Cereal killer: Are you eating too much iron? http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429980.500-cereal-killer-are-you-eating-too-much-iron.html Too much from vitamins is potentially linked to heart disease, cancer &c
Archive for the 'PopSci' Category
Cereal killer: Are you eating too much iron? – health – 04 December 2014 – Test – New Scientist
December 31, 2014Machine Intelligence Cracks Genetic Controls | Quanta Magazine
December 28, 2014https://www.quantamagazine.org/20141218-machine-intelligence-cracks-genetic-controls/
QT:{{”
The splicing code is just one part of the noncoding genome, the area that does not produce proteins. But it’s a very important one. Approximately 90 percent of genes undergo alternative splicing, and scientists estimate that variations in the splicing code make up anywhere between 10 and 50 percent of all disease-linked mutations. “When you have mutations in the regulatory code, things can go very wrong,” Frey said.
“People have historically focused on mutations in the protein-coding regions, to some degree because they have a much better handle on what these mutations do,” said Mark Gerstein, a bioinformatician at Yale University, who was not involved in the study. “As we gain a better understanding of [the DNA sequences] outside of the protein-coding regions, we’ll get a better sense of how important they are in terms of disease.”
Scientists have made some headway into understanding how the cell chooses a particular protein configuration, but much of the code that governs this process has remained an enigma. Frey’s team was able to decipher some of these regulatory regions in a paper published in 2010, identifying a rough code within the mouse genome that regulates splicing. Over the past four years, the quality of genetics data — particularly human data — has improved dramatically, and
machine-learning techniques have become much more sophisticated, enabling Frey and his collaborators to predict how splicing is affected by specific mutations at many sites across the human genome. “Genome-wide data sets are finally able to enable predictions like this,” said Manolis Kellis, a computational biologist at MIT who was not involved in the study.
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AI Teams Up With Genomics To Find Disease Causing Mutations : Science : Design & Trend
December 28, 2014Goodbye, paper: What we miss when we read on screen – tech – 29 October 2014 – New Scientist
December 26, 2014Goodbye, paper: What we miss when we read on screen http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429930.500-goodbye-paper-what-we-miss-when-we-read-on-screen.html Perhaps we’d learn better from less typing & more handwriting
Can AIDS Be Cured? | The New Yorker
December 24, 2014Can #AIDS Be Cured? http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/22/can-aids-cured Now a chronic disease, treatable w/ HAART cocktails? Parallels w/ cancer evolution & resistance
MEDICAL DISPATCH DECEMBER 22, 2014 ISSUE
CAN AIDS BE CURED?
Researchers get closer to outwitting a killer.
BY JEROME GROOPMAN
Weird wet worlds: Why Earth is lucky to have oceans – environment – 03 November 2014 – Test – New Scientist
December 23, 2014Weird wet worlds…Earth is lucky to have oceans http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429930.600 Surface ones absent in solar system, except for Titan’s hydrocarbons
Titan has 2 oceans, one under another
Mathematicians Make a Major Discovery About Prime Numbers | WIRED
December 23, 2014Major Discovery About #Prime Numbers
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/mathematicians-make-major-discovery-prime-numbers Extension of trick to find spans of composites, eg start w/ 101! add 2,3,4…101
QT:{{”
The two new proofs of Erdős’ conjecture are both based on a simple way to construct large prime gaps. A large prime gap is the same thing as a long list of non-prime, or “composite,” numbers between two prime numbers. Here’s one easy way to construct a list of, say, 100 composite numbers in a row: Start with the numbers 2, 3, 4, … , 101, and add to each of these the number 101 factorial (the product of the first 101 numbers, written 101!). The list then becomes 101! + 2, 101! + 3, 101! + 4, … , 101! + 101. Since 101! is divisible by all the numbers from 2 to 101, each of the numbers in the new list is composite: 101! + 2 is divisible by 2, 101! + 3 is divisible by 3, and so on. “All the proofs about large prime gaps use only slight variations on this high school construction,” said James Maynard of Oxford, who wrote the second of the two papers.
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Are some people doomed to be fat? – health – 12 November 2014 – New Scientist
December 19, 2014Are some people doomed to be fat?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429950.400-are-some-people-doomed-to-be-fat.html Overview of metabolism & #obesity; addresses common myths, eg don’t eat before bed
Also:
14 myths and maybes about burning fat
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26549-14-myths-and-maybes-about-burning-fat.html
Computing history: Geeks, Inc. : Nature : Nature Publishing Group
November 24, 2014http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7520/full/514032a.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20141002
NATURE | BOOKS AND ARTS
Computing history: Geeks, Inc.
Jennifer Light
Nature 514, 32–33 (02 October 2014) doi:10.1038/514032a
Jennifer Light enjoys a chronicle of the collaborations that conjured the digital realm.
The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster: 2014.ISBN: 9781471138799
Nuclear reaction
November 22, 2014Nuclear reaction
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21630959-how-complex-cells-evolved-mystery-new-idea-may-come-close Hypothesis from BMC paper on #evolution of eukaryotes from membrane blebs (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/12/76)
An inside-out origin for the eukaryotic cell
David A Baum and Buzz Baum
BMC Biology 2014, 12:76 doi:10.1186/s12915-014-0076-2
QT:{{”
The consensus is that the first eukaryote was a prokaryote which engulfed, but failed on several occasions to digest, other
prokaryotes. One of these undigested meals was a bacterium ancestral to mitochondria. Even today mitochondria have their own genes separate from those in the nucleus. These genes, which are carried on circular DNA molecules like those in bacteria, resemble those in a group of bacteria called Rickettsiales,
…
They imagine the original host prokaryote creating small protrusions, known to microbiologists as blebs, that poked out of it, as the diagram shows, like tiny fingers. Blebs like this are known to form in certain sorts of archaea, a group of prokaryotes distinct from bacteria proper that biochemical evidence suggests were involved in the formation of eukaryotes. The job of blebs is unclear, as archaea are not a well-studied group, but they may be feeding structures. The Drs Baum suggest that, in the case of the ancestral eukaryote, the blebs grew bigger and bigger, pinning proto-mitochondria (and, on a subsequent occasion, proto-chloroplasts), into the intervening spaces. “}}
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