Thursday, February 12, 2015
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Monday, February 9, 2015
Fibonacci Zoetrope Sculptures
These are 3-D printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light. The placement of the appendages is determined by the same method nature uses in pinecones and sunflowers. The rotation speed is synchronized to the strobe so that one flash occurs every time the sculpture turns 137.5ยบ—the golden angle. If you count the number of spirals on any of these sculptures you will find that they are always Fibonacci numbers.
For this video, rather than using a strobe, the camera was set to a very short shutter speed (1/4000 sec) in order to freeze the spinning sculpture.
John Edmark is an inventor/designer/artist. He teaches design at Stanford University.
Visit John's website here: http://web.stanford.edu/~edmark/
and Vimeo site: https://vimeo.com/johnedmark/videos
Learn how he made these sculptures here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Bloom...
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Monday, February 2, 2015
DNA ACTIVATION
A little cheesy, but really good info and explains well to give you understanding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=85114404&x-yt-ts=1422579428&v=EUunraf0bEM#t=76
https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=85114404&x-yt-ts=1422579428&v=EUunraf0bEM#t=76
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Junk DNA Is Not Junk After All
Among the many mysteries of human biology is
why complex diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and psychiatric
disorders are so difficult to predict and, often, to treat. An equally
perplexing puzzle is why one individual gets a disease like cancer or
depression, while an identical twin remains perfectly healthy.
Now scientists have discovered a vital clue to unraveling these riddles. The
human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that
reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn
out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other
tissues behave. The discovery, considered a major medical and
scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health
because many complex diseases appear to be caused by tiny changes in
hundreds of gene switches.
The findings, which are the fruit of an
immense federal project involving 440 scientists from 32 laboratories
around the world, will have immediate applications for understanding how
alterations in the non-gene parts of DNA contribute to human diseases,
which may in turn lead to new drugs. They can also help explain how the
environment can affect disease risk. In the case of identical twins,
small changes in environmental exposure can slightly alter gene
switches, with the result that one twin gets a disease and the other
does not.
As scientists delved into the “junk” — parts
of the DNA that are not actual genes containing instructions for
proteins — they discovered a complex system that controls genes. At
least 80 percent of this DNA is active and needed. The result of the
work is an annotated road map of much of this DNA, noting what it is
doing and how. It includes the system of switches that, acting like
dimmer switches for lights, control which genes are used in a cell and
when they are used, and determine, for instance, whether a cell becomes a
liver cell or a neuron.
“It’s Google Maps,” said Eric Lander,
president of the Broad Institute, a joint research endeavor of Harvard
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In contrast, the
project’s predecessor, the Human Genome Project,
which determined the entire sequence of human DNA, “was like getting a
picture of Earth from space,” he said. “It doesn’t tell you where the
roads are, it doesn’t tell you what traffic is like at what time of the
day, it doesn’t tell you where the good restaurants are, or the
hospitals or the cities or the rivers.”
The new result “is a stunning resource,” said
Dr. Lander, who was not involved in the research that produced it but
was a leader in the Human Genome Project. “My head explodes at the
amount of data.”
The discoveries were published on Wednesday in six papers in the journal Nature and
in 24 papers in Genome Research and Genome Biology. In addition, The
Journal of Biological Chemistry is publishing six review articles, and
Science is publishing yet another article.
Human DNA is “a lot more active than we
expected, and there are a lot more things happening than we expected,”
said Ewan Birney of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European
Bioinformatics Institute, a lead researcher on the project.
In one of the Nature papers, researchers link
the gene switches to a range of human diseases — multiple sclerosis,
lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, celiac disease — and even
to traits like height. In large studies over the past decade, scientists
found that minor changes in human DNA sequences increase the risk that a
person will get those diseases. But those changes were in the junk, now
often referred to as the dark matter — they were not changes in genes —
and their significance was not clear. The new analysis reveals that a
great many of those changes alter gene switches and are highly
significant.
“Most of the changes that affect disease don’t
lie in the genes themselves; they lie in the switches,” said Michael
Snyder, a Stanford University researcher for the project, called Encode, for Encyclopedia of DNA Elements.
And that, said Dr. Bradley Bernstein, an
Encode researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, “is a really big
deal.” He added, “I don’t think anyone predicted that would be the
case.”
The discoveries also can reveal which genetic
changes are important in cancer, and why. As they began determining the
DNA sequences of cancer cells, researchers realized that most of the
thousands of DNA changes in cancer cells were not in genes; they were in
the dark matter.
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