This post was originally written in 2012, and was slightly updated in 2017.

When I first started writing stochastic, individual-based computer simulations in 2005, I thought it would be a pretty straightforward job. Although I'm technically a biologist, I already had quite some (self-taught) experience in C-programming and knew about …

A few weeks ago I started teaching a mathematics-course for first-year biology students, as part of a larger three-month Systems Biology course at the University of Utrecht. A couple of years ago the university started to record a number of its lectures, which were then made available online for students …

For my research on Avian Influenza in waterbirds, I recently needed data on lakes and marsh-areas in Europe. I ended up compiling a spatial dataset from a number of different sources, including the EU Corine Land Cover database (CLC2000v13), the lake depth dataset compiled by Ekaterina Kourzeneva for the FLake …

Shapefiles are a format developed by ESRI (the makers of ArcGIS) to store and share geospatial data. Many interesting datasets are freely available in shapefile format. Shapefiles can be viewed with a number of freely available applications, such as ArcGIS Explorer (which requires the .NET framework or Silverlight) or ArcReader …

An interesting news-article appeared today, claiming a possible breakthrough in the development of a universal influenza vaccine. It describes the development of a new influenza vaccine at the Jenner Institute. Traditional influenza vaccines prime the adaptive immune system against the hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) proteins (the H and N …

Coming to you live from the Chaos Communication Camp 2007, in Finowfurt, Germany.

I gave a talk entitled "Life & Complexity" here on Thursday. Some supporting material regarding this talk is available on this site.

Also check out my gallery and Paul's gallery for some nice pictures, and recordings of most …