www.arareko.net

Jean-Christophe Lafaille, one of France’s greatest modern climbers, is now believed dead high on the slopes of Makalu, where he was attempting the peak’s first winter ascent completely solo. Lafaille last communicated with his wife, Katia, via satellite phone on Thursday, January 26, from a camp at around 7,600 meters on the 8,481-meter peak. He said that he planned to head for the summit on Friday morning. With no word from her husband over the weekend, Katia Lafaille requested an aerial survey of the peak, and French media are reporting today that a helicopter flew to basecamp, where Lafaille’s three Nepalese helpers said they had heard nothing from the climber. The helicopter crew was able to view Lafaille’s route to around 7,400 meters and spotted his tent but saw no sign of life. It is now believed Lafaille perished somewhere between this camp and the summit, likely in a crevasse fall; it’s impossible to say if he reached the top first.

Lafaille has been making headlines in French climbing since the 1980s. In 1989, he free soloed Privilége du Serpent (5.13a) at Ceüse, France. He also soloed numerous hard routes in the Alps and made some extraordinary link-ups of Alpine north faces. Lafaille had climbed 11 of the 14 8,000-meter peaks, including a solo ascent of Shishapangma in mid-December of 2004.

Source: Climbing Magazine

Stephen Koch, Dean Potter and Marko Prezelj forged a massive link-up from the lowest cliff at the base of Cerro Torre’s eastern flank to the summit of the Patagonian spire. On January 20, the trio started up El Mochito, a 1,000-foot cliff that tops out below the start of Cerro Torre’s normal Southeast Ridge route, then continued up the 1,600-foot Southwest Pillar (Anker-Piola Route) of El Mocho, the flat-topped stump east of Cerro Torre. From there, they traversed a beautiful snow and ice arête to gain the Col of Patience at the base of the Southeast Ridge (Compressor Route) and fired this to the summit. The entire link-up gained more than 6,600 vertical feet and required about 40 hours, with one short rest stop to make soup and drinks.

Source: Climbing Magazine

HORDES OF GREEN, SUB-MICROSCOPIC BALLOONS FLOAT in a watery mixture in Jack Szostak’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School. They come in a variety of shapes: spheres, blimps, worms. And as Szostak examines magnified images of them, he can’t help but notice a striking resemblance to bacterial ecosystems, pulsing with that fetid, yet undeniable quality that has eluded definition for generations – life…

The Scientist: Is This Life?

Around Easter last year, I finished writing the second edition of Advanced Perl Programming, a task that had been four years in the making. The aim of this new edition was to reflect the way that Perl programming had changed since the first edition. Much of what Sriram wrote in the original edition was still true, but to be honest, not too much of it was useful anymore–the Perl world has changed dramatically since the original publication…

Perl.com: More Advancements in Perl Programming

The weather did its thing also… The cold front is still above us and it started to rain in the middle of the session, but that didn’t matter to us, we just kept bouldering .

I could finally send a long standing project of mine: sit start, long dyno to an overhanging sideway sloper, get feet high, bear-hug a small roof, change hand to a mono-crimp, dyno to a good hold and exit. It may be V5, but awaits some repeats to be grade-solid .

We had 3 amazing hours of climbing until it got dark and our fingers completely numb. We began planning an upcoming visit to Aculco…

En Patagonia, además del Fitz Roy y del Cerro Torre, que han marcado hitos en el montañismo mundial, también hay numerosas paredes por escalar, sin tantos problemas como los grandes de la región pero con la misma intensidad. Una de ellas son las Torres del Brujo y un grupo de tres mexicanos abrieron una nueva ruta de 420 metros…

UNAM Montañismo y Exploración: Las Torres del Brujo

GOT some public speaking to do? Here is a tip to keep stress at bay: have sex beforehand. But make sure it’s penetrative sex – the magic vanishes if you pursue other forms of sexual gratification…

New Scientist: Sex before stressful events keeps you calm

The American Society of Microbiology is doing Video PodCasts! If that isn’t cool, I don’t what is.

I’m really glad to see the microbiologists taking the lead in reaching out the public with cool new technology…

Discovering biology in a digital world: Time for iMicrobe?

I am pleased to announce the release of a new website for BioPerl. The site is based on the mediawiki software that was developed for the wikipedia project. We intend the site to be a place for community input on documentation and design for the BioPerl project. There is also a fair amount of documentation started surrounding bioinformatics tools and techniques applicable to using BioPerl and some of the authors who created these resources.

The website continues to be at the URL www.bioperl.org. The DNS updates may take up to 24 hours to reach everyone.

The initial content of the site is result of the work of myself, Mauricio Herrera Cuadra, Brian Osborne, and Torsten Seemann. We encourage you to contribute to the site’s content by signing up for an account.

There are several guides for style of the site. One in particular is how to link to Modules which can contain additional information from the POD bioperl.org/wiki/Module:Bio::SeqIO.

You’ll notice that many of the paths have changed but the DIST and SRC continues to be available at bioperl.org/DIST and bioperl.org/SRC. The HOWTOs are now available from bioperl.org/wiki/HOWTOs (although we should be forwarding the old URL links to the correct place).

The FAQ is available at bioperl.org/wiki/FAQ and I encourage you to add your questions to it so they can be properly archived and addressed.

We also have initiated a News site for Bioperl for posting announcements regarding development and software. I would like to see if there are volunteers to post weekly or monthly summaries of mailing list traffic and development. www.bioperl.org/news/.

Jason Stajich on behalf of Mauricio Herrera Cuadra, Brian Osborne, Torsten Seemann.

Genetic algorithms are algorithms that model natural selection – sort of – to help solve search and optimization problems. They were originally mooted by John Holland at the University of Michigan back in the 70s, and arose out of earlier studies of cellular automata (in the in-silico sense).

In a nutshell, the idea is that we start off with a “gene pool” of randomly generated solutions (note that “solution” in this context doesn’t mean the right answer, just an answer) to a particular problem. As they were randomly generated, these solutions will no doubt be fairly crap. We assess their crapness with something called a fitness function, which takes a solution as input and outputs a score, where the higher the score the better the solution. After assessing all of the solutions we take the ones with the highest fitness scores and “breed” them to produce the next generation of the gene pool. Occasionally a solution is “mutated” and tweaked in some way at random. The whole process is then repeated. Over time the overall fitness of the gene pool starts to improve until eventually one of the solutions in the genepool has a high enough fitness to be a real, practical solution to whatever our problem is…

Flags and Lollipops: Genetic Algorithms: A Quick Tutorial