The "8% of your genome" comes from the first paragraph of the News and Views article which reviews the actual article by Horie et al, and is referring to ALL viral remnants in the human genome, not just this new Bornavirus one. From a quick scan of the paper, it looks like they didn't estimate what fraction of the human genome comes from their Bornavirus, but they only describe 4 actual elements - so that's a vanishingly small part of the human genome. The vast majority of viral elements in the genome come from retroviruses and other retrotransposons, and that's been known for a long time.
Yeah, I thought the exact same thing. A Firefox plugin that will detect when you download a PDF from some journal, and automagically upload the PDF to some open repository. That would be of immense use to scientists who don't have access to all the many expensive journals out there. Unfortunately, since almost all journals force authors of the papers to relinquish copyright to the journal, a open-access database of papers would copyright-infringing as hell. You'd have to host it some non-copyright-friendly country........ A great idea tho - I'd use it in a second! I download probably 50 papers a month from various paywall journals!
I use red fluorescent protein all the time in the lab - the photo in TFA looks pretty real to me, as you excite RFP with green coloured light (around 510-555 nm) to cause it to emit red fluorescence (607-610 nm for mRFP1/mCherry). TFA didn't say which of the many RFPs they used to make the cats, but if they did, and you wanted to see the fluorescence, you'd have to illuminate the cat in the dark with a green-wavelength light to see the red fluoro emission. And a nonfluorescent cat with white fur would appear to be green. Because the RFP cat has white fur (or so the article says), it would look greenish too, so they must have done something to avoid that and still make the red fluoresce.
The Recall extension does this for Moz 1.4 to 1.6, and it works well. Hasn't been updated in a couple of years, and doesn't work with 1.7 and up..... http://recall.mozdev.org/
I was at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park last night (seeing Louis de Bernieres read) and there was a big poster advertising Clarke reading there TONIGHT (Friday 24th). I think at 730PM - check here http://keplers.booksense.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp/ Haven't read the book but I've read generally good reviews of it....too bad both the aforementioned de Bernieres has a thick new novel out, as does/. fave Neal Stephenson......
Howabout trying Canada - Chapters/Indigo? They have 3 editions of it in stock but all with very long ship times? Don't know why that is. Often UK books are published in concurrently in Canada, then there's a big wait in the US....Iain Banks for one, older Ken MacLeod too..... Check it out here http://tinyurl.com/thmg
Just reading this now - that's the best sig ever! I've never met anyone else who loved "Mutiny in Heaven" as much as me...... By the Birthday Party (for the punters)
Two huge examples of why region-free DVD players are great: the UK only (Region 2) DVD sets of the complete first seasons of Family Guy and Futurama. http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASI N/B00005UWN O Due to syndication issues and other Fox f*ckery, god knows when they might be released in the US.......
I make recombinant lentiviruses every week in the lab. Probably made around 20 different ones so far. Gene search ones, ones with GFP, ones with the tet transactivator, etc etc. They work great, infect all types of human and mouse cells with great efficiency. They are all what is called SIN vectors : "Self INactivating". Their LTRs (control centers) lack promoters and enhancers, they lack Psi packaging signals for the viral RNA to be packaged, and (once integrated into the cell's genome) lack all lentiviral/retroviral structural genes (gag, pol, env, rev, tat, etcetera) which make a virus a virus. Safety with regard to virus gene therapy has been extensively studied in the past 10 yrs - just check out PubMed. If in the event that this vector infects a cell already infected by a real pathogenic lentivirus (ie HIV-1)where the structural genes already are (in trans) it STILL wouldn't generate further vector virions because the viral vector provirus lacks LTRs to transcribe the viral RNA, and even if it somehow was transcribed it couldn't be packed into the protein particle as it lacks the RNA secondary structure element known as the psi signal. So no "new hybrid cell/virus that carries the deadly portion and the reproduction capability". No way of that happening that I can think of. Onyx Pharmaceuticals (I think) has had inital success with this approach- using a virus (Adeno?) which specifically infects cells lacking p53 (many tumor cells) and had promising results with head and neck tumors (here's a ref:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi? cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11892945&dopt=Abs tract)
Finally a subject on/. that I know something about!
Funny to read reviews of Murakami on/.; no-one I know has heard of him. Loved "Wind-up Bird Chronicle" and my GF JUST finished "Hard Boiled Wonderland...." and was nonplussed by it,liking the WBC much better. His books remind me a bit of the movies of Shohei Imamura such as "the Eel" - strangeness ensconced in banality. The previous post mentioned Borges and Calvino, both fathers of speculative fiction. Just to clarify - Calvino's most popular work is titled in english "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" and is well worth reading, deconstructing the novel while you read it.
No chance. Read Iain Banks or Ken MacLeod for some amazingly creative utopian (IB) or dystopian (KM) science fiction. And Kim Stanley Robinson's incredibly well-imagined near future books (Mars etc) are equally unique and nonderivative. It's funny you use Dune as an example- the original and some of the sequels are as good as it gets, but the New Dune stuff by his son and Kevin Anderson? Now THAT'S derivative rehashage!
THAT'S who he was!! Thanx for reminding me - I'm a bit sad it's ending, thought the downhill started when it left my old hometown of Vancouver (we'd often see them filming in Kitsilano or the UBC Endowment lands). When I was there over New Year's, I was having breakfast in a popular place, Sophie's Cosmic Cafe, and I saw a guy who looked SO familar from something on TV and I couldn't figure out what....it was Krychek! Not nearly so scary in real life! Maybe I didn't realize it was him as there was no Mulder whaling on him......
Gibson lives in Canada (Kitsilano, Vancouver, British Columbia) but I'm not sure he's a citizen. He definitely speaks with a semi-southern accent - I believe he mentioned North Carolina at a reading of his I went to a few years back.....
Slashdot Mirror
The "8% of your genome" comes from the first paragraph of the News and Views article which reviews the actual article by Horie et al, and is referring to ALL viral remnants in the human genome, not just this new Bornavirus one. From a quick scan of the paper, it looks like they didn't estimate what fraction of the human genome comes from their Bornavirus, but they only describe 4 actual elements - so that's a vanishingly small part of the human genome. The vast majority of viral elements in the genome come from retroviruses and other retrotransposons, and that's been known for a long time.
Yeah, I thought the exact same thing. A Firefox plugin that will detect when you download a PDF from some journal, and automagically upload the PDF to some open repository. That would be of immense use to scientists who don't have access to all the many expensive journals out there. Unfortunately, since almost all journals force authors of the papers to relinquish copyright to the journal, a open-access database of papers would copyright-infringing as hell. You'd have to host it some non-copyright-friendly country........
A great idea tho - I'd use it in a second! I download probably 50 papers a month from various paywall journals!
I use red fluorescent protein all the time in the lab - the photo in TFA looks pretty real to me, as you excite RFP with green coloured light (around 510-555 nm) to cause it to emit red fluorescence (607-610 nm for mRFP1/mCherry). TFA didn't say which of the many RFPs they used to make the cats, but if they did, and you wanted to see the fluorescence, you'd have to illuminate the cat in the dark with a green-wavelength light to see the red fluoro emission. And a nonfluorescent cat with white fur would appear to be green. Because the RFP cat has white fur (or so the article says), it would look greenish too, so they must have done something to avoid that and still make the red fluoresce.
Remember what tabs I was reading
The Recall extension does this for Moz 1.4 to 1.6, and it works well. Hasn't been updated in a couple of years, and doesn't work with 1.7 and up.....
http://recall.mozdev.org/
I was at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park last night (seeing Louis de Bernieres read) and there was a big poster advertising Clarke reading there TONIGHT (Friday 24th). I think at 730PM - check here http://keplers.booksense.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp / Haven't read the book but I've read generally good reviews of it....too bad both the aforementioned de Bernieres has a thick new novel out, as does /. fave Neal Stephenson......
That's a very useful page, and it links to some other good work the author has done:
http://www.squarefree.com/pornzilla/
Howabout trying Canada - Chapters/Indigo?
They have 3 editions of it in stock but all with very long ship times? Don't know why that is.
Often UK books are published in concurrently in Canada, then there's a big wait in the US....Iain Banks for one, older Ken MacLeod too.....
Check it out here
http://tinyurl.com/thmg
Just reading this now - that's the best sig ever!
I've never met anyone else who loved "Mutiny in Heaven" as much as me......
By the Birthday Party (for the punters)
Huh - I use Mozilla 1.2.1 for banking at Citibank.com and it works great. Always has.
Nice subtle reference to Thomas Covenant........it almost got past me!
Two huge examples of why region-free DVD players are great: the UK only (Region 2) DVD sets of the complete first seasons of Family Guy and Futurama.I N/B00005UWN O
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/AS
Due to syndication issues and other Fox f*ckery, god knows when they might be released in the US.......
I make recombinant lentiviruses every week in the lab. Probably made around 20 different ones so far.? cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11892945&dopt=Abs tract)
/. that I know something about!
Gene search ones, ones with GFP, ones with the tet transactivator, etc etc.
They work great, infect all types of human and mouse cells with great efficiency. They are all what is called SIN vectors : "Self INactivating". Their LTRs (control centers) lack promoters and enhancers, they lack Psi packaging signals for the viral RNA to be packaged, and (once integrated into the cell's genome) lack all lentiviral/retroviral structural genes (gag, pol, env, rev, tat, etcetera) which make a virus a virus. Safety with regard to virus gene therapy has been extensively studied in the past 10 yrs - just check out PubMed.
If in the event that this vector infects a cell already infected by a real pathogenic lentivirus (ie HIV-1)where the structural genes already are (in trans) it STILL wouldn't generate further vector virions because the viral vector provirus lacks LTRs to transcribe the viral RNA, and even if it somehow was transcribed it couldn't be packed into the protein particle as it lacks the RNA secondary structure element known as the psi signal. So no "new hybrid cell/virus that carries the deadly portion and the reproduction capability". No way of that happening that I can think of.
Onyx Pharmaceuticals (I think) has had inital success with this approach- using a virus (Adeno?) which specifically infects cells lacking p53 (many tumor cells) and had promising results with head and neck tumors (here's a ref:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi
Finally a subject on
Funny to read reviews of Murakami on /.; no-one I know has heard of him. Loved "Wind-up Bird Chronicle" and my GF JUST finished "Hard Boiled Wonderland...." and was nonplussed by it,liking the WBC much better. His books remind me a bit of the movies of Shohei Imamura such as "the Eel" - strangeness ensconced in banality.
The previous post mentioned Borges and Calvino, both fathers of speculative fiction. Just to clarify - Calvino's most popular work is titled in english "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" and is well worth reading, deconstructing the novel while you read it.
No chance. Read Iain Banks or Ken MacLeod for some
amazingly creative utopian (IB) or dystopian (KM) science fiction. And Kim Stanley Robinson's incredibly well-imagined near future books (Mars etc) are equally unique and nonderivative.
It's funny you use Dune as an example- the original and some of the sequels are as good as it gets, but the New Dune stuff by his son and Kevin Anderson? Now THAT'S derivative rehashage!
THAT'S who he was!! Thanx for reminding me - I'm a bit sad it's ending, thought the downhill started when it left my old hometown of Vancouver (we'd often see them filming in Kitsilano or the UBC Endowment lands). When I was there over New Year's, I was having breakfast in a popular place, Sophie's Cosmic Cafe, and I saw a guy who looked SO familar from something on TV and I couldn't figure out what....it was Krychek! Not nearly so scary in real life! Maybe I didn't realize it was him as there was no Mulder whaling on him......
Gibson lives in Canada (Kitsilano, Vancouver, British Columbia) but I'm not sure he's a citizen. He definitely speaks with a semi-southern accent - I believe he mentioned North Carolina at a reading of his I went to a few years back.....