Ok, fair enough, perhaps saying that they can't do anything by themselves is an exageration, but they can't produce life by themselves, which is really the key.
Neither can proteins. But there is a pretty prevalent theory that kind of makes sense (to me at least) that says that RNA was the precursor to life. RNA molecules arose and were self replicating at low efficiencies owing to their primary structures. (With the generation of appropriate RNA molecules, you can get RNA that are self-replicating at high efficiencies, but I digress). Of course, were stuck into this question of "What is life?", and not knowing your personal definition, I'm not going to comment much on it. Suffice it to say that life itself is not black and white, and frankly, in a lot of instances, the answer to the question is not particularly important. (It's more of a label than an accurate description of what is going on.)
You can't consider RNA and DNA on their own because they belong in a complete system. Even viruses require a protein coat, and they're in between in the life/not-life category. To understand anything living, you need the proteins too.
For a bottom to top holistic understanding, of course. I totally agree that a synthesis of knowlege, from DNA, RNA and proteins to lipids, co-enzymes, co-factors, hormones, etc. is necessary in order to even begin to fully comprehend a complex system. (Actually, the synthesis of this information is one of the branches of the research I am doing right now... and if you'd like to dicuss it further, I wouldn't mind.)
The fact is that DNA itself is pretty useless. It can't do anything without proteins, and it's the proteins that are actually acting on each other, on the DNA, and on the RNA.
Whoa. DNA and RNA are quite capable of doing stuff on their own without proteins. Proteins are generally more versatile than RNA and DNA, but much more costly to generate. See RNA World for some perspective.
That said, it's probably the proteins that allow these functions in terms of things like splicing out introns (alternate splicing is a form of branching)
Actually, it's RNA (SnRNA) with proteins acting as a scaffold to increase efficiency that handles splicing, although generally it is small proteins (but sometimes rna) that forces the spliceosome into choosing alternate splicing pathways. You could consider this as a form of branching, but the code is ever so much more complex than that. What is almost happening at the DNA level is a vast form of preprocessing on the source code, sort of a loading of the libraries and code base that will be operated on by the cell... it only has a few operations that it can perform, but it performs them well.
What is a raw sequence? Is it just a list of all the base pairs in one person's DNA?
Yes. A raw DNA sequence is just the ordering of bases on one side of dna. Looks kind of like this:
ACTGGCTGCTAC
And what does "the human genome has been sequenced" mean, anyway?
That we know the sequence of all the parts of the human genome. IE, we now know the order of bases for each chromosome's coding length... (there are parts of chromosomes that don't contribute to genes... they are primarily there for structural purposes.)
The article does NOT say that the rent-a-center version of Windows will not play MP3 files. Neither does it say that it will be fundamentally crippled when it comes to the creation of MP3 files.
Whether or not the article is true is something else, but read this:
Microsoft's new restrictions -- which prevent its built-in software from recording MP3 files at fidelity rates higher than 56 kilobits per second
Sure sounds like fundamentally crippled MP3 creation to me.
But to read the responses that people post, you'd think that XP had an anti-MP3 layer built in to the OS itself preventing both the playback of existing MP3's, as well as causing applications that can create them to crash.
Now, I think as usual, the anti-M$ crew are over reacting, but there were some things in the article that could be interpreted as slightly wierd:
early testers of beta versions of Windows XP already complain that the most popular MP3 recording applications -- which compete with Microsoft's format -- don't seem to function properly, apparently because of changes Microsoft made to how data are written on CD-ROMs under Windows XP.
Of course, it's normal for API's to change slightly, and they could have changed the way that the CDDI interface works for perfectly normal reasons. It's just with Microsoft's track record, it's pretty easy to see even normal things as a hallmark of their monopolistic desires. (Bold quotes above from the article).
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
Other Universities Online Classes (Where's Yours?)
on
Open Courses at MIT
·
· Score: 1
I know that the University that I currently attend (UC Riverside) has a lot of it's courses available online. It's quite usefull to have your course notes available in an easily desiminated and modifiable format like most of the available digital formats allow.
Of course, MIT's plan seems to be much better than ours, as online class information is generally only available to students who are enrolled in the corse for most courses (although this is at the discretion of the professor, who can decided whether or not to allow public acces.)
In it's short tenure here on campus, it has become one of the most usefull resourses available for many classes. (Saves me from getting my information on dead tree format)
I know quite a large number of fellow slashdotters are also university students, or recently graduated, so I'll pose a question (that hopefully will be answered by at least a few of you): What sorts of resources are available on your campus?
The differences is that MacOS is intended for clueless users. Clueless users don't
I'm going to ignore this troll.
realise that running umpteen applications at the same time is going to adversely affect performance.
Actaully, on classic MacOS before VM, running N processes doesn't affect performance. (If you can run N processes in the available memory...;-)
I suppose OS 9 got around this issue by simply crashing if you loaded too many apps, thus training users to run fewer
Actually, OS 9 just gives you an out of memory error. See this comment for explanation.
but OS X degrades gracefully will stick work even if the harddrive is thrashing to keep up.
Quite right. This is why ide hard drives are quite annoying. You will eventually run out of memory, but it takes quite some time. (Course, you'll be hard-pressed to reach it if you have 4G of swap as they had in the test)
For some reason I get the feeling that I'm feeding trolls. But anyway...
UNIX is a multiuser timesharing system down to its very core; all system resources are fairly allocated amongst the processes running on the system.
Not true at all. Most UNIX machines have an equivalent of nice or real-time scheduling that enables "important" processes to get more time and resources than other applications.
For the Single User Workstation, the user must be king: he decides what he wants to do with the system, and the system should respond as directed.
I supose you like having to wait 6-80 minutes for cd's to burn on a G4 733, where there is MORE than enough processing power to run 3-4 12x burners at the same time. Or how when you switch A worlds, and you pull down a menu, programs in the background stop updating. Or how when netscape locks trying to look up a domain name, it can't update other windows. In fact, most programms for "Classic" Mac OS take advantage of the scheduler to get around these and many other disadvantages of cooperative multitasking. Most of the flaws in Classic stem from there roots in OS 1.0, and they haven't been designed out yet in the name of backwards compatibility.
Just for kicks, see the difference in running 20 terminals, two separate web browsers, a mp3 player, and a cd burner all at the same time in MacOS X and Mac OS 9, and see how much you enjoy co-operative multi-tasking.
no, it dosent matter that the nobium wire in the MRI machine is a perfect diamagnet because no one cares about that property in an MRI. the superconducting Nb
Are they actualy using superconducting magnets in medical NMR's? I don't seem to remember seing a dewer present in the last ones I looked at. They definetly don't need that much resolving power, probably only weigh in at like 100 MHz if that, and I thought you could reach that fairly easily with a non-superconducting electromagnet or permanent magnet.
(I'm still picking up my NMR skills, work on a 500 MHz Verian doing duterium work... Oxford magnet, LiHE cooled, pretty normal stuff.)
is used to more easily create a high magnetic field to flip the spins of protons in your body.
The magnet orients the spins of the protons in the same direction. You apply RF to flip protons, and then recieve RF as they relax.
Course, your other points seem to be right on. (Not that I know much about superconductive materials...)
As far as I am aware it is most elegantly demonstrated (to the lay person) in The Emporer's New Mind by Robert Penrose (I belive that's his name... I suck at names). You should be able to find it in any decent public library.
It doesn't matter what kind of liscense the code has already been released under. It really doesn't matter what you want.
Actually, it does matter just a bit, because you are under contract. Contracts in themselves being complex beasties, the following may not apply, but many contracts have escape clauses, and if said licensing terms were not to the specificaion of the DoD, or if there was no mentioning of specific licensing, so long as the deliverables are usable as specified under the contract, the terms of the contract hold. (Of course, the O.J. effect can take hold and muddle the process.)
The DoD owns the code, because they paid you to develop it.
Again, not necesarily. It really depends on the terms of the contract.
If they want to incorporate it into a closed system, then they have the power to do so. If you raise a ruckus and attempt to stand in the way of that, you'll find yourself replaced, quickly.
You as a developer also always have the power to terminate the contract under one of the escape clauses that every contract should have. (If this one didn't, it's time to sue your contract lawyer for malpractice.) You simply fulfill the terms of the escape clause, be it paying back money or whatever, and the contract goes away. (Be prepared for litigation in this case though, as normally, people don't like that.)
Of course, the sensible thing is to figure out why the DoD doesn't like the GPL, and then relicense the code to them under a non-GPL license for more money, or use that relicensing as a tool to get further jobs. From the description, it sounds like the code is a module, and it can just be called from other programs without any issues. You may need to lgpl (or bsd) the manual and some include files, but that's no biggie.
Ok, I guess then at some point you disolve into a turing machine, where it comes quite clear (or seems quite clear) that you can't completely self-analyze a entire set of problems.
I assumed that you were refering to things that were able to come to grips with their existence, but quite possibly not their purpose. Ie, conciousness versus life, the universe, and everything.
(The bio-informatics part that wasn't exactly what you were looking for [sorry] was in reference to the method of understand our genetic code, and the possible methods of a mechanistic analysis of the products of said genetic code. [So while not purely mathematical/computer science, it is the field involved with the bulleted points...])
Post translational modification is quite common in almost all eukaryotes. (I think it may even be present in prokaryotes, but I'm not as familiar with them.)
Intron splicing via spliceosomes is modulated by factors such as U2AF (U2 Associated Factor) and proteins such as Sxl (Sex-less [Drosophila]) to produce active and inactive proteins from a single mRNA transcript.
We even see a different type of event called RNA editing in apoB protein, which you probably know forms VLDL's. It can be post-transcriptionally edited by editosomes to generate abortive aboB proteins that make cholomicrons (the super small liposomes). [If I remember correctly, C6666 is turned into an Inosine which turns a ACG into an AUG stop codon. (Sure about the C6666 part, but not about the intervening sequence.;-))]
Of course, this is all even before the post-translational modification that we know can take place (addtion of sugars, protein cleave (Ig, Pesinogen, etc...)).
It's not 600 genes that are different, it's 2% of the sequence of the 30,000 genes that are different. So (ignoring evolutionarily conserved sequences like histons and RNA polymerases) all 30,000 genes could be different. Knowing that only a single bp mutation causes sicle cell anemia, you can see that a difference of 2% can quite easily be significant. [I forget how many kbp hemoglobin is, think it is on the order of 2-3 kbp]
Even one protein can make a huge difference. PKC (Phospho-Kinase-C), one of the proteins that I work with, interacts with more than 100 other proteins throghout the cell. A modulation in its affinity for other proteins will dramatically affect the cells respons and (more likely) its viability.
What you are looking for is the field of bio-informatics, which integrates mathmatics, computer science, and biology. (With some chemistry, physics, and philosophy thrown in for good measure.)
As far as self-analysis goes, it's something that human beings do every day, which is "code" that analyzes itself.
Every now and then we get mail with my name and our 5+4 zipcode on it. So yeah.. mail sometimes comes without the normal street address. [Even really fast when you send it with the barcode on it.;-)]
Of much greater concern is genetically modified humans. THAT is something very serious - and the time is coming. I recently saw an article describing the first genetically modified primate - a monkey with a special gene that produces a flourescent dye for use in research. Now THAT is scary.
Gee would that "flourescent dye" happen to be Beta-Galactose being formed by integrating a virus with a promotor region and the reporter gene lacZ?
Frankly, that's not terribly exciting. You can stick luciferace, or just about anything you want into a primate or any other animal. (Even plants.... some genetic botanist made a glow in the dark tabacco plant on my campus [luciferace (glow gene) coupled to a promotor of xylem growth]).
There's really not much "genetic engineering" going on. It's primarily genetic addition, and furthermore, it's very heavy handed to say the least.
Normally, for smaller molecules and proteins, yeah... but DNA can be kilobases long. Just the process of forming ice crystals can break longer strands of DNA.
In fact, one of the methods in the laboratory used to split long segments of dna into more managable parts is to stir it. (Basically, getting to 0K without breakage isn't the real problem, it's geting past 273K without having freezing going on...[dehydration may be a possibility])
This could allow the creation of self assembling superconducting circuits.
As far as self assembling superconducting circuits, DNA is probably not the right way to go. Currently the rules of DNA superhelix assembly are way to complex to easily predict. Plus, at super conducting temperatures, there is no way that the DNA is going to be capable of self assembly. (the experiment was conducted with DNA molecules of length 2-3, 10sh and 20-30 bases.)
Furthermore, just the process of supercooling DNA will probably denature molecules of any interesting length and structure. Finally, once all this is done, how in the world do you compute with just a string of DNA at that cold of a tempurature? I wouldn't think that it would be any more interesting in ability to compute than a bucky tube.
I highly suggest that you watch Gattaca if you really feel this way.
The movie demonstrates some of the outgrowths that have a high probability of occurence if we allow genetic testing to predetermine the ability/future of individuals. (This reminds me of a famous learning question. Do poor students do poorly because of genes, or do they do poorly because teachers/educators assume they are poor students and so don't push them as hard?)
Now, of course, genetic testing has it's uses, but it should most definetly not be used for discrimination in all but the most demanding jobs. (And even then, I would have grave reservations about a genetic test determining whether a fully qualified applicant was even able to train for a job.)
If you wish to provide that service for the bugtrack list, you are more than welcome.
But seriously, most people on the list are very busy, and the moderators at least have limited time for reformatting 'sploits. Plus, everytime you rewrite something, you have to understand the issue first, and there is always a danger of screwing up the meaning of the vunerability.
In short, the answer is yes. You couple up a virus with the GFP (green florescing protein) DNA (or RNA) sequence, get the virus to target specifcially your epethelial cells (not sure how to do that, probably some epethialial specific protein) and then infect you. Assuming the virus evades your immune system, and the resulting changes in your cells proteins don't cause your immune system to freak out and decide to digest your entire skin (I think GFP at this level would cause the immune system to decide it was "self") you would have green glowing skin. (Under the appropriate light, probably UV if I remember correctly.)
Of course, when you shed, you'd leave behind a train of GFP, so everyone would know where you had been, who you had touched, etc... but hey, that's the price you pay for green glowing skin.
Science in CNN is always interesting. Time to go to the primary source to figure out what is actually going on.
To examine whether bone marrow-derived cells could give rise to cells in the brain, adult marrow was harvested from transgenic mice (8 to 10 weeks of age) that ubiquitously expressed enhanced green
fluorescent protein (GFP) (13). GFP-expressing (GFP+) bone marrow was administered by tail vein injection (6 × 106 nucleated cells per recipient) into lethally irradiated, isogenic adult (8- to 10-week-old)
recipients (14). Brains harvested several months after the transplant (post-transplant) and examined by light microscopy revealed the presence of GFP+ cells throughout the CNS, including the olfactory bulb,
hippocampus, cortical areas, and cerebellum. No cells expressed detectable GFP in five age-matched bone marrow recipients (controls) transplanted with marrow that was not genetically engineered to express
GFP. Thus, bone marrow-derived GFP+ cells were clearly present in the brain.
Unfortuanatly, the mere precense of green florescing protein doesn't conclusively demonstrate that the bone-marrow cells have become neurons. I submit that if you were to look at cells throughout the body, you would have found differentiated stem cells glowing throughout the entire mouse. Nicely however, this data isn't shown, or even elluded to.
However, what does begin to demonstrate that the bone-marrow cells actually became neuronal cells is the staining process, where you stain for neuronal proteins. Of course, B cells have a nasty habit of trapping free neuronal proteins, so you would have to control for that, but that can be overcome. Course, one would really like to see a protein affinity study to conclusively demonstrate that the cells are actually neuronal, but I'm not a neurologist, so I won't digress.
Merzey's work deals more elegantly with the problem by not dealing with GPF at all and instead heading straight for genetic material, by using male stem cells in a female mice. (XY instead of XX, trivial to find Y using staining microscopy) This cleans up most of the nastyness of the GPF.
In addition Merzy deals with the differentiation of neuronal cells much more effectively, convicing me at least that these stem cells actually became neuronal cells, rather than just leaking out into the brain accidental like. Of course, the real trick now is to figure out what got the cells to become neurons.
I'm going to guess that it only works in stem cells, and occurs because of the influence of neuronal proteins on neurons affects the differentiation of cells that can actually change fate into something that suits their environment. (Ie, have a non-locked (non-genetic) path determination). Probably just the proteins that turned the neurons into neurons in the first place continue to act on cells that through some strange occurence end up in the range of those proteins
Slashdot Mirror
Go ahead and send me an e-mail since I don't seem to be able to find yours... ;-)
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
Actually, it's RNA (SnRNA) with proteins acting as a scaffold to increase efficiency that handles splicing, although generally it is small proteins (but sometimes rna) that forces the spliceosome into choosing alternate splicing pathways. You could consider this as a form of branching, but the code is ever so much more complex than that. What is almost happening at the DNA level is a vast form of preprocessing on the source code, sort of a loading of the libraries and code base that will be operated on by the cell... it only has a few operations that it can perform, but it performs them well.
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
What is a raw sequence? Is it just a list of all the base pairs in one person's DNA?
Yes. A raw DNA sequence is just the ordering of bases on one side of dna. Looks kind of like this:
ACTGGCTGCTAC
And what does "the human genome has been sequenced" mean, anyway?
That we know the sequence of all the parts of the human genome. IE, we now know the order of bases for each chromosome's coding length... (there are parts of chromosomes that don't contribute to genes... they are primarily there for structural purposes.)
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
Sure sounds like fundamentally crippled MP3 creation to me.
Now, I think as usual, the anti-M$ crew are over reacting, but there were some things in the article that could be interpreted as slightly wierd:
Of course, it's normal for API's to change slightly, and they could have changed the way that the CDDI interface works for perfectly normal reasons. It's just with Microsoft's track record, it's pretty easy to see even normal things as a hallmark of their monopolistic desires. (Bold quotes above from the article).
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
I know that the University that I currently attend (UC Riverside) has a lot of it's courses available online. It's quite usefull to have your course notes available in an easily desiminated and modifiable format like most of the available digital formats allow.
Of course, MIT's plan seems to be much better than ours, as online class information is generally only available to students who are enrolled in the corse for most courses (although this is at the discretion of the professor, who can decided whether or not to allow public acces.)
In it's short tenure here on campus, it has become one of the most usefull resourses available for many classes. (Saves me from getting my information on dead tree format)
I know quite a large number of fellow slashdotters are also university students, or recently graduated, so I'll pose a question (that hopefully will be answered by at least a few of you): What sorts of resources are available on your campus?
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
Actaully, on classic MacOS before VM, running N processes doesn't affect performance. (If you can run N processes in the available memory...
Actually, OS 9 just gives you an out of memory error. See this comment for explanation.
Quite right. This is why ide hard drives are quite annoying. You will eventually run out of memory, but it takes quite some time. (Course, you'll be hard-pressed to reach it if you have 4G of swap as they had in the test)
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
Not true at all. Most UNIX machines have an equivalent of nice or real-time scheduling that enables "important" processes to get more time and resources than other applications.
I supose you like having to wait 6-80 minutes for cd's to burn on a G4 733, where there is MORE than enough processing power to run 3-4 12x burners at the same time. Or how when you switch A worlds, and you pull down a menu, programs in the background stop updating. Or how when netscape locks trying to look up a domain name, it can't update other windows. In fact, most programms for "Classic" Mac OS take advantage of the scheduler to get around these and many other disadvantages of cooperative multitasking. Most of the flaws in Classic stem from there roots in OS 1.0, and they haven't been designed out yet in the name of backwards compatibility.
Just for kicks, see the difference in running 20 terminals, two separate web browsers, a mp3 player, and a cd burner all at the same time in MacOS X and Mac OS 9, and see how much you enjoy co-operative multi-tasking.
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
The magnet orients the spins of the protons in the same direction. You apply RF to flip protons, and then recieve RF as they relax.
Course, your other points seem to be right on. (Not that I know much about superconductive materials...)
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
As far as I am aware it is most elegantly demonstrated (to the lay person) in The Emporer's New Mind by Robert Penrose (I belive that's his name... I suck at names). You should be able to find it in any decent public library.
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
Again, not necesarily. It really depends on the terms of the contract.
You as a developer also always have the power to terminate the contract under one of the escape clauses that every contract should have. (If this one didn't, it's time to sue your contract lawyer for malpractice.) You simply fulfill the terms of the escape clause, be it paying back money or whatever, and the contract goes away. (Be prepared for litigation in this case though, as normally, people don't like that.)
Of course, the sensible thing is to figure out why the DoD doesn't like the GPL, and then relicense the code to them under a non-GPL license for more money, or use that relicensing as a tool to get further jobs. From the description, it sounds like the code is a module, and it can just be called from other programs without any issues. You may need to lgpl (or bsd) the manual and some include files, but that's no biggie.
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
Erghh.
Ok, I guess then at some point you disolve into a turing machine, where it comes quite clear (or seems quite clear) that you can't completely self-analyze a entire set of problems.
I assumed that you were refering to things that were able to come to grips with their existence, but quite possibly not their purpose. Ie, conciousness versus life, the universe, and everything.
(The bio-informatics part that wasn't exactly what you were looking for [sorry] was in reference to the method of understand our genetic code, and the possible methods of a mechanistic analysis of the products of said genetic code. [So while not purely mathematical/computer science, it is the field involved with the bulleted points...])
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
only packages with major numbers
The key here is the word major.
Most packages are numbered <MAJOR>.<MINOR>.<PATCH> or similar.
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
You're actually almost on the right path.
;-))]
Post translational modification is quite common in almost all eukaryotes. (I think it may even be present in prokaryotes, but I'm not as familiar with them.)
Intron splicing via spliceosomes is modulated by factors such as U2AF (U2 Associated Factor) and proteins such as Sxl (Sex-less [Drosophila]) to produce active and inactive proteins from a single mRNA transcript.
We even see a different type of event called RNA editing in apoB protein, which you probably know forms VLDL's. It can be post-transcriptionally edited by editosomes to generate abortive aboB proteins that make cholomicrons (the super small liposomes). [If I remember correctly, C6666 is turned into an Inosine which turns a ACG into an AUG stop codon. (Sure about the C6666 part, but not about the intervening sequence.
Of course, this is all even before the post-translational modification that we know can take place (addtion of sugars, protein cleave (Ig, Pesinogen, etc...)).
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
It's not 600 genes that are different, it's 2% of the sequence of the 30,000 genes that are different. So (ignoring evolutionarily conserved sequences like histons and RNA polymerases) all 30,000 genes could be different. Knowing that only a single bp mutation causes sicle cell anemia, you can see that a difference of 2% can quite easily be significant. [I forget how many kbp hemoglobin is, think it is on the order of 2-3 kbp]
Even one protein can make a huge difference. PKC (Phospho-Kinase-C), one of the proteins that I work with, interacts with more than 100 other proteins throghout the cell. A modulation in its affinity for other proteins will dramatically affect the cells respons and (more likely) its viability.
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
What you are looking for is the field of bio-informatics, which integrates mathmatics, computer science, and biology. (With some chemistry, physics, and philosophy thrown in for good measure.)
As far as self-analysis goes, it's something that human beings do every day, which is "code" that analyzes itself.
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
Every now and then we get mail with my name and our 5+4 zipcode on it. So yeah.. mail sometimes comes without the normal street address. [Even really fast when you send it with the barcode on it. ;-)]
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
Frankly, that's not terribly exciting. You can stick luciferace, or just about anything you want into a primate or any other animal. (Even plants.... some genetic botanist made a glow in the dark tabacco plant on my campus [luciferace (glow gene) coupled to a promotor of xylem growth]).
There's really not much "genetic engineering" going on. It's primarily genetic addition, and furthermore, it's very heavy handed to say the least.
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
Normally, for smaller molecules and proteins, yeah... but DNA can be kilobases long. Just the process of forming ice crystals can break longer strands of DNA.
In fact, one of the methods in the laboratory used to split long segments of dna into more managable parts is to stir it. (Basically, getting to 0K without breakage isn't the real problem, it's geting past 273K without having freezing going on...[dehydration may be a possibility])
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
As far as self assembling superconducting circuits, DNA is probably not the right way to go. Currently the rules of DNA superhelix assembly are way to complex to easily predict. Plus, at super conducting temperatures, there is no way that the DNA is going to be capable of self assembly. (the experiment was conducted with DNA molecules of length 2-3, 10sh and 20-30 bases.)
Furthermore, just the process of supercooling DNA will probably denature molecules of any interesting length and structure. Finally, once all this is done, how in the world do you compute with just a string of DNA at that cold of a tempurature? I wouldn't think that it would be any more interesting in ability to compute than a bucky tube.
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
I highly suggest that you watch Gattaca if you really feel this way.
The movie demonstrates some of the outgrowths that have a high probability of occurence if we allow genetic testing to predetermine the ability/future of individuals. (This reminds me of a famous learning question. Do poor students do poorly because of genes, or do they do poorly because teachers/educators assume they are poor students and so don't push them as hard?)
Now, of course, genetic testing has it's uses, but it should most definetly not be used for discrimination in all but the most demanding jobs. (And even then, I would have grave reservations about a genetic test determining whether a fully qualified applicant was even able to train for a job.)
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
Actually, it wouldn't be all that difficult to fit a human being onto a cd, as much of the human genome is repetitious and boring (read no genes).
Just gz humangenome.bin
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
If you wish to provide that service for the bugtrack list, you are more than welcome.
But seriously, most people on the list are very busy, and the moderators at least have limited time for reformatting 'sploits. Plus, everytime you rewrite something, you have to understand the issue first, and there is always a danger of screwing up the meaning of the vunerability.
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
Ergblah.
In short, the answer is yes. You couple up a virus with the GFP (green florescing protein) DNA (or RNA) sequence, get the virus to target specifcially your epethelial cells (not sure how to do that, probably some epethialial specific protein) and then infect you. Assuming the virus evades your immune system, and the resulting changes in your cells proteins don't cause your immune system to freak out and decide to digest your entire skin (I think GFP at this level would cause the immune system to decide it was "self") you would have green glowing skin. (Under the appropriate light, probably UV if I remember correctly.)
Of course, when you shed, you'd leave behind a train of GFP, so everyone would know where you had been, who you had touched, etc... but hey, that's the price you pay for green glowing skin.
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"
However, what does begin to demonstrate that the bone-marrow cells actually became neuronal cells is the staining process, where you stain for neuronal proteins. Of course, B cells have a nasty habit of trapping free neuronal proteins, so you would have to control for that, but that can be overcome. Course, one would really like to see a protein affinity study to conclusively demonstrate that the cells are actually neuronal, but I'm not a neurologist, so I won't digress.
Merzey's work deals more elegantly with the problem by not dealing with GPF at all and instead heading straight for genetic material, by using male stem cells in a female mice. (XY instead of XX, trivial to find Y using staining microscopy) This cleans up most of the nastyness of the GPF.
In addition Merzy deals with the differentiation of neuronal cells much more effectively, convicing me at least that these stem cells actually became neuronal cells, rather than just leaking out into the brain accidental like. Of course, the real trick now is to figure out what got the cells to become neurons.
I'm going to guess that it only works in stem cells, and occurs because of the influence of neuronal proteins on neurons affects the differentiation of cells that can actually change fate into something that suits their environment. (Ie, have a non-locked (non-genetic) path determination). Probably just the proteins that turned the neurons into neurons in the first place continue to act on cells that through some strange occurence end up in the range of those proteins
Oh yeah... for those of you who are actually interested, here is the links to the articles. Turning Blood into Brain: Cells Bearing Neuronal Antigens Generated in Vivo from Bone Marrow and From Marrow to Brain: Expression of Neuronal Phenotypes in Adult Mice.
Science 290:1779 and Science 290:1775 respectively.
Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"