linkstream2 microblog

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/42950/title/Microbiome-Fingerprints/

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As microbiome signatures mature, law enforcement or intelligence agents could theoretically track people by looking for traces of them left in the microbes they shed. Mark Gerstein, who studies biomedical informatics at Yale University and was not involved in the new study, suggested, for instance, that one could imagine tracking a terrorist’s movements through caves using their microbiome signature.

Huttenhower and his colleagues were identifying individuals out of pools of just hundreds of project participants, however. It is currently unclear how well the algorithm will perform when applied to the general population, though the researchers estimate that their code could likely pick someone out from a group of 500 to 1,000. “I would expect that number to get bigger in the future as we get more data and better data and better coding strategies,” Huttenhower said.

But the work raises privacy concerns similar to those faced by scientists gather human genomic data. Microbiome researchers are already wary of the human genomic DNA that gets caught up in microbiome sequences, but it increasingly appears that the microbiome sequences themselves are quite personal.

In the genomics field, researchers have increasingly limited access to databases containing human genomic sequencing data. Researchers must apply to use these data. “People might increasingly want to put the microbiome data under the same type of protection that they put normal genomic variants under,” said Gerstein. “Your microbiome is associated with various disease risks and proclivities for X and Y. I don’t think it’s a completely neutral identification. It potentially says things about you.”

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Scents of #Smell Rooted in Math
http://www.wsj.com/articles/scents-of-smell-rooted-in-math-1431079201 electrical spiking in #neurons simply (linearly) related to amount of odorant

[After a long career] Alexander Rich Dies at 90; Confirmed #DNA’s Double Helix
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/us/alexander-rich-dies-at-90-confirmed-dnas-double-helix.html Helped unravel Z-DNA & RNA structure

Genetics & That Striped Dress
http://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/genetics-and-that-striped-dress @23andme on-the-fly SNP associations w/ pop trends. Next: targeting ads w/ alleles

Hidden history emerges from [#mining] court data http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229750.700-crime-mining-hidden-history-emerges-from-court-data.html Diverging descriptions of types of #crime likened to genetic drift

Back to the future
Jennifer Ouellette
Available online 28 June 2014

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Instead, he turned to information theory, invented by Claude Shannon
in the 1940s. DeDeo’s aim was to reveal gradual changes in the way
crimes were spoken about. He split all the trials into two categories
– trials for violent crimes like murder or assault and trials for
non-violent crimes like pickpocketing or fraud – and then he looked at
the actual words that people used in the courtroom. Information theory
lets you quantify the amount of information given by a word in a
specific context. Using a measure known as Jensen-Shannon divergence,
a word picked at random from the transcript of a trial can be given a
score based on how useful it is for predicting the type of the trial.

So, for example, if you walked into the Old Bailey during Hall’s trial
and heard the word "murdered" uttered in court, how much information
about the type of trial underway would that single word convey? In the
early years of the period they looked at, most crimes involved some
level of violence. "There might be bloodshed, or an eye gouged out,
but the real crime is someone’s wallet got stolen," DeDeo says. "The
casual everyday violence of the past is remarkable."

…
Slowly, however, that changed. By the 1880s, the team found that the
majority of violent language was reserved for talking about crimes
like assault, murder or rape. So you could walk into the courtroom,
hear words like "murdered", "hit," "knife" and "struggled" – all words
from Martin’s testimony in 1801 – and be confident that you were
witnessing a trial for a violent crime rather than a trial for theft.

The analysis reveals a story of the gradual criminalisation of
violence. This is not necessarily evidence that we have become less
violent – as Steven Pinker argues, based on statistics for violent
crime, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Rather, it is a
story of the state gaining a monopoly on violence and controlling its
occurrence among the public. "What is deemed criminal has changed,"
says Hitchcock.

DeDeo likens the shift to genetic drift. If you took two herds of
goats and isolated each for centuries, the herds would gradually
evolve into separate species. Similarly, he sees Old Bailey cases as
populations of violent and non-violent trials. Over time the two types
"speciate" and become distinct from one another (see chart). "In 1760,
the patterns of language used in both kinds of trial are almost
exactly identical," he says. "Over the next 150 years they diverge."
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When #Chemicals Became Weapons of War [Cl, phosgene, diphosgene, mustard gas…]
http://chemicalweapons.cenmag.org/when-chemicals-became-weapons-of-war Conflicted history of Fritz Haber

Know it all: 10 secrets of successful learning http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27187-know-it-all-10-secrets-of-successful-learning.html Including quizzes, practicing to teach, buddying up & even video games

Bright light outdoors is good — but stay in the shade to avoid skin cancer.

The #myopia boom http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120 Was attributed to books; now epidemiological & lab evidence suggests not enough daylight for kids

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“Rose’s team tried to eliminate any other explanations for this link — for example, that children outdoors were engaged in more physical activity and that this was having the beneficial effect. But time engaged in indoor sports had no such protective association; and time outdoors did, whether children had played sports, attended picnics or simply read on the beach. And children who spent more time outside were not necessarily spending less time with books, screens and close work. “We had these children who were doing both activities at very high levels and they didn’t become myopic,” says Rose. Close work might still have some effect, but what seemed to matter most was the eye’s exposure to bright light.

See the light

Some researchers think that the data to support the link need to be more robust. Most epidemiological studies have estimated children’s time outdoors from questionnaires — but Christine Wildsoet, an optometrist at the University of California, Berkeley, says that such data should be treated with caution. In a small, pilot study of wearable light sensors, she found that people’s estimates often do not match up with their actual exposure. And Ian Flitcroft, a myopia specialist at Children’s University Hospital in Dublin, questions whether light is the key protective factor of being outdoors. He says that the greater viewing distances outside could affect myopia progression, too. “Light is not the only factor, and making it the explanation is a gross over-simplification of a complex process,” he says.

Yet animal experiments support the idea that light is protective. Researchers first demonstrated this in chicks, a common lab model for studying vision. By fitting chicks with goggles that alter the resolution and contrast of incoming images, it is possible to induce the development of myopia while raising the birds under controlled conditions in which only light intensity is changed. In 2009, Regan Ashby, Arne Ohlendorf and Frank Schaeffel from the University of Tübingen’s Institute for Ophthalmic Research in Germany showed that high illumination levels — comparable to those encountered outside — slowed the development of experimentally induced myopia in chicks by about 60% compared with normal indoor lighting conditions. Researchers elsewhere have found similar protective effects in tree shrews and rhesus monkeys.”

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#PCSK9 Inhibitors Near Market Entry
http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i13/Cholesterol-Lowering-PCSK9-Inhibitors-Near.html Suggested by natural #LOF lowering LDL via promoting recycling of its receptor

Tiny Internal Tornadoes Bring Drops to Life
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/science/tiny-internal-tornadoes-bring-drops-to-life.html Results from evaporation & surf. tension differences betw #water & PEG

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“The coloring turns out to be incidental. What is important is that food coloring contains propylene glycol. The combination of that fluid with water holds the droplets together and makes them move.

Water evaporates more quickly than propylene glycol and has greater surface tension. These differences result in continual movement inside a droplet. But the “little tornado inside” the drop reaches a balance that actually holds the droplet together, Dr. Prakash said.

The droplet moves when a change in relative humidity alters the tornado. Evaporated water from one droplet is a subtle but powerful signal, because it increases the humidity near another drop. That changes the second drop’s rate of evaporation, which disturbs the internal balance, and the dance begins.

By varying the percentages of the two fluids, the researchers were able to get droplets to move in ways that seemed mysterious — they sorted themselves according to their internal composition, formed a straight line and even climbed vertically.

The moving droplets could be useful. For instance, a mist might be used for cleaning surfaces, because the drops don’t leave any bit of themselves behind when they move.”

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