Archive for April, 2016

Make Google Drive Absolutely Awesome with These Tools

Monday, April 18th, 2016

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/make-google-drive-absolutely-awesome-tools

In Scrap-Metal Market, Buyers Have to Tell ‘Darth’ From ‘Vader’

Monday, April 18th, 2016

In #Scrap…Market, Buyers Have to Tell Darth From Vader
http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-scrap-metal-market-buyers-have-to-tell-darth-from-vader-1459263473 Elmo for intact electric motors & Shelmo for shredded ones

QT:{{”

““I like a little double entendre,” says Mr. Goodman, recalling how he made up “Elmo” so that U.S. traders could sell recycled electric motors to China, and “Shelmo” for shredded electric motors. “You should have heard the chuckles when I proposed that.”

The result reads like absurdist poetry but helps buyers distinguish Cocoa (shredded wire containing at least 99% copper but no more than 0.25% tin) from Cobra (shredded wire with minimum 97% copper and not more than 0.5% aluminum). Zorba is a mix of eight metals.”

“}}

Wearable Device Analyzes Sweat To Monitor User’s Health | January 28, 2016 Issue – Vol. 94 Issue 5 | Che mical & Engineering News

Monday, April 18th, 2016

#Wearable Device Analyzes Sweat To Monitor…Health
http://CEN.acs.org/articles/94/i5/Wearable-Device-Analyzes-Sweat-Monitor.html Going beyond @fitbit. Measures glucose, K+ & 2 other metabolites

also:

http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/07/Biosensor-Sticks-Skin-Detects-Metabolite.html Biosensor Sticks To Skin And Detects Metabolite In Sweat

Transfer tattoo measures lactate levels for real-time monitoring of physical exertion
By Alexander Hellemans

A Radical Attempt to Save the Reefs and Forests

Monday, April 18th, 2016

An…Attempt to Save the Reefs & Forests
http://NewYorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/a-radical-attempt-to-save-the-reefs-and-forests Engineering the #chestnut tree to express OxO, a defense against its blight

QT:{{”

“Powell attended graduate school in the nineteen-eighties, around the same time as Gates, and, like her, he was fascinated by molecular biology. When he got a job at the forestry school, in 1990, he started thinking about how new molecular techniques could be used to help the chestnut. Powell had studied how the fungus attacked the tree, and he knew that its key weapon was oxalic acid. (Many foods contain oxalic acid—it’s what gives spinach its bitter taste—but in high doses it’s also fatal to humans.) One day, he was leafing through abstracts of recent scientific papers when a finding popped out at him. Someone had inserted into a tomato plant a gene that produces oxalate oxidase, or OxO, an enzyme that breaks down oxalic acid.

“I thought, Wow, that would disarm the fungus,” he recalled.

Years of experimentation ensued. The gene can be found in many grain crops; Powell and his research team chose a version from wheat. First they inserted the wheat gene into poplar trees, because poplars are easy to work with. Then they had to figure out how to work with chestnut tissue, because no one had really done that before. Meanwhile, the gene couldn’t just be inserted on its own; it needed a “promoter,” which is a sort of genetic on-off switch. The first promoter Powell tried didn’t work. The trees—really tiny
seedlings—didn’t produce enough OxO to fight off the fungus. “They just died more slowly,” Powell told me. The second promoter was also a dud. Finally, after two and a half decades, Powell succeeded in getting all the pieces in place. The result is a chestnut that is blight-resistant and—except for the presence of one wheat gene and one so-called “marker gene”—identical to the original Castanea dentata.”

“}}

Synthetic microbe lives with fewer than 500 genes | Science | AAAS

Sunday, April 17th, 2016

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/synthetic-microbe-lives-less-500-genes

The Obamas made $436,065 in 2015 – Apr. 15, 2016

Sunday, April 17th, 2016

http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/15/news/obama-tax-return/index.html

Protein folds recognized by an intelligent predictor based-on evolutionary and structural information – Cheung – 2015 – Journal of Computational Chemistry – Wiley Online Library

Sunday, April 17th, 2016

Fold [class] recognized by an…[NN] predictor based-on evolutionary & structural info., w/ particle-swarm training
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcc.24232/full

Ngaam J. Cheung,
Xue-Ming Ding,
Hong-Bin Shen

First published: 27 October 2015
DOI: 10.1002/jcc.24232

Make Google Drive Absolutely Awesome with These Tools

Sunday, April 17th, 2016

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/make-google-drive-absolutely-awesome-tools/?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter

Epigenomic analysis detects aberrant super-enhancer DNA methylation in human cancer | Genome Biology | Full Text

Sunday, April 17th, 2016

two papers for journal club:

1. What are super-enhancers? Pott et al., Nature Genetics (2015) http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v47/n1/full/ng.3167.html

2. Epigenomic analysis detects aberrant super-enhancer DNA methylation in human cancer, Heyn et al., Genome Biology (2016)
https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-0879-2

#Epigenomic analysis detects aberrant super-enhancer DNA methylation in human #cancer
https://GenomeBiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-0879-2 hypo-Me of many large blocks

CRISPR: Pursuit of profit poisons collaboration : Nature News & Comment

Saturday, April 16th, 2016

http://www.nature.com/news/crispr-pursuit-of-profit-poisons-collaboration-1.19717?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews