Bo is a mutant:
Researchers from the NIH and several universities have shown that variation among the coats of different dog breeds can be traced back to three genes.
Obama family dog is special, indeed
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Category Archives: Genetics
I was a government guinea pig, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt
Please read and comment at The Register!
(All in the name of medical science: Uncle Sam wants their milk, and blood, and hair, and teeth, and... Photo: CC Jake Krohn)
From The Register, here’s my report on the largest, longest and most in-depth study of children, anywhere, ever:
To understand the causes of asthma, obesity and other troubling childhood disease trends, the National Children’s Study will sample DNA and monitor the health and environmental exposures of 100,000 kids, throughout their youth, from the womb to the dorm room.
Such a huge sample will ensure that less common diseases, such as autism, are captured in the study.
To aid their hunt for lead and countless other toxins, NCS organizers in 2004 explored the use of RFID and GPS transponders, wireless motes and sensors implanted under the skin.
Hear Alan Watt discuss the “monstrosity” of the National Children’s Study. (See the Sept. 9, 2008 entry.)
Radical new theory of aging: Gene drift
(Feely rusty? Oxidative stress may not be what’s killing you, after all. Photo: Shane Anderson)
from Mark:
Put away your free-radical scavenging face cream and your anti-oxidant horse pills: Old age is not about “rust.” It is the result of a derailing of genetic pathways in older animals, according to a new study.
According to a group of Stanford University scientists who examined some very tiny worms, we are living beyond natural selection’s ability to get rid of those susceptible to this “developmental drift,” because they have already reproduced.
“We found a normal developmental program that works in young animals, but becomes unbalanced as the worm gets older,” said the lead scientist on the worm study. “It accounts for the lion’s share of molecular differences between young and old worms.”
The discovery might lead new anti-aging therapies, or “genetic counseling” for helpful parents at risk for condemning their children to a shorter lifespan.
Some tortoises lay eggs at the age of 100, he points out. There are whales that live to be 200, and clams that make it past 400. Those species use the same building blocks for their DNA, proteins and fats as humans, mice and nematode worms. The chemistry of the wear-and-tear process, including damage from oxygen free-radicals, should be the same in all cells, which makes it hard to explain why species have dramatically different life spans.
“A free radical doesn’t care if it’s in a human cell or a worm cell,” Kim said.
Bush, Obama, Cheney, Ramses: All in the family
(Blood is thicker than water. Photos: Ramses, right, by Jimmy Smith; President George W. Bush, courtesy of the White House)
from Mark:
I’ve listened to enough patriot radio, and done enough Googling, to know that America’s leading politicians and personalities are related (see link, excerpt, below).
Still, I was struck by this recent statement by the far-out occult conspiracy researcher and broadcaster Freeman: “George W. Bush is a direct descendant of Ramses (one of the ancient Egyptian kings).
This is an important assertion for students of the reptilian/ET agenda. It is also, I imagine, impossible to prove.
I do not know a thing about family trees, so I cannot tell you whether this one from David Icke is accurate…
But I am astonished at how the mainstream media uses firm evidence of elite inbreeding, where it exists, to mock conspiracists and to claim, perversely, that it somehow proves politicians serve very different masters.
FactCheck.org: Are Barack Obama and Dick Cheney cousins?
Obama’s other relatives, by the way, include George W. Bush, who, according to the Sun-Times, is his 11th cousin. They share the same great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, a 17th-century Massachusetts couple named Samuel Hinckley and Sarah Soole Hinckley. And Harry S. Truman was Obama’s fourth cousin four times removed, the paper says. The New York Post, using ancestry.com, reported that Brad Pitt and Obama are ninth cousins. Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga told the BBC that his maternal uncle was Obama’s father, making them first cousins (we think).We wouldn’t make too much of this, though. After all, according to at least some researchers, a common ancestor for all humans now alive may have existed just several thousand years ago. That means you, dear reader, could have a cousinly relationship that may not go all that far back to everyone from Jack Kevorkian to Tina Fey to Hugo Chavez to the woman selling trinkets from a piece of cardboard on a Bangalore street corner.
"Big Blue" rebuttal: No transhumanists here
IBM researcher defends Second Life, World of Warcraft, against Parallelnormal blog posts.
from Mark:
High-profile virtual worlders are trying to correct what they see as misrepresentations by Parallelnormal of their recent meetings and events.
One of them, Second Lifer “Dale Innis,” writes a comment blasting my comparison of real and virtual versions of New England, and my description of a conference about the convergence of reality with virtual reality.
“(You) drastically misread your sources about the WoW conference and the Extropia sims, and you seem to do the same thing in many places where Second Life is involved,” Innis writes.
Innis in real life (RL) is IBM researcher David M. Chess.
IBM has built inworld stores for big box retailers.
Chess is working to develop autonomic technologies, which are self-aware and can fix themselves.
Chess, speaking for himself, and not IBM, denies that Extropia and the World of Warcraft conference “are in fact about transhumanism.”
Yet the WoW conference was organized by a transhumanist, and one who views the world’s major religions as an obstacle to the advancement of his own beliefs.
And extropians, by their own definition, are transhumanists, real or imagined.
But will they take Morgellons patients?
The U.S. National Institutes of Health today announced a broad clinical research program to aid patients with diseases that defy diagnosis.
No word yet if those who believe they are suffering from Morgellons and other mysterious ailments will be able to get an appointment…
NIH Office of Rare Diseases ORD – Undiagnosed Diseases Program
Some patients wait years for a definitive diagnosis. Using a unique combination of scientific and medical expertise and resources at the National Institutes of Health NIH, the Undiagnosed Diseases Program pursues two goals:To provide answers to patients with mysterious conditions that have long eluded diagnosis
To advance medical knowledge about rare and common diseases
The good-for-you tattoo
Scientists use tattoo needle to deliver HPV vaccine
Tattoos cause more pain than ordinary shots, Martin Müller admits. But because tattoo needles cause more cellular damage, they also create more surface area for vaccines to seep in.
Tattoos are far more effective at generating antibodies than the old needle-and-plunger, Müller reports in the journal, Genetic Vaccines and Therapy.
The journal’s editors suggest the tattoo will work best for routine cattle vaccinations, and the injection of therapeutic DNA vaccines (i.e., the direct injection of genes) into humans.
But the tattoos might also help public health officials sort the vaccinated from the potentially contagious in a pandemic.
Physicians already consider certain scars to be proof of vaccination.
Müller specializes in vaccines against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer.
Some governments and pharmaceutical companies want to make the HPV vaccine mandatory for all children–girls, and boys.
A vaccine tattoo that says, in effect, “I’m clean,” could also change the way humans choose their sexual partners.
More about Müller’s experiments, at the German Cancer Research Center:
Research Group Tumorvirus-Specific Vaccination Strategies
Almost one-fifth of tumor diseases are associated with viral and bacterial pathogens. Cancer of the cervix is among these. At half a million new cases each year, cervical cancer is the second most common cause of cancer-related disease among women. The leading risk factor for cervical cancer is infection with the human papilloma virus HPV. The goal of our working group is to develop vaccines preventing such viral infections as well as to scrutinize existing strategies for their effectiveness. In doing so, we are focusing on immune-therapeutic problems. Presently we are pursuing various approaches to develop a vaccine against HPV.
– Mark Baard
Arctic seed vault receives first deposit
Africans are the first to send seeds (for corn, soy, and other food crops) to the Arctic seed repository, by way of Oslo. The vault, pictured here, is among the seed bank projects being paid for by the United Nations, the Rockefeller, Ford and Gatsby foundations. — Mark Baard
More:
African seed collection first to arrive in Norway on route to Arctic seed vault
The vault is being built by the Norwegian government as a service to the global community, and a Rome-based international NGO, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will fund its operation. The vault will open on 26 February 2008.The shipment, which was sent by the Ibadan, Nigeria-based International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), consists of thousands of duplicates of unique varieties of domesticated and wild cowpea, maize, soybean, and Bambara groundnut. The seeds from the IITA genebank in Ibadan, Nigeria, were packed in 21 boxes weighing a total of 330 kg. The processing by IITA staff took several months, and the boxes were packaged over a three-day period, with 10 staff checking the accession list, reporting errors, and adjusting the inventory, as needed.
Your genes know the power of attraction
Chemists discover “genetic telepathy”
Stuck on you. DNA double helices with identical nucleotide sequences draw together, spontaneously.
Bits of identical DNA, separated by water only, will draw together–but only if they are the same, according to chemists at the Imperial College of London.
The ICL chemists do not know how the identical double helices recognize each other. They suggest that the curvature of the helices, being a match, might stress the medium between them in a way that brings them together.
Electrostatic charges might also be responsible for this DNA “telepathy.”
DNA Double Helices Recognize Mutual Sequence Homology in a Protein Free Environment
We have observed spontaneous segregation of the two kinds of DNA within each spherulite, which reveals that nucleotide sequence recognition occurs between double helices separated by water in the absence of proteins, consistent with our earlier theoretical hypothesis. We thus report experimental evidence and discuss possible mechanisms for the recognition of homologous DNAs from a distance.
– Mark Baard
DNA scans and scams, backed by Google
Your innermost “secrets,” stored to an online database? Genetic profiling firms promise insights, but deliver unfounded health scares.
For about US$1,000, Mountain View, Calif.-based 23andMe will tell you a thing or two about your genetic makeup.
Google, which collects as much intel as it possibly can about individuals, and has many close CIA ties, is one of the 23andMe’s backers.
23andMe analyzes saliva samples from its customers, to provide rudimentary information about your genetic predispositions to baldness, or developing prostate cancer.
More:
Google-funded firm launches DNA test in Europe | Technology | Reuters
The site does not currently make interpretations about a user’s risk for developing such diseases as cancers, Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes, though users could in some cases get help from experts to make some basic assessments.But the service may prove controversial in countries like Britain, where some experts say DNA tests are often of little value and can trigger unnecessary health worries.
– Mark Baard