Chrome has a deeply hidden checkbox under rendering settings:

… is a form of encryption that allows computations to be carried out on ciphertext, thus generating an encrypted result which, when decrypted, matches the result of operations performed on the plaintext…

First publication: acm.org
Introduction: technologyreview.com
Details: en.wikipedia.org
Use in genomics: nature.com
R package: www.louisaslett.com

install.packages(c("Rcpp", "RcppParallel", "gmp")) 
install.packages("http://www.louisaslett.com/HomomorphicEncryption/dl/HomomorphicEncryption_0.2.tgz", repos=NULL)
library("HomomorphicEncryption")
p <- pars("FandV")
k <- keygen(p)
c1 <- enc(k$pk, c(42,34))
c2 <- enc(k$pk, c(7,5))
cres1 <- c1 + c2
cres2 <- c1 * c2
cres3 <- c1 %*% c2
dec(k$sk, cres1)
dec(k$sk, cres2)
dec(k$sk, cres3)

A new study – repeated by many newspapers – claims genes that rescue even in severe Mendelian disorder: cystic fibrosis, Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, familial dysautonomia, epidermolysis bullosa simplex, Pfeiffer syndrome, autoimmune polyendocrinopathy syndrome, acampomelic campomelic dysplasia and atelosteogenesis.

A comprehensive screen of 874 genes in 589,306 genomes led to the identification of 13 adults harboring mutations for 8 severe Mendelian conditions, with no reported clinical manifestation of the indicated disease.

But we know about the reliability of 23andme results

Finally! 23 and the FDA warning

who even mixed up samples in the past.

Searching for genes that makes your resilient to disease is interesting of course but not very new with more examples of cystic fibrosis survivors available. Any new proof by the 23andme study is missing so far as the authors were unable to recontact any of the 13 resilient indiviuduals for whatever reasons.

This still not a trivial task given the patchwork of code pieces floating around. When writing a route finder app I came up with the following solution

# html
<form id="myform" enctype="multipart/form-data" action="upload.php" method="POST" target="_parent">
  <input type="hidden" name="uuid" value="1"/>
  <input id="myfile" type="file" name="file"  style="display: none;"/>
  <input type="submit" value="send" style="display: none;"/>
</form>

# query javascript that starts the upload
$("input[id='myfile']").click();

# upload.php
# note the redirect with javascript not with php allows to pass state parameters
$uuid=htmlspecialchars($_POST["uuid"]);
$uf = basename($_FILES['file']['name']);
$fn='data/'.$uuid.'.gpx';
if (move_uploaded_file($_FILES['file']['tmp_name'], $uf)) {
  rename($_FILES['file']['name'],$fn );
  file_put_contents ($fn , $txt, FILE_APPEND );
  echo '<script type="text/javascript">window.parent.location = "index.php";</script>';
}

The upload needs a quick refresh of the webpage (which could be avoided by posting to an hidden iframe and controlling response by an ajax call). The download doesn’t need a refresh:

# note the combined get and post commands
# don't know why this is necessary
$.ajax({
  data: "uuid="+fn,
  type: "post",
  url: "download.php",
  success: function() {
    window.location = 'download.php?uuid='+fn;
  }
});

There is a huge economical interest in bitcoins. And reading a bit more about the blockchain technology behind, I expect that scientific data will soon move towards the same path as soon as we drop Nature, Science and many more journals as gatekeepers

A block chain or blockchain is a permissionless distributed database based on a protocol that maintains a continuously growing list of data records hardened against tampering and revision, even by its operators. The initial and most widely known application of block chain technology is the public ledger of transactions for bitcoin,which has been the inspiration for similar implementations often known as altchains.

Although people are talking so much about releasing study data into the public domain – allowing reviewers to test central claims of a paper – there is no progress at all. Even being part of an EU funded collaborative study, I could never get the full data set.

Maybe it isn’t block chain alone – it may be also  cooperative storage cloud as in the following video example.

Added 31 Dec 2016: Blockchain started back in Jan 2009, occupies currently 105 GB and is distributed among 5400 nodes. Zündfunk (in German) has a nice feature about the blockchain referring mainly to the “Blockchain Revolution“, a new book by Don and Alex Tapscott.