Slashdot Mirror
Morse Code Used by Human Cells?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from several universities and drug companies in the U.K. have discovered that our cells are using Morse-like signals to switch genes on and off. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) write that this discovery may have major implications for the pharmaceutical industry. Better and more efficient drugs would only deliver the signals to our cells that will activate a desired behavior. Sounds like science fiction? Read more for other details, references and pictures."
Let me guess: One more justification for hanging onto the 5WPM morse requirement, right?
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to my feet in the morning, then QRO to my legs. That will allow me to get QRV and out of bed.
Human cells did it first. I knew that Morse guy was a fraud all along.
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
...just got a lot more fun
I have freaks! I did something right...
Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (http://www.primidi.com/) to see it for yourself.
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://www.uk.clara.net/clarahost/advanced.php) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is
S.O.C. Save Our Cells...
From IP claims.
The number of 'dots and dashes' being used by each signal could have different purposes, all of which could be modified by a drug.
Alright, I work in a chemical biology lab, and I don't know wtf this is supposed to mean. It's common for proteins to have their localization controlled by phosphorylation (i.e., a transcription factor, which is a protein that turns a gene on when bound to DNA, can only get into the nucleus to do its job depending on whether it's been phosphorylated or not). But what does "signal" mean in this context? The press release doesn't offer any scientific details.
This is really just all hype until they can make a claim beyond vague analogies. So why does this make the front page of Slashdot?
So a geneticist's lame metaphor for any "pattern of signals", Morse code, goes over a journalist's head, and makes it to the Slashdot homepage. If only we cell megacolonies were smart enough to decipher these patterns of signals, we might actually get meaningful insights into the infomechanics of DNA.
--
make install -not war
Well, it's been known that they use a pattern in that the arrangement of base units in a line represents a pattern. AFAIK it has not been general knowledge in the biology community that there is a temporal pattern involved with this activation as well. And DNA turning on and off is a little simplistic, there are such things as rate of transcription, how many simultaneous transcriptions occur, etc.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Actually, there are 4 units in morse code, the dash, the dot, the space between letters, and a longer space between words.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
There's nothing in that press release to convince me that a "major signaling pathway" has been discovered. There was just an overblown analogy; no science was explained.
And maybe you think biology is "oversold" because you don't know anything about it. Does anybody in your family take a statin (for lowering cholesterol levels)? If so, you should know that amazingly little details have been worked out about why those drugs work, down to the proteins that sit on the endoplasmic reticulum that are involved in cholesterol metabolism regulation, and the enzymes that interact with them. We know how that regulatory pathway eventually trickles down to interaction with DNA via transcription factors.
Maybe you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you out of ignorance.
Is just letting that turd Roland Piquepaille get more publicity for his blog. We need a slashdot boycott of these artciles, somehow. While we can't not reply (if we do, some loser or another will just reply anyway), maybe we can drown it out with comments that are uniform enough to get Taco's attention.
I propose everyone comment (whether at thread root or in reply) with a subject of "Stop the Roland Piquepaille assfest now!" and a body of the same. If out of 150 comments, 80 or 90 of them were these, would they not at least give it some consideration?
Perhaps this is a bit off-topic, but...
Various posts have appeared recently concerning the frequent appearance of articles like this one, submitted by Roland Piquepaille, containing links to what appears to be sparsely annotated collection text and images copied from other sources.
It appears that Roland is successfully using Slashdot to generate advertising revenue for this "blog" (which sadly seems to have marginally higher editing standards than Slashdot itself). Perhaps he should be formally added to the Slashdot staff and made an editor instead of paying him informally in this way.
The result might be improved Slashdot editing, and fewer links to a mediocre blog.
For christ's sake, if I read another ad for this asshole's fucking blog _where he doesn't even actually write any of the fucking content_, it'll be too fucking soon. Why the fuck do the editors insist on promoting this no-talent assclown?
Dammit, it took fucking _forever_ for Katz to go away. Not fucking looking forward to doing that again, but looks like we're right back to it.
Diappointingly, none of these links actually included any sort of reference to the scientific literature. Luckily, it was pretty easy to find one: "Oscillations in NF-kappaB signaling control the dynamics of gene expression", Science. 2004 Oct 22;306(5696):704-8. You can find the abstract on pubmed, and if you or your institution happens to have a subscription to Science you can read it online. Looking at the abstract, it seems like the morse code analogy is not very accurate: gene transcription is dependent on oscillation frequency of a transcription factor, but there doesn't seem to be any encoding in the signal in the manner of morse code.
In case anyone here is wondering, you can get the basic amateur radio license without having any knowledge of Morse code. You need the 5WPM morse code for the more advanced licenses that open up more frequencies and higher power, especially the HF ones.
Now that we know how to communicate with them...
Could someone convert the following messages to morris code for me?
To my head hair follicles: START GROWING AGAIN!
To my back, ear, and nose hair follicles : STOP GROWING SO MUCH!
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
The short answer is: No.
The long answer is: People can obviously correctly grasp broad outlines. The problem is that, in mathematics anyway, the broad outline is the mathematics. This is woefully imprecise. Let's see if I can successfully clarify.
Consider Fermat's Last theorem and the introductory exposition here. Notice that to understand, in broad strokes, the content (not even the method!) of the proof, you have to understand elliptic curves, elliptic functions, zeta functions, L-functions, galois groups and their matrix representations over p-adic rings. The properties of objects in each of these topics are essential to the proof, and seeing as the proof is in some sense a description of "how these objects interact," any description that fails to include one of these fields is going to be inadequate even for framing a broad outline. Even if the idea that lead to Wile's final proof was simple, one needs all of this machinery to even comprehend what it means.
The issue in physics is similar, but distinct. Equations are one thing, and anyone can write a story about a physicist staring at a peice of paper and yelling "Eureka!" But giving these equations physical meaning is another. It is becoming more and more common for physical meanings to be given in terms of complex mathematical constructs, and for the expositor, we're back at the trouble above.
That said, magazines like Scientific American and shows like Nova do make people interested in mathematics, if only because they're so incomplete. And they can serve as an introductory guide to the literature. But their value as informative sources is nil.
After all, I am strangely colored.