https://twitter.com/jcbarret/status/1463975708770897923
B.1.1.529
Posts Tagged ‘keyabbrev’
Medicine Nobel goes to scientists who discovered biology of senses
October 17, 2021(818) Photograph 51 explained – YouTube
September 27, 2021Photo 51 – Wikipedia
August 26, 2021The unvaccinated are at risk as evolution accelerates the covid-19 pandemic | The Economist
August 14, 2021QT:{{”
In the original Wuhan genome the 501st position in the spike chain is occupied by an amino acid called asparagine. ….Mutations which cause just that substitution, known as n501y (or sometimes âNellyâ) subsequently turned up in the Alpha, Beta and Gamma variants. Another change they spotted, now called e484k (or âEekâ), was found in both Beta and Gamma.
…
The rbd is not the only part of the spike protein where mutations matter. In a preprint published on June 22nd Ravindra Gupta, a molecular virologist at Cambridge University, and his colleagues put forward an argument as to why Delta is both more infectious and better at evading immunity than other variants. It is based on a substitution at site 681, which is at the point where, after the rbd meets ace2, the protein is cleft in two.
….
Dr Gupta says p681r, helped by two shape-modifying mutations elsewhere, makes it easier for the protein to be cut up and thus get into cells. Its presence also means that, once a cell starts producing particles, their spike proteins can get on to the cellâs surface pre-cut.
“}}
How to Make Oobleck – A Simple Recipe for Making Slime | Live Science
May 19, 2021QT:{{”
Want to have fun with physics and even “walk on water”? Try making a mixture of cornstarch and water called oobleck. It makes a great science project or is just fun to Oobleck is a non-Newtonian fluid. “}}
CRISPR and the Splice to Survive | The New Yorker
April 28, 2021QT:{{”
A few feet away from the detoxed toads, Spot and Blondie were sitting in their own tank, an even more elaborate affair, with a picture of a tropical scene propped in front for their enjoyment. They were almost a year old and fully grown, with thick rolls of flesh around their midsections, like sumo wrestlers. Spot was mostly brown, with one yellowish hind leg; Blondie was more richly variegated, with whitish hind legs and light patches on his forelimbs and chest. Cooper reached a gloved hand into the tank and pulled out Blondie, whom sheâd described to me as âbeautiful.â He immediately peed on her. He appeared to be smiling malevolently. He had, it seemed to me, a face only a genetic engineer could love.
…
To guard against a Vonnegutian catastrophe, various fail-safe schemes have been proposed, with names like killer rescue, multi-locus assortment, and daisy chain. All of them share a basic, hopeful premise: it should be possible to engineer a gene drive thatâs effective but not too effective. Such a drive might be engineered so as to exhaust itself after a few generations, or it might be yoked to a gene variant thatâs limited to a single population on a single island. It has also been suggested that if a gene drive did somehow manage to go rogue it might be possible to send out into the world another gene drive, featuring a âCas9-triggered chain ablationââor catchaâsequence, to chase it down. What could possibly go wrong? “}}
Robo-writers: the rise and risks of language-generating AI
April 17, 2021https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00530-0
GPT3
QT:{{”
A neural networkâs size â and therefore its power â is roughly measured by how many parameters it has. These numbers define the strengths of the connections between neurons. More neurons and more connections means more parameters; GPT-3 has 175 billion. The next-largest language model of its kind has 17 billion (see âLarger language modelsâ). (In January, Google released a model with 1.6 trillion parameters, but itâs a âsparseâ model, meaning each parameter does less work. In terms of performance, this is equivalent to a âdenseâ model that has between 10 billion and 100 billion parameters, says William Fedus, a researcher at the University of Montreal, Canada, and Google.)
“}}
Human local adaptation of the TRPM8 cold receptor along a latitudinal cline
April 7, 2021Stumbled onto this paper. Thought the conclusion that Europeans were more cold-sensitive due to TRPM8 was quite counter-intuitive – but interesting nevertheless
https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1007298
cold receptor
linkstream2 microblog 