isaac Mao's Library tagged DNA → View Popular

08 Aug 09

"This is a potential mechanism to create the neural diversity that makes each person unique," says Gage. "The brain has 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections, but mobile pieces of DNA could give individual neurons a slightly different capacity from each other."
"It is known that these mobile elements are important in lower organisms, such as plants and yeast, but in mammals they are generally considered to be remnants of our past," says Gage. "Yet they are extremely abundant. Approximately 50% of the total human genome is made up of remnants of mobile elements. If this were true junk, we would be getting rid of it."

20 Mar 09

19 Mar 09

DNA computing may not be fast but it is massively parallel. With the right kind of setup, it has the potential to solve huge mathematical problems. It's hardly surprising then, that DNA computing represents a serious threat to various powerful encryption schemes such as the Data Encryption Standard (DES).

03 Mar 09

Despite many experts' doubt that whole-genome sequencing could be done for $1,000, let alone a 10th that much, BioNanomatrix believes it can reach the $100 target in five years. The reason for its optimism: company founder Han Cao has created a chip that uses nanofluidics and a series of branching, ever-narrowing channels to allow researchers, for the first time, to isolate and image very long strands of individual DNA molecules.

21 Dec 08

不管是从古生物取证还是人类DNA考证，还是有证据的人类历史考证而言，似乎都指向了同一个答案：中国其实是整个世界的一个分支而已，而且开化较晚。诚然，依靠着东亚地区民族冲突和混血交配，中国的古代文明因为偏安一隅曾经一度看上去欣欣向荣，但对这个答案并无冲突。
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- 中国不是世界的中心——这种幼儿般的幻想曾在每一个“文明古国”的心中存在过，但是早在数千年以前就成为了过去式，曾途径丝绸之路和在印度中东倒卖走私的商人们最清楚这一点。正相反，中国是世界的一个组成部分，是这个世界家族的一员。

10 Oct 08

Doctoral research by Turi King has shown that men with the same British surname are highly likely to be genetically linked. The results of her research have implications in the fields of forensics, genealogy, epidemiology and the history of surnames.

14 Mar 08

04 Mar 08