Cancer is only one side of the story. Everything cause cancer (at least everything that tastes good) IMO the more scary part is that "It is also known to cause damage to the central and peripheral nervous system."
Living in Israel I've suspected long ago that people have gone mad. Now I know why.
The question of what is the definition of a gene is not that trivial.
for example in the definition you quote:
" No definition for a gene? "A unit of heredity. The unit of genetic function which carries the information for a single polypeptide." "
The two sentences are not equal definitions. There are mRNA sequences that are units of heredity, play important roll in defining our genetic makeover but are not translated to become a polypeptide. Does the DNA which serves as their template count as a gene? depends on the exact definition.
It is quite acceptable now that those sequences, include transcription factors, do count, but there are other difficulties in counting.
For example the issue of alternative splicing.
When you take many of the human proteins you will find that the DNA that is translated to make that protein is divided in more than one segment of DNA. It can be divided to many smaller segments - exons, separated by untranslated segments - introns. Those segments are being cut and edited to result in a protein - a process called splicing. Now, to complex things up, many times different proteins results from the same or almost the same set of segments by different editing. There is a question how to count those variants.
One of the reasons that the number of estimated genes was probably lower than the actual number is this phenomena of alternative splicing which is much more frequent than first assumed.
Gene prediction applications uses many statistical and computational methods in order to predict where hypothetically a gene might be hiding.
Information content and entropy measurement are used vastly in many of them. For example: the basic tool to compare how much one sequence resembles another (by doing sequence alignment) uses substitution matrices. Matrices that give a score to any possible substitution of one unit - a nucleotide for DNA/RNA or amino acid in the case of proteins, according to the likelihood of this substitution of being meaningful or just pure chance. The most commonly used matrix (actually it's a whole family or series of them) is called BLOSOM and information content is being used on one of the stages in its build.
However, this is not the news here. What the researchers did was combining the prediction from the DNA sequence itself with results from expression data, meaning the results of experiments that measure whether a subsequence of DNA is transcribed to RNA.
I've been to a visit in an agriculture institute where they showed us an example of this method for biological pesticide which was exactly that.
I don't remember all the details but it was based on the mail flies being sterilized by radiation. A kEY POINT to the success of the method was that with those flies each female fly only mate once at the beginning of their mating season and therefore if the unlucky female mate with one of the sterilized males it ends up with one less flies family. When the sterilized males out number the normal ones, the population reduces dramatically and the fruits in the field have a better season.
Do they solve the problem of transmitting their signal through the transformers?
Among the companies solving the high rate data transmission over power lines (PLC technology) I know of
only one, Mainnet (www.mainnet-plc.com) that claims of going through the transformers. Others Ascom(www.ascom.ch), ONELINE(www.oneline.com) bypass them or use only the low voltage part of the power lines grid.
At least you're safe the other way around because of the x-10 range.
Turning the lights off shouldn't interfere with the readings. For that, it will take something else.
It's yet another application of AMR-Automatic meter reading. Not a new idea, with many companies developing many solutions.
A lot of information could be found on metering.com
Some of the players are:
oneline, Ambianet, Intellon, itran and many others.
Slashdot Mirror
Cancer is only one side of the story. Everything cause cancer (at least everything that tastes good) IMO the more scary part is that "It is also known to cause damage to the central and peripheral nervous system."
Living in Israel I've suspected long ago that people have gone mad. Now I know why.
The question of what is the definition of a gene is not that trivial.
for example in the definition you quote:
" No definition for a gene? "A unit of heredity. The unit of genetic function which carries the information for a single polypeptide." "
The two sentences are not equal definitions.
There are mRNA sequences that are units of heredity, play important roll in defining our genetic makeover but are not translated to become a polypeptide. Does the DNA which serves as their template count as a gene? depends on the exact definition.
It is quite acceptable now that those sequences, include transcription factors, do count, but there are other difficulties in counting.
For example the issue of alternative splicing.
When you take many of the human proteins you will find that the DNA that is translated to make that protein is divided in more than one segment of DNA. It can be divided to many smaller segments - exons, separated by untranslated segments - introns.
Those segments are being cut and edited to result in a protein - a process called splicing.
Now, to complex things up, many times different proteins results from the same or almost the same set of segments by different editing. There is a question how to count those variants.
One of the reasons that the number of estimated genes was probably lower than the actual number is this phenomena of alternative splicing which is much more frequent than first assumed.
Of course they did.
Gene prediction applications uses many statistical and computational methods in order to predict where hypothetically a gene might be hiding.
Information content and entropy measurement are used vastly in many of them.
For example:
the basic tool to compare how much one sequence resembles another (by doing sequence alignment) uses substitution matrices. Matrices that give a score to any possible substitution of one unit - a nucleotide for DNA/RNA or amino acid in the case of proteins, according to the likelihood of this substitution of being meaningful or just pure chance. The most commonly used matrix (actually it's a whole family or series of them) is called BLOSOM and information content is being used on one of the stages in its build.
However, this is not the news here.
What the researchers did was combining the prediction from the DNA sequence itself with results from expression data, meaning the results of experiments that measure whether a subsequence of DNA is transcribed to RNA.
and for a problem much less acute.
I've been to a visit in an agriculture institute where they showed us an example of this method for biological pesticide which was exactly that.
I don't remember all the details but it was based on the mail flies being sterilized by radiation. A kEY POINT to the success of the method was that with those flies each female fly only mate once at the beginning of their mating season and therefore if the unlucky female mate with one of the sterilized males it ends up with one less flies family. When the sterilized males out number the normal ones, the population reduces dramatically and the fruits in the field have a better season.
Do they solve the problem of transmitting their signal through the transformers?
Among the companies solving the high rate data transmission over power lines (PLC technology) I know of
only one, Mainnet (www.mainnet-plc.com) that claims of going through the transformers. Others Ascom(www.ascom.ch), ONELINE(www.oneline.com) bypass them or use only the low voltage part of the power lines grid.
At least you're safe the other way around because of the x-10 range.
Turning the lights off shouldn't interfere with the readings. For that, it will take something else.
and indeed underground wiring of the power lines is usually considered a condition for plc- Power Line Communication for that reason exactly.
It's yet another application of AMR-Automatic meter reading. Not a new idea, with many companies developing many solutions.
A lot of information could be found on metering.com
Some of the players are:
oneline, Ambianet, Intellon, itran and many others.