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.

via Bo, Obama’s Dog Has Mutant Genes – ABC News.

Your Neanderthal, here. Photo: Erich Ferdinand

21st Century brutes will crave escargot, eschew dairy

With the whole world gone mad (again) for everything cryptid (the Boston Phoenix attributes this to our pressing need for Great Depression 2.0 distractions), New Scientist has cooked up a list of DNA-sequenced species to be raised from the dead.

Neanderthals, naturally, top the list of humanoid species.

Harvard archaeologists, meanwhile, believe they know what might have killed-off the Neanderthal in the first place: lactose intolerance. The Harvard folks also suggested the Neanderthal enjoyed many different kinds of food, including escargot.

To revive a long-dead species scientists would have to recover enough DNA from a well-preserved specimen and find a suitable surrogate species similar to that of the extinct animal in which to grow the new baby from an embryo.

“It’s hard to say that something will never ever be possible,”said Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who is sequencing the Neanderthal genome.

“But it would require technologies so far removed from what we currently have that I cannot imagine how it would be done.”

via Extinct Animals Could Be Brought Back To Life – ROGUEGOVERNMENT.COM.

David Friedman, author of such books as The Machinery of Freedom and Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, now looks at a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species, and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play. “If it can be done, it will be done,” David Friedman has said. “So the interesting thing to me is not what should you stop but how do you adapt.” We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely to be much like the past. It is worth starting to think about it now.

via Cato Institute: Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World (Book Forum)

(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.

Prevailing theory of aging challenged in Stanford worm study – Office of Communications & Public Affairs – Stanford University School of Medicine

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.

(A meeting of the minds, at “Convergence of the Real and the Virtual: The First Scientific Conference in World of Warcraft.” Image: from the Convergentsystems wiki)

by Mark Baard

Virtual worlders, led by a so-called “convergenist” from the National Science Foundation, met this week to discuss one of their plans for humankind: capturing individual personalities onto computers, and transmitting them into other worlds.

Rather than meeting in the real world, attendees at the Convergence of the Real and the Virtual conference brought their swords and leopards, and their idealized bodies (big muscles, big boobs) to a space in World of Warcraft, an online massively multiplayer online role playing game, or MMORPG.

The NSF sociologist who organized the WoW scientific meeting, William Sims Bainbridge [sic], has taken the form of a “level 65 (out of 70) blood elf priest” in the game, which claims more than nine million players.

Part of Bainbridge’s job, as director of the NSF’s Human-Centered Computing Cluster, is to direct young researchers into areas of “future research,” including “immersive and multi-sensory technologies, and direct brain-computer interfaces.”

For the WoW meeting, Bainbridge described how human consciousnesses might be uploaded to virtual worlds (at least in Battlestar Galactica, they call it “downloading”).

He also described how virtual humans might be made governable:

(Virtual world) participants are much less likely to be guided by religious belief, and more likely to prefer the suspension of disbelief associated with science fiction and fantasy. So, we can expect that virtual worlds will prototype many social innovations that might then diffuse to offline governance, while often preaching sedition.

Bainbridge spent some of his younger days in a Scientology splinter group, and is considered by some academics to be a religious expert.

But Bainbridge is also a religious hero, to the transhumanists, who hope to accelerate the convergence of real and virtual reality, as well as genetics, nanotechnology and robotics (Ray Kurzweil’s GNR).

In addition to recruiting its partnerships with the NSF, NASA and other governmental agencies, the extropians court Hollywood stars such as William Shatner, and academics at Yale and Oxford.

Some transhumanists call themselves extropians, others, convergenists. Some also use a different convergence acronym, NBIC, which represents nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science.

Like Scientologists, transhumanists appear to brook little dissent, and seem eager to silence their critics. When Bainbridge meets with Second Lifers in a few weeks, for example, he will be hosted by a group of transhumanists “too busy building the future we want to spare time on unconstructive criticism.”

That unconstructive criticism, say the transhumanists, is any that comes from those who do not “share our goals and values.”

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.

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

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

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

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