mammalian transgenesis

Born this day in 1921, embryologist and genetic engineering pioneer Beatrice Mintz contributed enormously to the understanding of inheritance, growth and cellular differentiation. After a Fulbright research fellowship afforded her studies abroad in Paris and Strasbourg, Mintz came to Philadelphia in 1960 to continue cancer research, perfecting techniques for reprogramming tumour cells, cloning and using viral messengers to introduce foreign DNA. Mintz remains on the faculty of the Fox Chase Cancer Centre.

8x8

three blind mice: researchers restore sight by reversing the epigenetic clock in laboratory animals, re-endowing youthful characteristics—via Marginal Revolution  

big drunk girl energy: the dumbest coup is still playing out in the courts  

a touch of cabin fever: this is what stir-crazy looks like—the Year on TikTok—via the morning news

manifest destiny: a scrollytelling art histories (previously) that recounts the mythology of North America—via Maps Mania  

alpenhorn: disappearing, defaced and duelling phallic totems in the mountains of Germany and Austria 

for the longest time: dispel the zoom and gloom with this quarantine rendition from the Phoenix Chamber Choir 

 home box office: Warner Brothers is simultaneously releasing its cinematic productions on subscription television for 2021—via Kottke  

oceanus procellarum: Chang’e probe (previously) has lifted off of the lunar surface and will return with the first samples of moon rocks since 1976—via Slashdot

7x7

a midnight train going anywhere: take the nightline through an infinite metropolis—via JWZ  

炬燵: a giant, living room sized electric blanket from Japan called a kotatsu 

pop culture c-span: mining the US government archives for movie and television references and reviews—via Waxy  

doctor zaius, doctor zaius: researchers splice human genes into embryonic marmosets to increase their brain size 

just a little plastic bag with little handles on it: the arbiter of packaging 

peripheral drift: an interesting rotating circles optical illusion  

zoomquilt: follow the thread for an infinite exploration—via the New Shelton wet/dry

müllerian mimicry

While at a loss to choose a favourite, we very much appreciated—in a similar vein to these apparel comparisons—this thread of Sir David Attenborough in various fancy suits and academic regalia as well as more practical outfits juxtaposed with friends from the insect world from the always splendiferous Everlasting Blört. Much more to explore at the links above, and do let us know if you’ve found a spirit animal for your own wardrobe. 

 

recapitulation theory

Having before seen some of the precocious handiwork of Charles Darwin’s children, we enjoyed this curated collection from Open Culture of the early drawings of the immanent scientist whose offspring matured beyond test subjects and objects of academic curiosity into laboratory assistants and apprentice researchers themselves with several becoming scientists in their own right. Interest born to a degree out of melancholy and self-preservation, these illustrations and what they prefigure provides a nice counter-balance.  Much more to explore at the link above.

7x7

bouncing here and there and everywhere: a Finnish maths rocks band—via Things Magazine

wrr-fm: the strange and wonderful account of the first radio station in Texas—via Miss Cellania’s Links

infinity kisses: Carolee Schneemann (*1939 – †2019) experimental montage of her smooching her cats

smashedmouths: an all deep fake rendition of All Star using wav2lip subroutine—via Waxy

the medium is the message: hunting down the first mention of cybersex

eeo: Trump bans diversity training, citing them as divisive, engendering resentment and fundamentally un-American

recessive traits: heredity illustrated with gummy bears

acquired immunity

Seemingly to spite the World Health Organisation and China (plus the some one hundred seventy nation strong coalition who have so far signed up to participate) and avoid any obligations to share with the rest of humanity, the US under Trump’s direction will not join a global effort to develop a vaccine and therapeutic interventions to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
By snubbing the Covax initiative and its solidarity trials—which pledges to prioritise aid and delivery to the most vulnerable populations first (once that presently hypothetical inoculation is developed—that is), Trump is forcing the US to wager big on the promise that America can on its own come up with its own treatment hedged with an escalating corona-driven arms race with contracts to buy out the stock of whatever intervention seems viable.

naming conventions or format cells

Via Kottke’s Quick Links (now archived) we learn that rather than trying to carve out exceptions in the programming of the world’s most prevalent spreadsheet software that is a little notorious in trying to anticipate one’s intentions and be helpful or trust that the next person to collaborate on a research project remembers to disable automatic formatting, geneticists are modifying gene names and initialisms so that Microsoft Excel doesn’t misconstrue (see also here and here) them as dates.
Personally my biggest frustration is inheriting a Frankenstein of a document that has conflicting source margins and artefacts of older surprises built into it unsuspecting of its future consequences and accom- modations but it’s rather astounding and frightening to read that fully twenty percent of known errors in published papers can be attributed to errant aliases like SEPT-1, gene that encodes the protein septin needed for cell division and may play a part in Alzheimer’s disease, or MARCH1 (Membrane-Associated Ring-CH Type Finger 1). Scientists and universities are working on reforming the nomenclature retroactively and going forward (though I imagine it is hard to future proof such things) to reduce the chance of misinterpretation by a computer try-hard, like Mister DNA from Jurassic Park.

256 byte boundary

First encountered here, we really appreciated learning about Memories and the economy of engineering that went into coding this MS-DOS demonstration, via Waxy, and wonder if anyone else is practising constrained programming, sensitive to limitations, legacy and backwards compatibility. Considering how enduring Voyagers’ primitive operating systems are or the two-bit viruses that can bring the world to a stand-still, tiny code can have outsized implications.

6x6

paracosm: Things Magazine digs through its rough drafts to bring together a montage of private homes that represent the complete, the self-contained

your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should: researchers isolate a sample of possibly viable dinosaur DNA, via Slashdot

ursine alignment chart: lockdown coping levels gauged by cartoon bears

вечеринка на балконе: solo techno raves are the latest challenge in Russia under social distancing rules

covid corridor: absent leadership on a national level, new names proposed for regional alliances forming in the disunited states

domus: Sony World Photography Awards winners and runners-up announced in the category of architecture—via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals

fringe theory

Whilst the rollout of Fifth Generation (5G) cellular networks—argued as essential to support the Internet of Things (which seems a bit of an exaggeration and if there are connectivity bottlenecks, a lot of that stems from being bogged down by adware) to include self-driving vehicles—is not free from controversy, for instance its lockstep integration with jurisdictions to enable seamless surveillance and its general portrayal as technology’s be all and end all, it most certainly does not infect people with the novel corona virus nor is COVID19 a front for the ailments that the global pandemic is causing, a false narrative inspiring some to destroy cell phone masts and sow distrust—that the errant strands of RNA that researchers interpret as a new viral strain is actually genetic material expelled from our own cells, taking with it toxins built up by the non-ionising radiation of cell towers.
Jesus wept. The same social media for whom the contagion of such paradigm is their bread-and-butter have agreed wholesale to not amplify such dangerous missives, knowing full well that popularity and endurance of conspiracy theories is not sustained by being mainstreamed but rather sidelined. Recently reading about a reportedly parallel phenomenon that took place during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, I heard that people were fearful of using telephones for fear that the sickness might be transmitted by wire, and while allowing that there might have been one of two attention-seekers raising those alarms, I should think that the aversion was chiefly sourced in the idea that proximity to a shared mouthpiece was not the most hygienic thing to do. Perhaps future generations will look favourably, naively back on this vandalism as an attempt to disrupt Facebook’s stream of disinformation that is the most virulent than any contagion. Misinformed and dangerous as those views maybe, those whom irresponsibly espouse such theories are not stupid and are studied and creative enough to know that governments, businesses and marketers have not been transparent and forthcoming in matters of public and muting those most able to spread these ideas won’t address underlying causes, like a frayed social safety-net that make alternative medicine more appealing for the precarious classes—not to mention charlatans who can speak to and perpetuate these insecurities, attended by industry whose lobby dictates regulation with no regard for consumer protection.

zoonosis or jumping the shark

Though we would be wrong to blame bats or any other wildlife for bringing illness where it is our behaviours that invite in and exacerbate the spread of new disease, it is worth considering how our chiroptera friends have evolved an immune system parallel and attendant to the corona viruses that have accompanied them for countless generations.
As flying mammals, a lot of their metabolic processes are given over to keeping them aloft and because of the stress, wear and tear that come with it, their immune system is more tolerant of infections and endures them rather than reacting in a violent, exclusionary manner. Humans, on the other hand, with little exposure to such pathogens—bats being themselves nearly as mobile and wide-ranging as people—have a hyper-vigilant approach to combating contagion which has normally served us well but can result in a life-threating condition called sepsis when the immune response is pushed into overdrive and harms the internal organs and tissues. There isn’t much that one can do to alter those sorts of responses but there are a host of pre-emptive measures that are even more effective—like maintaining one’s distance and proper hand-washing that’s not a duck-and-cover exercise as a little soap and elbow grease and discipline out of the consideration of the wellbeing of others, especially for the vulnerable among us does chemically wreck the virus and commute it towards something harmless, keeping healthy in general and getting vaccinations and immunizations as prescribed even if the glamourous cure we are waiting for does not seem so commiserate with the chore of prevention. The inflammatory reaction that follow the onset of infection can result in pneumonia and low blood flow and proves fatal—from all causes of septic shock, for about ten million worldwide per year. A number far greater, like the pathology of season influenza often cited, than the number of case of the corona virus likely to prove deadly but maybe that signals that it is time that we find all these numbers unacceptable and work towards societal and medical interventions to reduce its occurrence.

crtl-c

Via Slashdot, we are referred to the obituary of the recently departed computer scientist Larry Gordon Tesler (*1945), whom while possibly not a household name like other pioneers helped make invaluable contributions for human-machine interaction and defines how we interface with computers today.
While working at the Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Centre (also the birthplace of the mouse), Tesler developed the first object-based programming language, the first word processor with a graphical, WYSIWYG display and perhaps most famously and introduced the concept of copy-and-paste functionality. After leaving Xerox, Tesler went on to work for Apple—one of the architects behind the Lisa and the Newton—consulted for Yahoo!, Amazon and the genetics company 23andMe

palm house and parterre or bulletin of miscellaneous information

Underpinning nearly all life on Earth and comprising a majority of the planet’s biomass, the kingdoms of plants and fungi are constantly yielding up new discoveries that we must cherish and preserve as best we can, for their own sake and to mediate on the strange and novel adaptations and chemical magic that Nature has developed, some habitats lost before we could fully appreciate or even identify what sorts of treasures we’ve destroyed. Curators at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew have selected ten superlative finds out of the some one hundred and nine newly, officially recognised species all across the globe to highlight this wonderful and surprising realm, including a berry that has the effect on the human palette of turning sour tastes to sweet (Synsepalum Chimanimani) and a tenacious shrub confined to a single waterfall that produces its own adhesive to stick to rocks and prevent it from being swept away.

mmxxix

Though we can know one event to happen ten years from now with some certainty, A Message from Earth was beamed by a high-powered radio signal towards exoplanet Gliese 581c in 2008 will be in reception range, it bears recalling the adage, via the always engaging Things Magazine, by scifi author William Ford Gibson that “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed”—with nearly a year’s worth of 2019 headlines focusing and informing how 2029’s reporting might look if we continue on this same trajectory.  While perhaps not in the expected milieu and sacred settings of blockbuster movies no epic flooding yet of New York City or London but we are on the cusps of experiencing such cinematic disasters Delhi or Jakarta and instead of delivering us to a life of leisure and a forty-minute workweek, we are instead fretting over mass robotic-redundancy and unemployment, so Gibson’s quote resounds with perspective. What do you think about these predictions? The past is good council but the present may make us all come up short.

buckeye state

Recommended by Digg, we really enjoyed reading this nuanced, thoughtful essay that explores the project to restore North America’s blighted chestnut forests (see also) by creating a genetic hybrid whose DNA contains material from wheat that makes it resistant to the fungus that wiped out the trees.
Given how some of our exuberance to adopt GMOs was misplaced—and conversely fears over it, it is especially vital to get the science right before releasing something synthetic into the wild as trees not thrive outside of our laboratories, fields and plantations, they are also a vital part of the landscape and ecosystem, host to their own particular constellations of Nature. What do you think? Testing is extensive and circumspect and well worth considering all the trials conducted and considered but one in particular stands out: tadpoles fed with either natural or transgenic chestnut leaf litter thrived equally well, but grew at nearly twice the rate of their siblings that had to make due with a diet of maple and beech leaves—their only option since the chestnuts disappeared a century ago, suggesting that the ecosystem is missing these magnificent and useful trees far more than we can appreciate.

cloud farming or ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

Via the New Shelton Wet/Dry, we learn of a fledging company that hopes to stave off the incidental but increasingly significant problem of cloud storage and energy-intensive data-management by enabling clients to keep their past and prognostications waiting in the wings in the form of crops whose DNA has been encoded (at density with integrity reaching two hundred petapixels per gram) within the plants themselves, and instead of consuming resources to maintain the information at one’s fingertips—we ought to mediate on the meaning of archives, curation and libraries before we decided to make everything at all times ready to summon forward whilst on the go—though the details seem rather sparse, to generate clean air and useful biomass as a by-product of perpetuating these hitchhiker genes.

Perhaps this passive form of storage could also be a substitute for the energy-hungry prospect of prospecting for crypto-currencies as well.  Compare to how restrictions on memory and storage of software was supplemented on the Apollo missions by weaving the programming into a mesh by hand.  Knowledge should be freely accessible but the omnipresence of it might seem to have diminishing value, considering the caprices of capacity and arbitrary limits. I wonder what it means for abstract, errant data to become part of Nature and whether that same information isn’t also party to the rules of evolution and inheritance and what we perceive as degradation, decoding errors that outside our dataset we would call mutations which in fact be taking that triangulation of statistics to the next level.

heritage tourism

In what smacks very much as an unholy alliance that turns over a rock to reveal that there’s already a booming genealogical travel industry, one problematic force of the gig-economy that’s turned gentrification into overdrive and percolated a housing crisis in the popular destination of the moment that’s proving very hard to recover from and another DNA analysis service that’s demonstrated some serious problems with confirmation bias and sampling-size form a partnership to make holiday-suggestions based on one’s ancestry—for those wanting to rediscover their roots.
Family histories can of course be fascinating, enlightening and humbling—to help us all realise that each of us has been uprooted and transplanted in one way or another, but this method and the package it promises does not strike me as the advisable way to dig around in the past. It’s a huge dissonance that we’ve cushioned ourselves to such a great extent to maintain our distance from others and avoid interaction or betraying intent, and yet we will invite strangers into our homes and automobiles and hope they’ll judge us well. What do you think? The two companies pledge that data about one’s DNA and travelogue won’t cross but I can’t see how that can be prevented. We’d all like to be able to extemporaneously share our narratives and autobiographies (especially when they reaffirm our uniqueness) and perhaps have a dramatic reunion with long-lost cousins, but I don’t think that journey is one that ought to be short-circuited though marketing gimmicks and cynical ploys for horizontal monopolies on one’s aspirations.

breakfast of champions

One of the intermediate achievements to come out of a four-decade experiment of The Land Institute’s founders Wes and Dana Jackson was trialled earlier this week before a body of scientists, conservationists and environmental activists in the form of a cereal milled from the grain of a perennial wheat, domesticated through a series of cross-breeding (see also) to make a potentially useful food crop out of wild prairie grasses.
Calling their cultivar Kernza, the team hopes to transform and invert the way industrial agriculture affects the environment and ecosystem as an enduring part of an environment that admits cohabitation rather than a seasonal interloper that requires energy intensive replanting year after year and causes a large degree of collateral damage despite its otherwise shallow impact.  In comparison, seasonal farming practises seem like a scorched earth campaign, with pesticides, erosion, vast expanses of monoculture that does not allow for a degree of diversity and the act of tilling itself that releases a bigger share of carbon dioxide than most other human enterprises.  Learn more at the links above.

rose of jericho

Via the always wonderful and inspiring Nag on the Lake we are introduced to a shrub called Selaginella lepidophylla—a type of resurrection plant—that can cope with the arid and punishing conditions of its native habitat, the deserts of Chihuahua, and survive unscathed near complete desiccation.
During periods of drought—and researchers are looking into how they might reactivate the same dormant genes in food crops to make them sturdier under dry conditions—the plant, also known as the (False) Rose of Jericho, curls up into a ball when dry and unfurls its fronds upon re-hydration and has evolved another clever trick as has its North African cousin—Anastatica hierochuntica, the (True) Rose of Jericho—and can form tumbleweeds to be whisked away to a more favourable location. Since ancient times, farmers (and hucksters) have recognised resurrection plants as vegetable hygrometer to predict oncoming rain. See a time-lapse of the thirsty plant getting a drink at the link above.