technology:genetic code

  • #dna is Worth Billions. How #blockchain Helps to Securely Store Medical Data
    https://hackernoon.com/dna-is-worth-billions-how-blockchain-helps-to-securely-store-medical-dat

    Biological and medical science experienced a real breakthrough when the DNA structure was decoded in 1953.DNA is a macromolecule that stores and transfers essential information about living beings, i.e. the genetic code. Francis Crick and James Watson, the scientists who described the double helix of this biopolymer, received the 1962 Nobel Prize, nine years after the discovery.Could they know at that time that their achievement would be the object of cyber-theft after half a century?Genetic passportSimply put, DNA is a sequence of molecules (nucleotides) where the genome information is stored in the form of a certain code.DNA is a carrier and transmitter of heredity from skin color and eye shape to specific diseases that were transferred from parents. The unique code contained in the (...)

    #healthcare #medicine #blockchain-healthcare

  • Central Park Mice Don’t Get Out Much - Issue 51: Limits
    http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/central-park-mice-dont-get-out-much

    The good thing about studying rats is you don’t have to travel very far. Fordham University evolutionary biologist Jason Munshi-South studies biodiversity and evolution right here in New York City. His study subjects—rats and mice—are abundant here. Munshi-South thinks of the city as a grand evolutionary experiment. When he looks at a map of New York City, he sees the city’s parks and green spaces as wildlife islands. Movement within islands is free, but between islands is restricted. White-footed mice, for example, thrive in city parks but not on concrete and asphalt. Munshi-South can tell which park a mouse is from, and how it moves around the city, from its genetic code. Central Park mice, he’s found, are relatively isolated. Mice from Van Cortlandt Park and the other parks in the (...)

  • The Spiritual, Reductionist Consciousness of Christof Koch - Issue 47: Consciousness
    http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/the-spiritual-reductionist-consciousness-of-christof-koch

    Consciousness is a thriving industry. It’s not just the meditation retreats and ayahuasca shamans. Or the conferences with a heady mix of philosophers, quantum physicists, and Buddhist monks. Consciousness is a buzzing business in neuroscience labs and brain institutes. But it wasn’t always this way. Just a few decades ago, consciousness barely registered as a credible subject for science. Perhaps no one did more to legitimize its study than Francis Crick, who launched a second career in neurobiology after cracking the genetic code. In the 1980s Crick found a brilliant collaborator in the young scientist Christof Koch. In some ways, they made an unlikely team. Crick, a legend in science, was an outspoken atheist, while Koch, 40 years younger, was a Catholic yearning for ultimate (...)

  • Five Veteran Scientists Tell Us What Most Surprised Them - Issue 28: 2050
    http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/five-veteran-scientists-tell-us-what-most-surprised-them

    Turn back the clock to 1965. Science appeared to be marching forward at an unrelenting pace. Biochemists had cracked the genetic code (how DNA translates into proteins), inspiring Life magazine to envision “superbabies with improved minds and bodies.” In an article for the trade magazine Electronics, computer engineer Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated chip would double every year while the cost stayed the same—the eponymous Moore’s Law. This, he wrote, would lead to “such wonders” as home computers, mobile phones, and automatic control systems for cars. Meanwhile, the New York World’s Fair provided further glimpses of what the future might hold: fusion power, moon colonies, underwater hotels, robot maids, flying cars, and 3-D TV. For young scientists at (...)

  • #Monsanto’s coming up with an alternative to GMOs | Grist
    http://grist.org/news/monsantos-coming-up-with-an-alternative-to-gmos

    Here’s how it works: All living things contain DNA, and that DNA carries the genetic information that cells need to make proteins. But it’s actually RNA, DNA’s less famous workhorse of a partner, that takes that genetic information out into the cell to get shit done. Viruses also use RNA, however, so cells have a kind of defense mechanism to detect viral RNA, memorize its contents, destroy it, and then hunts down its progeny to destroy them too.

    Told you it was kind of badass.

    With a little tweak, however, this defense mechanism can be turned against itself, so that a cell starts attacking its own genetic code. That’s where BioDirect comes in. Using spray-on RNA that looks like viral RNA but is actually genetic information from weeds or pests or whatever it is Monsanto wants to target, the company can effectively turn the enemy against itself. It could even use BioDirect to target certain genes in crops themselves in order to make those crops, for example, drought resistant.

    So if an orange grove in Florida is suddenly overrun with the insect that transmits greening disease (look it up — it’s destroying the orange industry), farmers could, in theory, just spray on some insect RNA BioDirect until the situation is under control and then go about their business — no pesticides or genetically engineered trees required.

    #it_has_begun #agriculture #pesticide #RNA_tueurs

  • Epigenetics and oral health - Medical News Today
    http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/273701.php

    Raffa

    Epigenetics and oral health - Medical News Today - http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/release...

    1 hour ago

    from Bookmarklet

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    ""This is important because, in the case of oral health, epigenetic factors may help to orchestrate healthy and unhealthy states in our mouths. They respond to the current local environment, such as the type and level of our oral microbes, regulating which of our genes are active. This means we could use them to determine an individual’s state of health, or even influence how their genes behave. We can’t change the underlying genetic code, but we may be able to change when genes are switched on and off,"" - (...)

  • The Mammoth Cometh
    NYMagazine via @shouhart
    By NATHANIEL RICH - FEB. 27, 2014
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/magazine/the-mammoth-cometh.html (déjà recensé par @fil évidemment, ça m’apprendra à avoir du retard de @7h36)

    The earth is about to become a lot less “natural.” Biologists have already created new forms of bacteria in the lab, modified the genetic code of countless living species and cloned dogs, cats, wolves and water buffalo, but the engineering of novel vertebrates — of breathing, flying, defecating pigeons — will represent a milestone for synthetic biology. This is the fact that will overwhelm all arguments against de-extinction. Thanks, perhaps, to “Jurassic Park,” popular sentiment already is behind it.

    #animaux #DNA #biologie

    D’ici 2060, le retour des pigeons voyageurs ! C’est donc l’ambition du projet Revive & Restore, propulsé par Stewart Brand et sa femme Ryan Phelan, « an entrepreneur who founded an early consumer medical-genetics company ».

    Et bientôt :

    Besides the woolly mammoth, candidates include the black-footed ferret, the Caribbean monk seal, the golden lion tamarin, the ivory-billed woodpecker and the northern white rhinoceros, a species that is down to its final handful of members.

    Et le « western black rhino » déjà éteint, alors ?
    http://seenthis.net/messages/171749

    Feraient bien de se hâter :

    Scientists predict that changes made by human beings to the composition of the atmosphere could kill off a quarter of the planet’s mammal species, a fifth of its reptiles and a sixth of its birds by 2050.

    Et qui dit Brand dit Long Now Foundation. Dans l’article il est aussi question du disque Rosetta — qui fait partie du Rosetta Project http://rosettaproject.org — embarqué dans la sonde du même nom :

    a disk of pure nickel inscribed with 1,500 languages that has been mounted on the Rosetta space probe, which this year is scheduled to land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, 500 million miles from earth.

    Aux dernières nouvelles, tout se passe bien dans l’#espace, @simplicissimus veille :
    http://seenthis.net/messages/208339
    http://seenthis.net/messages/220256

  • Sortie de Sic 2
    http://www.sicjournal.org

    Crisis has become a household word and the attack on the value of labour power an everyday reality. Such an attack had already been stamped on capitalism’s genetic code by the restructuring of the ’70s–’80s, but the crisis of restructured capitalism gave it an enormous impetus. From struggles of waged workers anxiously demanding to remain such and mobilisations of pensioners defending their survival, to the outburst of rage of the ‘feral class’ in developed countries, to violent workers’ riots in the South-East Asian global factory, and all the way through to the Arab Spring and its aftermath, hard evidence of the continuing conflictuality of social reality forces even the most unrepentant end-of-history sopranos to refresh their repertoire. Admittedly, not everything bathes in perfection. But it would seem that there is good news too: nobody has to worry about where this world is going, it is a one-way street, just keep on going. Some changes in management personnel are graciously offered, the persons reciting the ‘no alternative’ mantra can always be renewed and even bear the socialist flavour. Of course, the remnants of a once optimistic citizenism keep formulating ‘proposals’ – ever less far-reaching, ever more restrained – begging capitalism to mend its ways, but nobody seems to take these noble souls seriously enough, since they dispose of no high-placed interlocutor with a receptive ear. Still, there are struggles, outbursts, riots, serving as a reminder that class struggle is always there and that capital, today no less than yesterday, is a ‘moving contradiction’. Hand in hand with it, the critical theory of its demise is being produced: history in the making is also the making of theory.

    #communisation #communisme #théorie