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Also, the login/password "slashdot2000" / "slashdot200" works fine at the NY times.

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The news is based on some articles to be published in an upcoming issue of Nature. The actual Nature articles require free registration. Here is a link to the Nature news item.

I could not resist this troll...
Let's not be too hasty in letting GE 'superweeds' off the hook. Take Bt Corn, for example, which has a resistance to the pesticide Bt, and which it also produces throughout the entire plant, including the root system.
When sprayed on the surface of tha plant, Bt breaks down to less or non-toxic constituant parts over a season or so. The pesticide produced by Btends up deep in the soil where it "binds tightly to clays and hummic acids" and breaks down at a much slower rate -- samples taken up to 30 months after the plant had died showed no decrease in the amount of Bt in the soil.
Thus, over few short seasons, Bt corn can pollute a field to levels even worse than those produced by planting "regular" corn, and spraying regularly.

See the article&l t;/a> (enter "Insecticidal toxin in root exudates from Bt corn" in the search field) in Nature magazine for a more detailed examination of this issue.

I could not resist this troll...
Let's not be too hasty in letting GE 'superweeds' off the hook. Take Bt Corn, for example, which has a resistance to the pesticide Bt, and which it also produces throughout the entire plant, including the root system.
When sprayed on the surface of tha plant, Bt breaks down to less or non-toxic constituant parts over a season or so. The pesticide produced by Btends up deep in the soil where it "binds tightly to clays and hummic acids" and breaks down at a much slower rate -- samples taken up to 30 months after the plant had died showed no decrease in the amount of Bt in the soil.
Thus, over few short seasons, Bt corn can pollute a field to levels even worse than those produced by planting "regular" corn, and spraying regularly.

See the article&l t;/a> (enter "Insecticidal toxin in root exudates from Bt corn" in the search field) in Nature magazine for a more detailed examination of this issue.

Lars
__

Maybe this came up earlier and I missed it, but... There was an article by Seth LLoyd from MIT in Nature volume 406, pp. 1047-1054 last month exploring how much computing power you could theoretically expect to get out of 1kg of mass taking up a volume of 1 liter. The result was ~5x10^50 operations per second. You can (eventually) get to the original article here (but annoying registration required). Anyway, we've got a ways to go.

Now another screwy thing to wonder about is what are the precursers to Caffeine? Think about it, they may taste really bad. Caffeine is an alkaloid (nitrogen contaning organinc molecule) and they all taste bitter (Think of tonic water without gin) and in general they tend to be toxic too. So now we get coffee beans that are full of precursers with nowhere to go.

Of the most common methods to decaffeineate beans, I'd say stick with super critical CO2. Mess with the temp and pressures to get a more exclusive extraction. Solvents stink, and environmental considerations need to be taken into account. So I dunno, I'll stick to leaded coffee for now. Besides, didn't someone publish that caffeine reduces the risk of Parkinsons disease?

As far as all of the "other" drugs/chemicals that could be produced, I don't think too much of that happening. I saw that someone posted that they were diabetic. As a 24 year veteran of that disease, the sheer number of monitoring and induction steps involved with normal pancratic functions makes my head spin. Considering the fact that we don't know how most prokaryotic bacteria (no nucleus) sense their environment, or what happens so that they can respond, not to mention redundancies for good measure. What a run on, but we don't know how to control these systems in bacteria, never mind people. Just some thoughts. R

The scary thing is that the environment and ecosystems operate on the same principle (scale-free). And we are just plucking away, destroying bits and pieces without much logic or foresight. That's good because we are not likely to kill the critical nodes right away. But eventually we will, and various ecological systems will start to collapse. This is already happening in Borneo, where the rainforest is rapidly collapsing and dying off due to the combination of human and natural stress.

The really really scary thing is that we will never know what the critical nodes are in the various ecosystems until it is too late. Yet we keep on destroying and polluting. We are doomed unless we wake up soon.

I think this is the correct link http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/n ature/journal/v406/n6794/full/406 378a0_fs.html

Actual link to nature article

Maybe this one will work.

-- Dr. Eldarion --

Maybe this one will work

You are quite correct. Neuroscience is still a very young field, and having taken a few courses in the field, I have read some fairly conflicting bits of research. As soon as anything even vaguely resembling a statement comes out, it is challenged. The real progress that is being made is in the details, for example, "how does our brain process olfactory sensory input," not by groups who discover something then use it as the basis for a sweeping generalization. [interesting digression] Some quite fascinating research has been going on in the olfactory field, incidentally - specifically in how our brains may be able to encode extra information onto a nervous signal temporally (free registration with Nature required to view abstract...) [end digression] However, speaking as a scientist, I wouldn't get my knickers in a twist over something like this until they come out with something a bit more concrete. The bulk of the real progress being made in this field is typically being made by groups of hard science types who rarely make mainstream press when they discover something. As for these folks: They mentioned the release of calcium effecting the neurons. we've known this for a while, and let me just say that soaking a cell in calcium has more of a sledgehammer effect than a scalpel. Of course, this could be a huge finding, but what it sounds like is that someone made an interesting discovery but has very little idea of what it actually means.

According to this article in Nature, 1000 terabytes = 1 petabyte, and 1000 petabytes = 1 exabyte. The article notes that as ever larger and more complex scientific experiments produce ever larger quantities of data, there was briefly a possibility that we would run out of words to describe the amount of data produced. Consider that while the Library of Congress contains less than 12 terabytes, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) is expected to produce 100 petabytes (i.e., 100,000 terabytes) of stored data in 15 years... Anyway, moving on up, after exabyte, they (whoever they are) started naming things from the back of the alphabet. Thus 1000 exabytes = 1 zettabyte, and 1000 zettabytes = 1 yottabyte. Although the article does not say, perhaps the term for 1000 yottabytes will skip over 'x,' as we already have exabyte, and go to 'wottabyte'? I like the sound of that :) ...

According to this article in Nature, 1000 terabytes = 1 petabyte, and 1000 petabytes = 1 exabyte. The article notes that as ever larger and more complex scientific experiments produce ever larger quantities of data, there was briefly a possibility that we would run out of words to describe the amount of data produced. Consider that while the Library of Congress contains less than 12 terabytes, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) is expected to produce 100 petabytes (i.e., 100,000 terabytes) of stored data in 15 years... Anyway, moving on up, after exabyte, they (whoever they are) started naming things from the back of the alphabet. Thus 1000 exabytes = 1 zettabyte, and 1000 zettabytes = 1 yottabyte. Although the article does not say, perhaps the term for 1000 yottabytes will skip over 'x,' as we already have exabyte, and go to 'wottabyte'? I like the sound of that :) ...

It's not like splicing is anything new - hell we've been making corn that poisons butterflys for a while now - it's not new. Why is this news? What is the nature of the chromosome, is that what makes it so special? What does it do? Anything?

Regular neural networks still work on digital information only. These things, apparently, do not. That's why it's a big deal.

I do have a problem with this statement in the Wired article though:

The chip -- believed to be the first hybrid digital and analog electronic circuit -- has been hailed as a breakthrough in "neuromorphic" engineering.

Claiming that these guys have pioneered mixed-signal design is just a little bit of a stretch. Do your research, Wired. =)

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Biological (neural) systems have properties sometimes desirable electronically, such as robustness and insensitivity to noisy data. Indeed, Caltech's Carver Mead (if he's still there) went a long way to popularize biologically-inspired engineering, or "neuromorphic engineering." His book Analog VLSI and Neural Systems is the usual text, mixing VLSI design and mimicry of, say, the retina.

The original Nature article should be readable to those clued in on MOS circuitry and a bit of neuroscience. I think it's wonderful that Nature is willing to post their material for free online, esp. in PDF...

For those of you itching to learn more about the brain & neuromorphic engineering, I set up a page of links to related books.

All best,

Gregg Favalora, CTO, Actuality Systems, Inc.

Developing autostereoscopic volumetric 3-D displays.

Check out the original article, in the letters to nature section. Rodney Douglas' web adress www.ini.unizh.ch/~rjd/

Enjoy

Jan-Jan

Can be found here at Nature.

Whilst the difficulty in this experiment is in interpreting the results, one thing to remember is that the speed limit c for any information is a postulate of relativity, not something that has been proved. It appears to be true so far, but there is nothing to say that it always applies.

I am one of the authors of the work that Geoff Ozins techniques are based on (Synthesis of Macroporous Minerals with Highly Ordered Three-Dimensional Arrays of Spheroidal Voids. Holland, B.T.; Blanford, C.F.; Stein, A. Science 1998, 281, 538-540 [Abstract] and Synthesis of highly ordered, three-dimensional, macroporous structures of amorphous or crystalline inorganic oxides, phosphates, and hybrid composites. Holland, B.T. et al. Chem. Mater. 1999, 11, 795-805 [Abstract]).

In addition to the technological limitations of photonic computing, we are a long way from fabricating these materials on a length scale that will work for even a rudimentary application, such as a waveguide. As the article states on the first page, their silica structure has "a typical single domain size of 100 um". The templates are brittle (they are essentially artificial opals) and the defect control is nearly impossible. Defects in the material grossly affect the behavior, that is, whether they behave like a photonic band gap material or a waveguide or whatever.

I think another promising route that isnt mentioned here is covered in Fabrication of photonic crystals for the visible spectrum by holographic lithography Nature 2000, 404, 53-56 [ Abstract. Free registration required]. Rather than using an opal for a template, they have complete control over the shape of the void lattice by the holographic interference of several lasers in a polymer matrix which is replaced by a high refractive-index semiconductor.

I am one of the authors of the work that Geoff Ozins techniques are based on (Synthesis of Macroporous Minerals with Highly Ordered Three-Dimensional Arrays of Spheroidal Voids. Holland, B.T.; Blanford, C.F.; Stein, A. Science 1998, 281, 538-540 [Abstract] and Synthesis of highly ordered, three-dimensional, macroporous structures of amorphous or crystalline inorganic oxides, phosphates, and hybrid composites. Holland, B.T. et al. Chem. Mater. 1999, 11, 795-805 [Abstract]).

In addition to the technological limitations of photonic computing, we are a long way from fabricating these materials on a length scale that will work for even a rudimentary application, such as a waveguide. As the article states on the first page, their silica structure has "a typical single domain size of 100 um". The templates are brittle (they are essentially artificial opals) and the defect control is nearly impossible. Defects in the material grossly affect the behavior, that is, whether they behave like a photonic band gap material or a waveguide or whatever.

I think another promising route that isnt mentioned here is covered in Fabrication of photonic crystals for the visible spectrum by holographic lithography Nature 2000, 404, 53-56 [ Abstract. Free registration required]. Rather than using an opal for a template, they have complete control over the shape of the void lattice by the holographic interference of several lasers in a polymer matrix which is replaced by a high refractive-index semiconductor.

So the Star's article is completely devoid of details - it's a newspaper ! I'll add a few more details so people can get as much information about this topic as they want. First and foremost the latest issue of Nature has an article entitled "Photonics: Opal appeal" specifically about this breakthrough (subscription required). The catch phrase used is a "three-dimensional photonic bandgap material". The team that's accomplished this is a bit more international then indicated so far, consisting of a Spanish team making the opal template, Geoff Ozin's group filling the lattices & then dissolving the template, Henry VanDriel's group performing the laser experiments, and Sajeev John's group providing the theory framework.

For those of you who just want pretty pictures, here are some images of the opals.

Here's the ultimate resource for photonic bandgap materials.

So that should give you more then enough to visit & read. Basically what these materials do is prevent propagation of light of a specific frequency in 3-dimensions. The 'bandgap' of the light can be controlled during the fabrication process allowing these things to block different frequencies. So you could imagine placing one of these materials into an optical fibre & selectively blocking one of the data streams but allowing all others to pass through unimpeded. The current breakthrough is twofold, first these aren't imaginary, they've been made & tested and they aren't decades removed from insertion into optical networks, they're months or years from it, second, this is the first example of a 3D PBG material, previous versions have generally been 2D. One of the neater experiments performed involved putting liquid crystals into the opal holes & then by putting an electric field across the liquid crystals, controlling the transmission through the crystal. A variable transmission photonic bandgap device. Light is fast, electrons are slow, an all optical network would be blazingly fast & these devices bring us a step closer to making that happen.

CJM

My dad, who works in Beijing, China, is a geneticist. So when the news broke that human chromosome 21 had been mapped, I sent him a link to the BBC News article on the event. He replied that he couldn't read the article in China, and asked me to email him the text. Same thing happened with the chromosome 21 article published in Nature . Had to email him the PDF.

I got the following email from Nature:


Dear Colleague:
We are very pleased to offer all users of Nature's electronic services a
FREE sample of the May 18th issue of Nature. To request a free print copy
containing the Chromosome 21 paper, use the order form at:
http://www.nature.com/marketing/freecopy/
These free copies of Nature are produced with support from AppliedBiosystems -
http://www.appliedbiosystems.com
Forward this e-mail to let your friends and colleagues know about this
special offer.
Chromosome 21 is the second human chromosome sequence to be documented,
encompassing more than 33 million base pairs of DNA, and its publication
therefore marks a major scientific milestone. A striking feature of the
chromosome is that it contains less than 300 discernible genes. This implies
that the whole human genome may contain no more than 40,000 genes, many
fewer than previously thought.
The chromosome sequence reveals the organisation of a number of genes linked
to specific human disorders, and will speed the search for several more
disease-linked genes. The availability of this sequence will also provide
valuable tools for investigating the basis of Down syndrome, which is caused
by the inheritance of three (rather than the normal two) copies ofchromosome 21.
Yours sincerelyRichard GallagherBiological Sciences EditorNature

That thing (bow tie) looks like an amoeba http://www .nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6783/fig_tab/4051 13a0_F1.html - a nucleus with protoplasm and tenticles.

We all knew that Internet was in its early development stage but I thought it was already closer to some multicelled trilobite then a single celled organism!

Here's some info from the latest issue of Nature. Their site requires a login, so I'll just post an exerpt below. The article gives a little more detail on the story, such as the actual sizes of the sequences involved.

Drosophila genome contaminated with human sequence

[WASHINGTON] Computational biologists at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) have discovered about 150,000 bases of human DNA mixed in with the genomic sequence of the fruitfly Drosophila compiled by Celera Genomics of Rockville, Maryland, and the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project (BDGP).

Scientists working with the data were downplaying the significance of the contamination last week. David Lipman, NCBI director, says that the figure should be seen in the context of the approximately 180 million bases of the fly genome.

Lipman adds that the errant data were in a part of the database holding 'unassigned scaffolds', not the labelled part of known fly chromosomes. "We found no evidence of any contamination in the main body of fly sequence data," he says.

Researchers at Celera and the BDGP had previously pointed out that some of the unassigned sequence might contain foreign DNA. They have requested a correction in Science, which published the Drosophila sequence last month. Gerald Rubin, leader of the BDGP, has been quoted as describing the contamination as "trivial".

ROTFLMAO! (I always wanted to know what a large-scale space warping accident sounded like)

BTW if anybody's interested: this other recent paper about the Boomerang results states explains why the size of the small CMB ripples confirms that inflation must have taken place.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

But i don't think that the fruit fly is going to be the Rosetta Stone anyway, because from what i've heard, there are no wild type fruit flies left anymore. They've been used so much in genetics research that you couldnt find a natural fruit fly if you looked!

For example, this weeks issue of Nature has an article about constructing a model of Parkinsons disease in the fruitfly. This is probably a great tool to test drug candidates on. Fruitflies are somewhat cheaper and more convenient to experiment on than human beings. ;-)

Lars
__

X-ray and gamma-ray emitting sources (high-energy sources) of radiation are usually signs of something very extremal going on: black holes, supernovas, neutron stars, pulsars. Now, a new family of such objects has been found -- the full article is in today's "Nature". What are they? Read the article, I'm not much of an astronomer :-)

Regards,

January

Your post reminded me of a story that appeared in Nature (Login Required), in the 3/02/00 issue. For Slashdot readers not familiar with Nature, it is a well-respected science journal (The type with peer-reviewed articles in it).

What was unique about the article, entitled "Danger -- hard hack area", is that it was a piece of SF that speculated on the future of Biotech and the hacking community. Here's a little excerpt below:

"Sequence your genome at home, and set science free!" cry the biopunks.

Many people predicted that VirCon 2010, the first open meeting of the biopunk movement, would end in a riot. In truth, it was as privately exciting and as publicly dull as any science conference. From their besieged underground culture, the clandestine surfers of the new wave in biology are emerging blinking into the daylight and, dare one say, into respectability.

But VirCon 2010, held in a dilapidated midtown New York hotel, was not without friction. Despite the rule that no biological material could be brought in, there was a ruthless but futile inspection by officers of the Food and Drug Agency. Several people suspected of being undercover federal agents or snoops from biotech companies were summarily ejected, and the press was barred, which led to strange scenes outside the hotel as TV journalists were videoed typing into a laptop to communicate with conference delegates just inside the lobby.

I was allowed to cover the event from the inside because of personal contacts made while covering the pursuit and arrest of Kevin 'Freaky-Deaky' Miles, the man who claimed to have turned the Amazon rainforest luminescent -- and because I'm a science fiction writer, and biopunks love SF.

The delegates were mostly young, white males under 25, dressed in everything from baggies and T-shirts, through goth black and multiple piercings, to business suits. All had self-inflicted gene hacks: feathers or scales instead of hair; bands of chromatophores on their foreheads; motile tattoos. And of course, unlike the pasty-faced, overweight cliché of computer hackers, the biopunks were bursting with health, their skin and eyesight perfect, their muscle definition superb, their energy seemingly boundless...

Summary or details.

And how do you know we don't have altered personality as we age? Perhaps you haven't known people, and yourself, for decades. Remember, there probably is no single neuron controlling anything, and we're referring to replacing some with similar neurons.

My interpretation of that line is that, overall, students had WORSE memory performance when sleep-deprived, but those students who had greater activity in the parietal region performed better than those with lower activity -- but still worse than they would have had with a good night's sleep. Am I correct in my reading?

Yes, this is also borne out by the original article in Nature, which in its abstract says:

"Although sleep deprivation significantly impaired free recall compared with the rested state, better free recall in sleep-deprived subjects was associated with greater parietal lobe activation."

And in the article itself, they say:

"Subjects performed significantly less well on free recall when they were sleep-deprived"

I don't know whether the full article is accessible with a guest login at Nature's site, as I have a subscription.

There's also a story on Yahoo from AP which also points out that sleepy subjects did worse than well-rested ones.

For a course project I've spent the past six months exploring the connections between machine/biological vision and our growing understanding of Quantum mechanics and it's implications for computing. The bottom line is that we are far enough along to ask credible scientific questions about the implications of Physics to Computation and Biology. For another popular science account that makes connections between evolution, Quantum mechanics and theory of computation read: Fabric of Reality

It is very early to judge what "Physics can do for Evolution" but I've read enough Dawkins to know that we can fruitfully think of evolution as a kind of computation. Quantum computer "simulations" of evolution or intelligence may turn out to be much more efficient than the "real" thing. OR it might turn out that Nature already "thought" of that and used the most powerful computing model available-- that would be the Quantum computing model and it's what many people are trying to find out.

Right here

It's not the actual journal report, but a summary for civilians :-)

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I think I know what the problem is: unless you are into a certain field, something like "scientists found now a way of switching genes on and off" sounds like a sensation, and "it seems that leptine plays an important role also in lizard metabolic regulation" does not - even though the first one is, roughly speaking, nothing but journalistic bullshit, and the second a real revelation.

In spite of my miserable English knowledge I keep submitting to slashdot articles from Nature science update and some other sites that are providing good scientific information. Unfortunatelly, they do not sound as interesting and enthusiastic as what you can read about biology in "XXN news for housewifes".

By the way, I work at ZMBH, Bujard, who developed the tet-system (which seems to work quite fine in many applications) also works here.

Regards,

January

Unfortunately, those of you who have no access to "Nature" cannot read the full article, but I put some exerts here. Actually, it was my today's slashdot submission (rejected, of course - I have never seen anything posted to slashdot referring to any good biological site). I thought the article is interesting, because it targets the whole scientific community (there is hardly a biologist out there not reading "Nature"), and is the first article in such a journal which mentions Linus Torvalds and Linux, therefore making these names known to a large number of scientists who never heard them before. In a certain way, it could bring Linux more publicity then an editorial in "Times".

Regards,

January

1. There are many qualified sources of biological information on the net. Contrary to what you probably expect(*), wired is *not* one of them, as opposed to Nature science update, for example.

2. Although spores of B. subtilis are quite resistant to many external factors, it is a highly evolved gram negative bacterium - and it's ancestors, as much we can tell, do not share its peculiar capabilities. I could think about several higher organisms which could survived a direct impact deep inside a meteorite, but they could not give rise to the diversity of life as we know, not to mention that it would not fit into any theory explaining the mechanisms of observed evolution, because those insects - as well as B. subtilis - are quite specialized and, genetically speaking, very complicated life forms.

3. It is a well known fact that one could imagine a very primitive ancestor of all life forms as we know it capable of hitch-hiking through our solar system. Unfortunately, this is not sufficient for a sound scientific theory. This is why nobody takes the panspermia theory seriously, even though some great scientists are promoting it. Nobody but the media, but media take seriously even Microsoft publicity, right?

Regards,

January

(*) Whenever I read something like this /. news I feel the urge to reply quoting two polish humourists, J. Tuwim and A. Slonimski: "Dear madam; either someone did not inform you precisely enough, either - what the editors consider more probable - you didn't understand something. The man is not a descendant of Darwin."

You are confused because because the article is, shall we say, less than clear. Here is a better one from Science News. Note that this is a year old. The gene sequence appears to be underway or near completion. There have been no results of the remediation studies posted to the web. Here is the ab stract of the study referred to by the CNN article. It's fairly preliminary. The researchers have made the bug and done a few lab tests. Now they need to do some field trials.

The US DOE has a huge problem; they need to clean up thousands of contaminated sites, all with significant radiation levels. Cleaning up the heavy metals and organo-chlorines is tough enough without the radiation hazard.

The brute-force-and-ignorance approach is to "scoop and bag", remove the contaminated soil and put it in a sealed landfill. This is enormously expensive.

Bio-remediation offers a partial solution. You clean up the organic compounds, mostly clenaing fluids very similar to dry-cleaning solvent, by breaking them down on site. Heavy metal clean-up involves changing the chemical form of the pollutant to something less toxic or easy to get out of the soil by washing. The microbes have no effect on radioactivity. You still need to remove the radiation hazards, it's just less (chemically) toxic after the bugs have chewed on it.

New strains of D. radiodurans have been engineered to do both jobs. In optimal conditions with a really good innoculum, microbial remediation can almost entirely destroy the pollutants. In poor conditions (cold, no food or water) or with the wrong bugs, very little may happen. Training innocula, as microbial cultures are called, for a specific pollutant is time consuming and difficult.

Kind Regards,

However, it has also been conventional wisdom that learning requires some kind of change of "brainal" configuration. But I think CW has been that this is done by changing the strengths of synapses rather than the number of synapses.

see my other posts on this article regardiong this topic. As I said there, many researchers think that the strength (weight for you cosi people) is modified by adding additional synspases between neurons that are already connected. Regarding the Research considering the growth of new neurons, check out the press release and the article istelf at nature

Will this finish a task? No, it is just a beginning - having the sequence, the real work starts: searching ORFs (Open Reading Frames - sequences which could possibly be genes), running database searches, and slowly passing to the most exciting fields of modern molecular biology - from genomics to transcriptomics and proteomics. Transcriptomics is looking for genes, which actually got expressed, and proteomics - similarly, looking for expressed proteins. Making transcription / translation (translation is the process in which proteins get synthetized) profiles can lead us to 1) function of proteins (e.g. protein X. is expressed under this and this conditions, so it must take part in this and this metabolic response) 2) regulation - DNA is a single strand, but various enzymes are present in various copy numbers under various conditions.

Those are enormous projects. A lot of work has to be done before the raw sequence will actually be of any use; nethertheless, it is a milestone of molecular biology and will be a fine achievement for the end of our century.

Another project will be to determine the variability of human genome: screening for different gene allels, mutations etc. This will be one of the most important goals in human genomics in the next few years.

Whats on the catch... erm, chromosome 22? 22 is 33,400,000 bases long (Mycoplasma pneumoniae, one of the smallest bacteriums, has about 816,394 bases). It contains several already known genes responsible for various genetic disorders, and possibly a gene responsible for certain types of schizophrenia.

By the way, a much better source of information is the Nature science update page - the original scientific publication has been published today in Nature.

Regards,

January

Will this finish a task? No, it is just a beginning - having the sequence, the real work starts: searching ORFs (Open Reading Frames - sequences which could possibly be genes), running database searches, and slowly passing to the most exciting fields of modern molecular biology - from genomics to transcriptomics and proteomics. Transcriptomics is looking for genes, which actually got expressed, and proteomics - similarly, looking for expressed proteins. Making transcription / translation (translation is the process in which proteins get synthetized) profiles can lead us to 1) function of proteins (e.g. protein X. is expressed under this and this conditions, so it must take part in this and this metabolic response) 2) regulation - DNA is a single strand, but various enzymes are present in various copy numbers under various conditions.

Those are enormous projects. A lot of work has to be done before the raw sequence will actually be of any use; nethertheless, it is a milestone of molecular biology and will be a fine achievement for the end of our century.

Another project will be to determine the variability of human genome: screening for different gene allels, mutations etc. This will be one of the most important goals in human genomics in the next few years.

Whats on the catch... erm, chromosome 22? 22 is 33,400,000 bases long (Mycoplasma pneumoniae, one of the smallest bacteriums, has about 816,394 bases). It contains several already known genes responsible for various genetic disorders, and possibly a gene responsible for certain types of schizophrenia.

By the way, a much better source of information is the Nature science update page - the original scientific publication has been published today in Nature.

Regards,

January

Why climate change ? Woo, big question; there's lots of evidence, and various contrarian theories (eg: observed temperature change is due to solar oputput variations) have been knocked down one by ne. Latest doom-watch for us Euro-weenies : tghe Gulf Stream (well the upstream end of it, off Greenland) is being severely disrupted. Shut down the gulf stream and suddenly central/southern Europe regains the climate of other areas on our latitude: Siberia, northern Canada ....

There's too much to give precise URLs, but for starters search these for 'climate change' :

• BBC
• New Scientist
• Nature,
• Science,
• IPCC
• UN Environmental Program
• hell, even CNN ...

It seems that the development of such tools is more evolved than you'd expect. One of the research centers mentioned in the article is the MIT's Media Laboratory. You can find more information on the ML projects here. The lab is working also on some other futuristic projects: wearable computers, software algorythms for recognizing photographs and other.

Regards,

January

Regards,

January

P.S. When /. posts a reference to an article about computers, it is usually worth reading. When /. posts a reference to an article about biotech, don't bother.

There is an interesting review article on vpr, gene therapy and such. I got a little confused as I read it: it seems that vpr helps invading non proliferating cells - there are many cancer cells which stop proliferating for a while, and therefore are of course they are not affected by traditional therapy.

From what I read in literature it seems that Planelles is planning to use modified HIV both as a trigger of cell death and as carrier. Still, even conventional, well - researched gene therapy is just getting of to field trials - sometimes with not much luck (two months ago I think I read an article in Nature on deaths due to gene therapy - those were first clinical tests on volunteers of some novel gene therapy).

In summary - there has been many "breakthroughs" like that one, but before we open the champagne bottles a lot of work has still to be done. Note for slashdot moderators: most of the journals get the biological stuff even worse than the computer stuff. So watch out - there are many "sensations" like that. If you look for something really new, then bookmark the Nature Science Update homepage. It is easy to read and very competent.

Regards,

January

A recent Nature Biotechnology issue had an article about a "recombinant DNA artist" who has bred a glow-in-the-dark German Shepherd expressing GFP in its fur as well as the paper announcing the red GFP's from coral, with c ommentary.

Requires a password, but if you care enough to read them, you probably already have one...

A recent Nature Biotechnology issue had an article about a "recombinant DNA artist" who has bred a glow-in-the-dark German Shepherd expressing GFP in its fur as well as the paper announcing the red GFP's from coral, with c ommentary.

Requires a password, but if you care enough to read them, you probably already have one...

A recent Nature Biotechnology issue had an article about a "recombinant DNA artist" who has bred a glow-in-the-dark German Shepherd expressing GFP in its fur as well as the paper announcing the red GFP's from coral, with c ommentary.

Requires a password, but if you care enough to read them, you probably already have one...

(Note to Rob: I submitted this same story to /. yesterday afternoon, with links and proper attribution to NECRI and Nature, but I guess accuracy doesn't count as much as timing.)