ConnectedBases

Color Oracle is a free software utility to simulate how the colorblind might see your artwork or figures available for Mac OS X (10.3.9 or better), Windows, and Linux. Another similar utility for this is Sim Daltonism (Mac OS X 10.2.8 or better).

According to Wikipedia article, as many as 8% of males and more than 1% of all people have difficulty distinguishing colors. We can make it easier for our audiences to interpret our figures and use our bioinformatics web applications if we give a little forethought and check to make sure that they will be able to discriminate what we identify with color.

Generally, I don’t use color in figures for journal articles or posters, but I do tend to use color in slide presentations. Now, I can make sure that my work is more accessible to those who might be colorblind.

Both software links above via Daring Fireball.

Update: I re-wrote this article and submitted it to MacResearch.org.

I was looking through Nucleic Acids Research this morning, and I saw an abstract for taveRNA, which I remembered as a graphical design interface for bioinformatic workflows (PMC). But instead, it was a set of web-tools for understanding RNA structure (inteRNA, pRuNA, alteRNA). Both sets of tools share the name “taverna”.
So, my fellow scientists, if you are going be cute when naming your genes, proteins, databases, or program, please make sure your term is at least somewhat unique in Google or PubMed. Otherwise, keeping these things straight in my head is difficult.
This of course, is not meant to disparage the creators of the taveRNA suite. They have put together a useful set of tools for modeling inter- and intra-molecular interactions of RNA molecules. These sorts of tools are just going to be more and more important in the future, as we discover more riboswitches and other RNA-based regulators.

UPDATE—

The Wall Street Journal discusses how this is important for people’s names.