Archive for December, 2017
San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair) – Wikipedia
Tuesday, December 19th, 2017California health officials release guidelines on cellphone radiation – CBS News
Monday, December 18th, 2017DNA Tattoos Are the Final Frontier of Love
Monday, December 18th, 2017DNA Tattoos Are the Final Frontier of Love
https://www.NYTimes.com/2017/12/09/style/dna-tattoos.html Putting some DNA into tattoo ink via @Everence_Life. But what of putting tattoos into non-functional DNA with CRISPR? Maybe next? HT @gamzeandgursoy
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Four years, a handful of dedicated colleagues and nearly a dozen patents later, Mr. Duffy has brought the idea to life with Everence, a product he and his partners hope will deepen bonds — in the most literal and physical way — between family, friends and loved ones. It is about as biologically intimate as one can get. Everence is a powdery substance synthesized from a sample of DNA, something as simple as a few thousand cells from a swab of a person’s inner cheek, or from cremated ashes. A small vial of Everence can be brought to a tattoo artist and added to any type of inks.
The result: A tattoo imbued with the DNA of another human being — or, if you prefer, a dog, cat or other furry friend.
In so doing, Mr. Duffy and Endeavor Life Sciences, his company, join the ranks of a winding list of biohackers, artists and technologists dabbling in the world of biogenic tattoo artistry. Many have mixed ash, hair or other material with inks to include organics in tattooing for years.
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Opinion | How Computers Turned Gerrymandering Into a Science
Monday, December 18th, 2017How Computers Turned Gerrymandering Into a Science
https://www.NYTimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/sunday/computers-gerrymandering-wisconsin.html MCMC random walks evaluate possible redistricting swaps, producing complex boundaries. Eventually, we may get fractal electoral maps!
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The clustering of Democrats in cities does indeed give the Republicans an edge. But it’s a much smaller advantage than the turbo-boost the current map provides, as the Duke paper demonstrates. The main tool in the Duke paper is a method called the “Markov chain Monte Carlo” algorithm. Starting from the current Wisconsin district map, it makes a sequence of random changes, swapping wards from one district to an adjacent one, carrying out a “random walk” through the set of all possible maps. Completely unconstrained changes would create crazy-looking districts, so it weights its changes in favor of traditional districting criteria.
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