The popular science press rediscovers “junk DNA” every few months, usually with an article breathlessly pointing to some discovery or other where it’s claimed DNA previously believed to be “junk” turns out to have a some function or other. Gosh!
You’ll be hard pressed to find a peer reviewed reference where they claim that any given stretch of DNA in a genome is “junk”. The term is virtually unused in scientific publications compared to the net as a whole (searches for “Junk DNA” in PubMed & Google give 78 and ~256K hits respectively).
The Wikipedia discussion on the junk DNA entry has comments recommending that it be merged with Noncoding DNA. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, as it’s not really synonymous. “Junk DNA” is an expression of an idea that most of our genomic DNA has no function, but this is rather misleading and far too teleological an idea to apply to the products of evolution.
“If the Vikings were around today, they would probably be amazed at how much glow-in-the-dark stuff we have, and how we take so much of it for granted.”
— Jack Handey [Deep Thoughts]
Buying some glasses online for my Dad I ran across these ones at optical4less. I’m very close to buying them. The fact that you can buy high quality glasses for $50 makes frivolous purchases a lot more likely: this also points to a new business model selling cheap glasses for all occasions. Work glasses, semi-formal wear glasses, glasses specifically optimized for eating at McDonalds (grease shedding!). Angry optometrists feeling threatened by online glasses purchases should take note!
Just for fun looked at the number of GEO (Gene Expression Omnibus) sample submissions per submitter, ranked by number of submissions. Plotting the top 400 with the X axis being rank and the Y axis number of submissions, I note that it follows a very nice clean power law distribution (R^2 = 0.9957)!
I’m sure I’ll go to bioinformatics hell for graphing this in Excel and not R or gnuplot, but there it is.
It’s amazing where power laws show up if you look for them. I suspect most of this is due to power law distributions in size (and activity) of organizations/labs submitting.
About a week ago I saw a City of Ottawa employee dowsing at the corner of Alta Vista and Main. He was walking across a lawn using a couple of bent metal dowsing rods. I’m guessing he was looking for the location of a buried water pipe.
Is this standard practice for municipal employees?
From The Onion, an old one, still funny.
New Scientist has a blurb on an interesting paper on correlations between neighborhod walkability and obesity: Living on the wrong street could be making you fat, however I can’t find it at the American Journal of Preventative Medicine (AJMP): I think the citation might be wrong.
There are however many good articles about the association between urban design and weight/health in AJPM: just search for “built environment” on the site. Even if you don’t have access the abstracts are quite accessible.
Scanning a few related papers shows that there is a strong correlation between the age of neighborhoods and weight as older neighborhoods are more walkable in general. I can see how that would be the case: even where newer neighborhoods have sidewalks there isn’t much to walk to. We chose our house largely based on walkability: I always want to live in a location which doesn’t require me to own a car and we walk quite a bit as a result.
From M., a friend who tried this recently on a flight from Ottawa to Frankfurt.
For the record, the day of the flight I had an almost non existent
breakfast at 8AM, and a very light lunch at 1PM with some coffee. No
alcohol.
I took the flight at 5PM, refused the dinner, but also managed to lie
down across two seats with a sleep mask for around five hours, although
I don’t think I slept much. I had breakfast at 10:30 PM (Germany 4:30
AM) and then another breakfast later at 2AM (Germany 2AM) both with
coffee. Then normal meals.
Then I was able to get through the day without sleeping although this
required some effort. And, this is the best part, I slept from local 9PM
to 7AM without any interruption. I consider this a success because
typically I would have interruptions.
So, if today I manage again to sleep normally I would consider your
method a complete success. I wonder if it would work if I had been
reading or watching movies instead of being in darkness those 5 hours in
flight.
I didn’t eat again on the way back from the Netherlands (-6hrs), arrived at 5PM and broke my fast at 7AM.
That day was rough but the following days were fine, I think it worked. I’ll be doing that on my next jetlag-risk trip, though I’ll try to schedule my arrivals for early morning from now on. Going the night without food didn’t make my sleep terribly comfortable, I’d prefer to get that over with on the plane.
About 10%, based on mouse Ensembl 48.
Someone was wondering about this in a meeting. The Ensembl perl API makes these types of questions very easy to answer.