Let's go synthetic

Oct 23, 2013 19:07

One of the base facts of biology that prves evolution from common ancestor is the fact that all organisms on Earth share the same genetic code (except for tiny differences in some very old organisms among Archea and things like mitochondria). Codons made of 3 bases correspond to either one of the 21 amino acids used (some amino acids are coded by more then one codon) or a stop sign (stop codons) that truncates protein syntesis. The meanings of those codons is the same in all organisms which is why we can genetically engineer bacteria to produce human insulin by putting insulin gene in it. It's also why viruses can move between species (nature's genetic engineering). One of those stop codons was replaced and recoded in an E. coli strain creating a different genetic code (making aliens). It was change to code for an amino acid that is never used in nature leading way to a designer proteins. This is more radical change then any GMOs because it creates a new lanuage of biology that 7s incompatible with all other life on Earth (it also makes it hard for it survive due to lack of ec8system). Some day it may even mean we'll get to make proteins fom D-amino acids.

Women are already stressed out about aging in our culture of eternal youth cult and obligatory sexiness and then it turns out that women's breasts age faster than the rest of our body. The metylation status of DNA from different tissues in the body can give information about relative age of theose tissues. Researchers checked the changes of methylation with age and compared them to other markers of molecular aging like telomere lenght and then used that to estimate the ages of different tissues. Hearts are about 9 years younger but woman breasts are 2-3 years older. And you thought that the pressure for getting breast plastic surgery was already high.

The last 12 months were hottest on record in Australia. This resulted in massive bush fires that got Sidney covered by gigant smoke cloud. As temperature rises so does droughts and fires prevalence. This is all our fault.

Long time ago when analog, over the air radio and TV were the thing you would scan for the programs and in between hear and/orsee white noise of background radio waves. The empty space between stations was needed so they wouldn't interfere with each other but with the advent of digital broadcasting they became wider than necessary. One proposition to use this free space is to provide wireless Internet and one such project in UK goes on trial.

Wikipedia is crashing on the paid-for 'sockpuppet' entries. Wikipedia doesn't do ads and begs for donation to avoid conflict of interest and being forced to promote sponsors. So I'm not surprised they aren't happy. Even though it was inevitable someone would get this idea and try to profit from it.

future is now, science, biology, environment, links

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