...on a "real science" note, these remains are one of the older human finds with enough intact DNA to reliably classify the maternal and paternal lineages. Usable mitochondrial DNA was found in 9 of the 13 individuals; there were 3 in mtDNA haplogroup K1b, 2 in haplogroup X2, and one apiece in haplogroup U5b, I, H, and K1a2. Three males in the same grave (an adult and two children) were found to be members of Y-DNA haplogroup R1a.
Since the summary didn't mention it (but TFA did), this is a big deal since unlike previous Neanderthal DNA analysis, this is the first time anyone's published a complete mitochondrial DNA sequence.
The sequence has 206 differences from the revised Cambridge Reference Sequence, which is about double the number of differences ever found in any modern human.
The authors believe they can extract enough uncontaminated autosomal and sex chromosome DNA have the rest of the genome done sometime next year.
SNPedia has been around since August 2006. It's just for SNPs, not entire genes, and focuses on SNPs used in commercial testing, but the layout of SNPedia and the proposed wiki in the paper are fairly similar.
I didn't RTFA, but I'm guessing they're referring to CCR5-delta32. While somewhat rare overall, it's most common in people of Northern European descent. The good news: increased HIV and smallpox resistance. The bad news: decreased overall T cell function and West Nile resistance.
All of those are found in Europe to varying degrees; the only item of note is that the K and one of the H samples had no exact matches when compared to a database containing over 15,000 mtDNA sequences.
For the lazy, they tested his mitochondrial DNA (he turned out to be a member of mtDNA haplogroup A), and compared that to a number of living people. None of the 17 matches are his direct descendants, but have a common matrilineal ancestry.
Besides that, Mormons were among the earliest adopters of genealogical DNA testing; the implications of which don't make any sense if you're denying the existence of evolution. (Of course, they were most strongly interested in genetic genealogy so that they could try to provide some of the crazier aspects of their theology, but that's another matter.)
(Food) plants also have a larger set of possible allele combinations per gene, as they usually have 3, 4, 6 or 8 copies of each chromosome. (You and I have to get by with "only" 2.)
One of the best places in the continental United States to see the night sky is in the Sandhills of north-central Nebraska. For the past 15 years, Nebraska astronomy clubs have held the Nebraska Star Party in late July or early August out in the Sandhills.
One of the pages on my watchlist is Adrian Smith (R - Nebraska, third district). About once a month, an anon IP or recently-created user account tries to whitewash his WP article by removing unflattering sourced details about his campaign contributors.
If you want to follow along in the fun, view the article history.
In Nebraska, we've voted in term limits for our state legislators three times. Because Nebraska has the nation's only unicameral (meaning only one congressional body, rather than two like a house and senate), the people's vote via referendum is considered the check and balance of "the other house."
In all three cases, the legislators threw the term limits out (which limit them to only a few terms). They refuse to leave, and have deemed the overwhelming majority vote of the people to be either caused by confusion reading ballets or just plain wrong.
That's flat-out incorrect. The Legislature didn't throw the term limits out, the courts did, as Nebraska's first two attempts at a term limit law also imposed term limits on federal representatives, something the State of Nebraska has no jurisdiction over. The third time, they limited it to state officials, and (SURPRISE!) the courts had no problems with it. I don't know how you can say that they "refused to leave" when every legislator who was term-limited out did indeed leave after the 2006 election.
Because the people kept on sending out petitions to get it back on the ballot and voted on, the legislature decided to fix that. They made all sorts of new rules on the petition process, cutting the time to circulate petitions in half, doubling the required amount of votes, using nefarious methods to reject signatures, etc.
Those changes you speak of only happened AFTER the final success of the term limit initiatives. Don't conflate to the two together to show evidence of some evil plot.
Once you let someone be a full-time politician, the power goes to their head. The influence of lobbyists and the nice gifts they bring matters much more than any pathetic constituent. Show me someone who's a life-long politician and I'll show you a crook - party need not matter.
Hey Slashdot! Want to have fun? Read (and reply to) some of the comments in the Journal Star articles about UNL and the RIAA (available here and here.)
FYI, tornadoes are probably the easiest natural disaster to avoid; all you have to do is pay at least slight attention to the weather and have access to a basement or interior room. I've lived in Tornado Alley my entire life, and it's been 15 years since the last time a tornado came close enough to where I live that taking cover was justified.
On the other hand, even though it's very unlikely to happen in my lifetime, a Yellowstone eruption would almost certainly own much of North America. An eruption from that hot spot 10-12 million years ago killed wildlife halfway across the continent.
My alma mater is third in RIAA notices; after so many years of football dominance, it's nice to be in the top 5 of something again. Like Ohio University, the campus network at UNL makes it relatively easy to associate people with IPs.
(On a related note, the 100-person computer science/business honors program I was in was, at one time, using something in the area of 25% of the student housing network bandwidth; note that this particular network has about 5,000 users.)
Have you ever been remotely near a "farming state"? I'm shocked that you actually believe that people in rural areas don't know or don't want Internet access. Do you have any idea how important and useful online shopping, weather information, and instantaneous communication are for those who don't live close to large population centers or retail hubs?
This is a question that's been bugging me for a while: even if you use the non-inflated numbers, who and where are the people that actually play Second Life? I do not know a single person who has played it for longer than a trivial amount of time, even though my social circle is overrepresented in practically every other area of the online world. I find it strange that SL receives so much press even though the usual reason for unjustified media hype (being owned by a media conglomerate) doesn't apply to this situation.
I had a discussion about this with my friends recently; the best answers I got about Second Life are that it's bigger in Europe than here in the U.S., it caters more to the MySpace crowd than, say, the WoW crowd, and that, of course, it's mostly for porn anyway.
Well, that's probably (another) reason that I manage to have a hard time creating memorable "hooks" with other people; I have practically no interest in keeping up with or finding new music. (It isn't that I don't enjoy nearly all forms of music, mind you, it's just that, for me, there's approximately zero value in seeking out new things to listen to.)
On a related note, the common geek tendency to disparage everyone who doesn't have the same eXtreMely obscure/not-yet-trendy/running counter to current popular opinion taste in music as he/she does is very lamentable. Seriously, most people don't use their taste in music to define themselves, so judging people on that is very narrow-minded.
Slashdot Mirror
...on a "real science" note, these remains are one of the older human finds with enough intact DNA to reliably classify the maternal and paternal lineages. Usable mitochondrial DNA was found in 9 of the 13 individuals; there were 3 in mtDNA haplogroup K1b, 2 in haplogroup X2, and one apiece in haplogroup U5b, I, H, and K1a2. Three males in the same grave (an adult and two children) were found to be members of Y-DNA haplogroup R1a.
Entire haplogroup trees have been redefined because new information has revealed flaws in the previous models.
Not just that, but the redefinitions have come about in large part due to the efforts of hobbyists (the YDNA SNPs spreadsheet).
Surprised this hasn't been brought up yet...
Does anyone know if UK law has puffery defined in its trade laws, and if so, the extent (if any) allowed?
I presume that puffery protected Apple from similar problems here in the States.
Since the summary didn't mention it (but TFA did), this is a big deal since unlike previous Neanderthal DNA analysis, this is the first time anyone's published a complete mitochondrial DNA sequence.
The sequence has 206 differences from the revised Cambridge Reference Sequence, which is about double the number of differences ever found in any modern human.
The authors believe they can extract enough uncontaminated autosomal and sex chromosome DNA have the rest of the genome done sometime next year.
SNPedia has been around since August 2006. It's just for SNPs, not entire genes, and focuses on SNPs used in commercial testing, but the layout of SNPedia and the proposed wiki in the paper are fairly similar.
I didn't RTFA, but I'm guessing they're referring to CCR5-delta32. While somewhat rare overall, it's most common in people of Northern European descent. The good news: increased HIV and smallpox resistance. The bad news: decreased overall T cell function and West Nile resistance.
For the lazy, the samples found were:
All of those are found in Europe to varying degrees; the only item of note is that the K and one of the H samples had no exact matches when compared to a database containing over 15,000 mtDNA sequences.
Here's an article abstract.
For the lazy, they tested his mitochondrial DNA (he turned out to be a member of mtDNA haplogroup A), and compared that to a number of living people. None of the 17 matches are his direct descendants, but have a common matrilineal ancestry.
Besides that, Mormons were among the earliest adopters of genealogical DNA testing; the implications of which don't make any sense if you're denying the existence of evolution. (Of course, they were most strongly interested in genetic genealogy so that they could try to provide some of the crazier aspects of their theology, but that's another matter.)
(Food) plants also have a larger set of possible allele combinations per gene, as they usually have 3, 4, 6 or 8 copies of each chromosome. (You and I have to get by with "only" 2.)
The Proto theme is now the default in Mac OS X; no additional download is necessary.
(If you didn't click the link in the parent post, the upshot is that Firefox now looks a lot more like Safari.)
One of the best places in the continental United States to see the night sky is in the Sandhills of north-central Nebraska. For the past 15 years, Nebraska astronomy clubs have held the Nebraska Star Party in late July or early August out in the Sandhills.
One of the pages on my watchlist is Adrian Smith (R - Nebraska, third district). About once a month, an anon IP or recently-created user account tries to whitewash his WP article by removing unflattering sourced details about his campaign contributors.
If you want to follow along in the fun, view the article history.
Despite what Apple's Web site says, it installs on Windows 2000 just fine.
Hell, I'm typing this response in Safari 3 on Windows 2000.
Once again, life imitates Futurama.
In all three cases, the legislators threw the term limits out (which limit them to only a few terms). They refuse to leave, and have deemed the overwhelming majority vote of the people to be either caused by confusion reading ballets or just plain wrong.
That's flat-out incorrect. The Legislature didn't throw the term limits out, the courts did, as Nebraska's first two attempts at a term limit law also imposed term limits on federal representatives, something the State of Nebraska has no jurisdiction over. The third time, they limited it to state officials, and (SURPRISE!) the courts had no problems with it. I don't know how you can say that they "refused to leave" when every legislator who was term-limited out did indeed leave after the 2006 election.
Because the people kept on sending out petitions to get it back on the ballot and voted on, the legislature decided to fix that. They made all sorts of new rules on the petition process, cutting the time to circulate petitions in half, doubling the required amount of votes, using nefarious methods to reject signatures, etc.
Those changes you speak of only happened AFTER the final success of the term limit initiatives. Don't conflate to the two together to show evidence of some evil plot.
Once you let someone be a full-time politician, the power goes to their head. The influence of lobbyists and the nice gifts they bring matters much more than any pathetic constituent. Show me someone who's a life-long politician and I'll show you a crook - party need not matter.
Students still can (and do) have static IP addresses; now, however, you have to fill out a form to get one.
The 2000-2001 academic year was a wonderful time to be a freshman at UNL. No network caps whatsoever.
Well said. You should send that along to the Lincoln Journal Star , the Omaha World-Herald and the Daily Nebraskan .
Hey Slashdot! Want to have fun? Read (and reply to) some of the comments in the Journal Star articles about UNL and the RIAA (available here and here.)
FYI, tornadoes are probably the easiest natural disaster to avoid; all you have to do is pay at least slight attention to the weather and have access to a basement or interior room. I've lived in Tornado Alley my entire life, and it's been 15 years since the last time a tornado came close enough to where I live that taking cover was justified.
On the other hand, even though it's very unlikely to happen in my lifetime, a Yellowstone eruption would almost certainly own much of North America. An eruption from that hot spot 10-12 million years ago killed wildlife halfway across the continent.
My alma mater is third in RIAA notices; after so many years of football dominance, it's nice to be in the top 5 of something again. Like Ohio University, the campus network at UNL makes it relatively easy to associate people with IPs.
(On a related note, the 100-person computer science/business honors program I was in was, at one time, using something in the area of 25% of the student housing network bandwidth; note that this particular network has about 5,000 users.)
Update to this story:
The colossal squid was caught while consuming a colossal-mouth bass, not a Patagonian toothfish as originally reported.
I take it you haven't heard about the two-finger right click functionality
Have you ever been remotely near a "farming state"? I'm shocked that you actually believe that people in rural areas don't know or don't want Internet access. Do you have any idea how important and useful online shopping, weather information, and instantaneous communication are for those who don't live close to large population centers or retail hubs?
This is a question that's been bugging me for a while: even if you use the non-inflated numbers, who and where are the people that actually play Second Life? I do not know a single person who has played it for longer than a trivial amount of time, even though my social circle is overrepresented in practically every other area of the online world. I find it strange that SL receives so much press even though the usual reason for unjustified media hype (being owned by a media conglomerate) doesn't apply to this situation.
I had a discussion about this with my friends recently; the best answers I got about Second Life are that it's bigger in Europe than here in the U.S., it caters more to the MySpace crowd than, say, the WoW crowd, and that, of course, it's mostly for porn anyway.
Well, that's probably (another) reason that I manage to have a hard time creating memorable "hooks" with other people; I have practically no interest in keeping up with or finding new music. (It isn't that I don't enjoy nearly all forms of music, mind you, it's just that, for me, there's approximately zero value in seeking out new things to listen to.)
On a related note, the common geek tendency to disparage everyone who doesn't have the same eXtreMely obscure/not-yet-trendy/running counter to current popular opinion taste in music as he/she does is very lamentable. Seriously, most people don't use their taste in music to define themselves, so judging people on that is very narrow-minded.