymetrix of Santa Clara, California, will assist the government in sequencing, genotyping and data analysis. The Instituto Nacional de Medicina Genomica (National Genomic Medicine Institute of Mexico, or INMEGEN) will manage the resulting ‘Mexican HapMap’. The head of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, Francis Collins, who led the international public consortium that deciphered the human genetic code, will provide unpaid advice to INMEGEN on scientific and ethical issues.

According to Gerardo Jimenez, director of INMEGEN and the new collaboration, INMEGEN will begin by sampling individuals in six remote regions of Mexico to construct a consensus genetic map that fits the entire Mexican mestizo population, a mixture of Europeans (mainly Spaniards) and Indians. The first objective is to determine if every block of nucleic acid sequence will be alike for all the Mexican groups. “My own prediction”, says Jimenez, “is that we are not going to find huge differences”…

news@nature.com: Mexico launches bold genome project

A current look at the field of bioinformatics will reveal that it is a field that is largely dominated by the Linux operating system, as well as by programming languages such as Perl, Python, and Java. Windows and its associated native application development platforms are not in widespread use among present-day bioinformatics practitioners. In fact, the usage of Linux and other open source technologies will likely remain the dominant platforms upon which most novel and/or large-scale bioinformatics research is conducted. Scientific computing of all types has deep-seated roots in Unix and its derivatives, and as a result is very much dependent on code bases that are written with *nix platforms in mind. Many scientific applications are written for High Performance Computing (HPC) architectures or distributed computing environments, and such applications will often need to be run for lengthy periods of time, thus making OS stability an important factor. While Windows operating systems have made inroads in the server markets, the HPC market is still devoid of most Microsoft-based products. Practical issues such as these aside, however, most bioinformatics practitioners are highly in favor of open source ideologies and technologies, since the free exchange of ideas is valued as one of the fundamental building blocks upon which scientific progress is based…

SYS-CON Australia: Applicability of the .NET Platform to Bioinformatics Research

We spent the whole morning doing only a couple of routes in the 5.10-5.11 range and trying to link some long boulder problems. Clarita and Juanito were also there and shared some very fun moments with us.

I arrived home by 5 p.m. and still had some energy for running a few kilometers. I called Fer to know how she was from her injuries. She was doing the “family thing” (which included buying a pair of running shoes) and still had a little bit of pain in her legs. We agreed to leave it for tomorrow.

Then I went alone for a nice 11 km run with a beautiful sunset in the mountain horizon…

Despite her pain and exhaustion, she really enjoyed the route (because of the beautiful landscape) and promised to buy appropriate shoes for running in that kind of terrain.

We finally arrived to the car and came to my home to eat a nice lunch with my mom. We didn’t had breakfast, so we were very happy to finally eat something…

It’s not over till it’s over, and even as they near the summit the team knows that getting to the top is only halfway to success.

Though the Eiger has an aura of the absolute, it seems to bend this morning as John Harlin III and Robert and Daniela Jasper cruise upward on their second day on the North Face, making better time than expected. For weeks potential climbers have been waiting for the right conditions, but now the mountain is crowded; behind is not just one German team, but now a second, a guide-client combination…

Richard Bangs Adventures from Yahoo! News: The Son Also Rises: Success on the Eiger

The journey to the summit starts with a phone call, and by the end of the day the climbers are high on the Eiger’s North Face, bivouacked in for the cold night ahead.

While sitting in the quiet Billiard Room of the Bellevue des Alpes hotel, John Harlin III gets a call on his cell phone. It is his climbing partner Robert Jasper calling to announce that the climb will start tomorrow. The weather is provisionally merciful, cold enough to slow down the ice falls for the next couple of days and yet clear. In three days another front is predicted to roll in…

Richard Bangs Adventures from Yahoo! News: And Now the Hard Part

Mountain climbing is not just a sport for “hard men” – there are hard women, too, both on the wall and on the ground.

Like a massive muddy wave frozen in the midst of a squall, the Eiger seems about to crash down upon us at its base. But then clouds mushroom in, it begins to snow and the face is veiled. The storm is upon us and the climb hangs.

Mountaineers are dragon-seekers, bent on improbable deeds. But peel back the large codes of conduct, chip the granite faces, and you find souls chockfull of qualms and romantic terrors. Though John Harlin III has been waiting his whole life for this moment, he is waiting still until conditions are just right. There is a constant tension here between the cult of daring and obligation to family; between the blistering attraction to the flame of risk and the want for well-being and safety…

Richard Bangs Adventures from Yahoo! News: Mountain Men and Mountain Women

John Harlin III spent a lifetime trying to live up to the legend of his father’s passion. Now it’s his turn on the Eiger.

An enormous eddy of warm air has slipped into the Jungfrau region in the Swiss Alps. The bane of climbers on the Eiger, a foehn, is coming in. Like a chinook, it is a coil of air that thaws ice and snow and triggers avalanches. Worse, directly after a foehn often follows a big chill that varnishes rock walls with a thin sheen of ice that neither ice axe nor piton can grip. That thin ice layer is called verglas. Verglas, John Harlin III repeats in almost mantra-like manner, is not something he wants to face on the North Face of the Eiger.

And so he waits…

Richard Bangs Adventures from Yahoo! News: School of Hard Rock

In the shadow of the most notorious rock wall in the Swiss Alps, John Harlin III contemplates the climb of his life – the one that claimed his father 40 years ago.

One rope length from the White Spider, the last great defiance on the mountain wall that is one of the world’s deadliest, the 7 mm fixed line broke. John Harlin II, the first American to climb the legendary North Face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps four years earlier, fell 4,000 feet into the void.

A short time later his nine-year-old son, Johnny, heard the news from his sobbing mother. It was news he couldn’t fathom. His father was among the world’s greatest climbers, a pioneer of straight-up routes, a man almost mythically at home in the vertical world.

That was 40 years ago…

Richard Bangs Adventures from Yahoo! News: Challenging the Man-Eating Mountain