Although this blog is not very technology centered, I have a great passion for human powered vehicles. Being a long-time owner of a recumbent bike and having a strong interest in ecology, I would certainly (Show me more…)
but repeats in the human genome are not such impressive. Instead they create a lot of trouble when situated in the close proximity to genes. Think of Huntingtons disease, myotonic dystrophy, fragile X or some ataxias. The human genome sequence paper already had a chapter (Show me more…)
An excellent new review summarizes our current knowledge about telomeres – the complicated chromosome end machinery that is necessary to prevent unwanted repair while allowing to track for the number of replications. Think of it like a source code control system as CVS, the Concurrent Version System. During a recent research project on life cycle of single point mutations / SNPs I realized (Show me more…)
I had the chance to install now the new PLINK GWAS software for a further analysis of recently published ORMDL3 asthma data. It seems that PLINK is some software that I was looking for a long time (paper link|download link). There are great and foolproof functions to check the validity of your data. I discovered for example unnoticed stratification in the German case-control sample by first and second component of the MDS analysis (Show me more…)
SPIEGEL online points to a retrospective of former SCIENCE editor Daniel Koshland on the science typologies challenge, chance and charge.
Challenge – putting the pieces together like the discovery of the DNA structure of Watson & Crick.
Charge – solving longstanding ubiquitous problems like gravity laws by Newton, a rare event.
Chance – events like the development of PCR by Mullis.
I could add cha-uvinism (ignoring previous work), cha-os (also called creativity), cha-racter (???), cha-rity (work for nothing), cha-rade (also called congresses), cha-pter (many to write), cha-lk (many lectures), cha-nge (not really), cha-mpion (a few), cha-ir (less), cha-ff (most), cha-rts (hundreds), cha-t and cha-rivari (always), yea,yea.
New work in mice published in nature neuroscience now show that ordinary fever is caused by prostaglandin E2 stimulation of EP3 prostaglandin receptors in the median preoptic nucleus of mice. EP4 seem to mediate hypothermic response, leaves you to choose not only ambiyour desired body temperature