There’s a nice article at the Torque Report about the Toyota iQ,  which hits the road next fall.  In a bit of national pride,  Toyota based the design on the ‘J-Factor’,  “that aspect of Japanese originality and quality that creates modern, attractive, and globally appealing products from the apparent disharmony and contradictory nature of its original components.”  Toyota developed six major technical innovations to develop a car less than 3 meters with great drivability and comfortable seating for three adults and a child.

I’ve long noticed the difference in priorities between US and Japanese car manufacturers.  The Corolla and Civic were designed by people who are passionate about small cars — they’re small on the outside but big on the inside.  The Chevy Cobalt,  on the other hand,  seems to be designed by people who think that driving a small car is like wearing a hair shirt,  and even likable vehicles like the Dodge Caliber and  Buick Lacrosse seem quite puffy:  oddly small on the outside for the large exterior.

With gas at $3.40 a gallon and heading up,  we can only hope that American carmakers will focus innovation on fuel efficiency and appealing small cars rather than gimmicks such as OnStar and ultrasonic sensors to keep you from mashing the back wall of your garage with an oversized vehicle.

It looked like a winter wonderland when I woke up in Brooktondale this morning,  about 1000 feet above the lake.  I found that the ice had melted in Ithaca,  where I drove to do some business.  I drove up route 13  around 10 am,  on the stretch between Stewart Park and the Mall,  which cuts a diagonal up the Cayuga Lake Valley with sweeping vistas of Ithaca and the Lake.  I looked across the lake to the other side of the lake,  and noticed that above a certain altitude the trees were silvery — they were still covered with ice.  I rounded the bend at the end of the straight segment of the road and suddenly the trees around me were covered with ice as well.

One thing I like about the Ithaca area is the variation of microclimates:  it can be raining downtown but snowing at Cornell.  Downtown gardeners appreciate being able to grow plants that would otherwise need to be a few hundred miles south to grow;  the microclimates on the slopes of the finger lakes are essential for our growing wine industry.

Our new web site, a collection of interactive 3-d polyhedra based on the canvas element and AJAX has just gone live.

It’s a really fun site that shows what can be done with Javascript in 2006. It turns out that Canvas performance is good enough in Firefox, Safari and Opera that simple 3-d rendering can be done in the browser. Unfortunately, it may be too late for Microsoft to add canvas support to IE, but the folks of Google have created a library that adds canvas support to Internet Explorer. Thanks to this, polyhedra.org works on IE, even if it is a little poky.

DNA, the long-term carrier of genetic information, may be a bit more glamorous, but RNA plays so many roles in the cell that it makes DNA look boring. An “RNA World” was envisioned as early as 1962, a stage early in the evolution of life where RNA played the role of both enzyme and genetic carrier. In the just few years, scientists have discovered that the critical sites of the ribosome, the component of the cell that converts an RNA sequence into a protein, is composed of RNA. The RNA World, describes the latest research on the roles RNA plays in life today, demonstrating the tremendous versatility of the molecule. Although much of the picture is murky (How was RNA synthesized in prebiotic conditions? How could RNA have been kept stable enough to be a genetic carrier?), the “RNA World” is more plausable than ever.

With 25 chapters written by more than 60 authors, the third edition is completely revised from the second. Although the first third of the book is largely speculative, most of it is entirely practical, focused on recent discoveries on the roles RNA plays in modern life. Although speculation on the RNA World began with the discovery that RNA plays many roles in protein synthesis, such as messenger RNA, transfer RNA, and in the ribosome, the research described in this book shows that RNA is central to gene regulation in many ways, such as the splicing of introns, the stabilization of chromosomes, and that it plays a role in the generation of most “junk” DNA.

is a fun and fascinating trip for anyone who’s comfortable with the language of molecular biology.
Title: RNA World: the nature of modern RNA suggests a prebiotic RNA

Edition: 3rd
Editors: Raymond F. Gesteland, Thomas R. Cech, John F. Atkins

Published: 2006, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

Pages: 768
ISBN: 0-87969-793-3