Kyle MacLea

@MuseumCommodore I have the hacked version where they took GGS and changed the artwork and sprites to look more like SMB. Also has a way to give you unlimited lives.

It started as a quick cash-in on the Mario craze but became a C64 cult classic! Rainbow Arts’ cheeky UK box art taunted, “The brothers are history!” — and Nintendo noticed. After the May 1987 release (C64 original first), they sent a strongly worded complaint detailing the similarities to Super Mario Bros. No full lawsuit, but an out-of-court settlement followed: the game was yanked from stores almost immediately. The UK physical copies are now ultra-rare collector’s items, yet piracy made sure the game survived and thrived! Legendary C64 composer Chris Hülsbeck (who later scored Turrican) created the music for the game; some say it made the game the mega hit it was. It certainly helped! But here is the question we need to answer: Mario Bros vs Giana Sisters, which did you prefer? Share your answer below👇

@FloppyDeepDive I have 4 or 5, different styles

They called them storage cases. To us? They were treasure chests. Cracked corners. Broken latches. Lost lids. And if you were lucky… the blue one with the handle. Tell me if you still have yours. #Commodore64 #RetroComputing #GenX #80s #c64reposts

@markowenmartin The Hyperion Cantos was a revelation. RIP.

Sad to hear of Dan Simmons passing away. His novels and stories were a part of my life. Especially these two *very* different vampire novels. As a character said in COTN: “I wish you dreamless sleeps.” Rest easy, Mr. Simmons, and thank you for your stories.

The cover of the Lancet. It says it all.

The 2026 elections may not come down to Democrats vs. Republicans. It may be about whether we remain a democracy or move to an authoritarian society. We cannot allow Trump and his friends to stop a free and fair election. Fight back.

Something I bought from the UK: a Rosalind Franklin mini-fig, complete with Photo 51. I am super fond of it. #HistoryOfScience #DNA

@markowenmartin That is AWESOME.

@FloppyDeepDive Anybody still have a disk notcher? I tried to find one unsuccessfully when I set up my C64 last year.

If you owned a Commodore 64 in the 80s, you might remember this! With only 664 blocks available, we often found ourselves needing more space, so we notched our floppies. Did you notch your disk, or were you too afraid to take the risk? #c64 #commodore #floppydisk #retrogaming

@mdrejhon AMAZING!

I had no modem. I learned 100% from books and magazines. I read Jim Butterfield's books and "Mapping The Commodore 64" and I had a subscription to COMPUTE! Gazette. By 1991, I typed-in SuperMon 64 from the magazined & then programmed a full video game in 100% 6502/6510 opcodes.

40 years ago on a Commodore 64, I typed this command to save my first BASIC program to floppy disk. SAVE "COMIC PAGES", 8 40 years - February 1986 - February 2026 Happy 40th birthday to the start of my software development career. Thanks mom & dad for the C64!

Check out our latest work! JERBOA, a toolkit for making genome-wide genetics work in non-model bacteria. blog.cultivarium.org/p/so-youve-seq…

@markowenmartin For everything a season…. And for you time to metamorphose! 🦋 💪

It looks like little interest this semester and summer from students to work in my lab (I am becoming an academic ghost?). That's okay; I want students to pursue their own interests. Besides, I need to roll up MY sleeves and become that independent researcher I dream of being.

@naturepoker1 Beautiful!

Sorting through and charting out some archaeal genomes for this year's study targets in #julialang. All the plots and output gets directly rendered in repl (UnicodePlots + sixel render), no need for bulky IDEs. Syntax highlight and completion built in. I can do this on my phone.

This paper is wild. After 3 rounds of directed evolution, they converted a DNA polymerase into an enzyme that can do: - RNA synthesis - Reverse transcription - Synthesis of "unnatural" nucleotides - Synthesis of DNA-RNA chimeras One of the best papers I’ve read recently. For context: In nature, it is DNA polymerase that takes a DNA sequence as a template and then copies it. These enzymes are crucial in replicating the genome for cell division, and they are EXTREMELY specific for DNA over RNA. This is key because RNA nucleotides are present in the cell at concentrations ~100x higher than DNA nucleotides, so the enzyme has evolved clever strategies to select one over the other. RNA polymerases, for comparison, are the enzymes that take a DNA sequence as template and then convert it into RNA. They are involved in gene expression, for example. To convert a DNA polymerase into an RNA polymerase (and all the other functions I mentioned earlier), the authors did a fairly straightforward directed evolution experiment. First, they took four DNA polymerase enzymes belonging to various archaea. These DNA polymerases don’t check for DNA vs. RNA as stringently as other types of cells, so they’re a good starting point to evolve RNA polymerases. The authors inserted some targeted mutations into these enzymes, based on known mutations in the literature. For example, they swapped the amino acid at position 409 for a smaller amino acid, thus removing a “gate” that keeps RNA building blocks from entering the enzyme. Next, they took the four genes encoding these DNA polymerases and cut them up into 12 segments each. They randomly stitched these 12 segments together — from the four different genes — to build millions of unique variants. Each shuffled gene was inserted into an E. coli cell. Then, they grew up these cells (each carrying a unique polymerase) and put them into microfluidic droplets. A device isolates each droplet, lyses the cell open, and releases the polymerase. The droplet also contains RNA building blocks and a DNA template, encoding a fluorescent reporter. If the polymerase begins synthesizing RNA, it will produce a detectable signal. They screened about 100 million droplets in 10 hours of work, searching for those with a signal. For each well that yields a fluorescent signal, the researchers isolated the DNA and sequenced it to figure out which polymerase it was. They repeated this 3x times, finally isolating a really excellent RNA polymerase variant which they called "C28." C28 has 39 mutations compared to the wildtype enzymes. It incorporates about 3.3 nucleotides of RNA per second, with 99.8% fidelity. The crazy thing is that this enzyme can also copy DNA or RNA templates back into DNA (reverse transcription), or use chimeric DNA-RNA molecules as a template and amplify them. It is just a super versatile polymerase that can act on DNA, RNA, or modified nucleotides, to build just about anything.

For all practical purposes measles is back, now whooping cough on the rise, next domino to fall. What’s next? Hib meningitis? Polio? All to benefit a corrupt wellness influencer industry and phony MAHA ideologies. Congress, the White House asleep. Americans should be outraged

Any #archaea lab out there interested in having their Natrialba species sequenced on ONT r10 up to about 3Kx read depth for free? I'll send back annotated assembly, methylation data and raw signal files. I need at least one more species for a current paper. Feel free to DM!

@luismbat Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Imagine losing first authorship because you got hit by a blue shell on the last lap 💀

@naturepoker1 I enjoyed the book!

@kmaclea I really should, I've only read 'the spy who came in from the cold' among Carr's oeuvre. There's just such a backlog of stuff to read these days.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) is a curiously divisive movie among my age group. People I know either can't stand five minutes of it or watch it again every year or so. I belong in the latter camp. Wonder what's causing the difference.

@naturepoker1 Is there an English translation worth reading?

오랜만에 눈마새를 정독중에 이 부분을 다시 읽었다. 자기완성을 위한 인생을 조심하라. 정말 알쏭달쏭한 문장이었는데. 젠장. 한국밖의 사람들이 이 소설을 읽지 못하고 살아가야 한다는 사실은 굉장한 불의가 아닐 수 없다. 그리고 세상에는 내가 못 읽는 아름다운 이야기가 가득하겠지.

DNA extraction free whole genome sequencing of bacteriophage genomes from a single plaque | bioRxiv biorxiv.org/content/10.110…