linkstream2 microblog

A lot of trails can be found here, including Westwoods
at the Branford/Guilford border

http://www.visitguilfordct.com/todo-category/recreation/todo/trail-maps-of-guilford-ct/

https://www.bufalinact.com/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/business/media/mit-media-lab-food-computer.html

http://www.bio-itworld.com/2018/05/09/carl-zimmer-to-speak-at-bio-it-world-tackle-heredity-genes-and-how-our-understanding-of-the-two-is-changing.aspx

QT:{{”
“It was a huge amount of fun watching them take that raw data and put it through their own pipelines,” Zimmer told me, but he also felt uncomfortable pointing out discrepancies to the scientists he worked with. “I still remember, I was sitting down with Chris Mason at Weill Cornell. He and his students were so enthusiastically going through their findings with me… and they showed me, among other things, how many SNPs I had. Not too long beforehand I’d gone through the same experience with Mark Gerstein and his team at Yale, and their numbers for my SNPs were off by hundreds of thousands. … It was a little awkward with Chris, but I just said, ‘Hey, I got a very different number from Mark Gerstein,’ and Chris just shrugged and said, ‘Oh yeah, that happens.’”

It turns out, there’s a lot about our current understanding of our genes and how we pass them on that isn’t perfectly clear cut. “}}

https://twitter.com/carlzimmer/status/989191766745272320

https://twitter.com/carlzimmer/status/989196672503812102

https://twitter.com/carlzimmer/status/989197056060284928

https://twitter.com/carlzimmer/status/989214467882934272

QT{{”
“Early on, the cells in an embryo can turn into any tissue. As these stem cells divide, they can lose this flexibility, committing to becoming one kind of cell or another. After that, cells typically shut down their viral genes.
Viral proteins appear to help keep stem cells from losing this potential. …
Viruses might have exploited embryos to make more copies of
themselves. By keeping their hosts as stem cells for longer, the viruses were able to invade more parts of the embryo’s body.” “}}

Ancient Viruses Are Buried in Your DNA, by @CarlZimmer
https://www.NYTimes.com/2017/10/04/science/ancient-viruses-dna-genome.html Nice #intuition on why they may promote the stem-cell state

The Man Who Kicked Off…#Biotech by @CarlZimmer
http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/the-man-who-kicked-off-the-biotech-revolution H Smith for discovering restriction enzymes + a history of the term

QT:{{”
“Trying to make sense of the failure, Wilcox suggested to Smith that the bacteria were destroying the viral DNA. He based his suggestion on a hypothesis proposed a few years earlier by Werner Arber, a microbiologist at the University of Geneva. Arber speculated that enzymes could restrict the growth of viruses by chopping up their DNA, and dubbed these hypothetical molecules “restriction enzymes.”” “}}

https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/17/genetic-variants-ex-ac-sequence/

Your an adult. Your brain, not so much by @CarlZimmer
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/science/youre-an-adult-your-brain-not-so-much.html Non-obvious ethical implications of developmental neuroscience

QT:{{”
“The human brain reaches its adult volume by age 10, but the neurons that make it up continue to change for years after that. The connections between neighboring neurons get pruned back, as new links emerge between more widely separated areas of the brain.

Eventually this reshaping slows, a sign that the brain is maturing. But it happens at different rates in different parts of the brain.

The pruning in the occipital lobe, at the back of the brain, tapers off by age 20. In the frontal lobe, in the front of the brain, new links are still forming at age 30, if not beyond.

“It challenges the notion of what ‘done’ really means,” Dr. Somerville said.

As the anatomy of the brain changes, its activity changes as well. In a child’s brain, neighboring regions tend to work together. By adulthood, distant regions start acting in concert. Neuroscientists have speculated that this long-distance harmony lets the adult brain work more efficiently and process more information.”
“}}

Assembling a new picture of humanity by @CarlZimmer
https://www.statnews.com/2016/10/07/dna-genome-sequencing-new-maps/ 1 graph to represent everyone, counterpoint to #personalgenomes