A excellent explanation why we get cancer at an advanced age

Embedded in the tragic history of Henrietta Lacks – a 31 old mother of five small children – the authors of a new Nature review show how closely both processes are being related. The main culprit seems to be genomic instability as shown by loss of heterozygosity. What has been particular new to me were the cross links to autophagy – the waste management of the cell that came into focus only recently in Crohns disease. Yea, yea.

Peer to peer publication

Although not so much appreciated by big companies, peer to peer technologies have a great success in sharing communities. Peer to peer might even work with mobile phones in Africa as shown recently by a Swedish company.
I wonder if peer to peer would also work. Continue reading Peer to peer publication

More on paranormal inheritance of allergy

This note should probably start with a smile ;-) as you may already know about my interest in parthogenesis, microchimerism, siRNA transmission and other epigenetic wonders. We already know about preferential transmission of allergy by the allergic mother Continue reading More on paranormal inheritance of allergy

Genetic databases – the tragedy continues

A new review paper about online genetic databases nicely summarizes the current state of the art (including my own efforts). There are only 13 databases Continue reading Genetic databases – the tragedy continues

Repetitio est mater studiorum

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 Continue reading Repetitio est mater studiorum

Geotagging: Fast lane from JPG & NMEA to KMZ

Have you ever ever wondered how these nice photo tracks in Google Earth work?
After spending hours of try & error, here is my recommendation if you can record NMEA stream on your GPS device and JPG on your camera. No hacking, no conversion, no scripts, just a quick & intuitive way by freely available software.
Adjust your camera & GPS to be absolutely synchronous. After data recording copy all your files into a single directory and let Locr GPS Photo propose a GPS position for all photos. Correct positions in the map window if necessary.

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Then fire up COPIKS Photo Mapper, load photos plus track and export all together as a KMZ file.

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You are done!

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Living on borrowed time

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 Continue reading Living on borrowed time