Green Baron

@Cassel, there still is a problem in understanding. DNA is a code. We can read and write it to code text for instance. No problem. Apart from that (and originally), it is used by nature to code proteins and in general life(tm). Parts of the DNA code that codes an organism are known, but not the whole code. The code for an organism is complex and we understand a growing part of it, but not all. Especially not side effects and dependencies. Like, you can read English, you understand parts of a text titled "King Henry VIII", but not all. The title is only a shortcut, it doesn't describe what's in the play, the time, the politics, the social interactions, personal reflections. For that, you must sit down and read it in whole. But everyone knows what "King henry VIII" is about when hearing the title, at least those who have studied literature. Would you rant at Shakespeare for not naming it good enough, misleading it for a simple theatre play, though you don't understand everything ? See what i mean ? Language is a good example. Language is what makes you and me communicate. Language exist in many forms and versions, formal languages, natural languages, mathematics can be seen as the language of physics, symbolic languages, communication via signals, odours, ... In order to understand a language you must learn. Years. Decades. It never stops. If you are too lazy to do so, just leave the fun to others and honour them for their thriving and endeavours because, in contrary to your generalization of being useless and only spending other's money, these scientists and subsequently engineers enable your easy living, your pants (chemistry, agriculture. geoscience), your typing on the keyboard (physics, electronics, chemistry, petrology), your provisioning (economics, infrastructure, construction, geoscience in general), your ranting (physics, radiocommunications, networking, spaceflight, ...). Without the scientific foundations of engineering you'll be driving horse-(or ox-) coaches, eating things from the field (if the harvest was good enough), and wearing coarsely made rugs (if the big boy from the neighbourhood hasn't taken them from you). In general, science lays the foundation and enables us to understand and manipulate the nature around us and also the living together of many people (philosophy, politics, economics, geography). All things we use have been described and accumulated over centuries, and given names. These names are not perfect, but we know what we are talking about. You must learn to use them properly or you'll be chattering about things you don't understand (which we all do from time to time). Desoxyribonucleid acid is a name for complex thing whose description, experiments, applications and scientific history fills libraries. Do you want to bring a library every time you talk about it or just name it "DNA" ? One day you may find a field of interest, whatever it'll be, and you'll see that people have worked on it before, found things, described them, given them names, abstractions, in order to enable the following generations to build upon their findings without having to go thorugh it over and again. That's how complex techniques like the one presented by the OP come into being.

3371

You (or me) even have to devote time to grasp a simple concept like electrical energy, let alone DNA. Nothing comes from nothing, valid in the kitchen, experimental chemistry and computer gaming. Learning is fun. If only we could drink knowledge :-) We (well, they, not i) perfectly understand the chemistry involved, to a degree that information can be encoded, written, stored and retrieved with relatively simple means. But we do not understand everything about how an organism is encoded in all its details. Like, in the 70s people knew how to store characters in a 7bit code called ASCII, but 3 dimensional animations stored and played in real time still were a mystery. Ok, a helpless analogy, maybe :-) Ok, but now, to turn your argument on you ;-) what do you mean with "safe" ?

Nobody does this, that is a severe misunderstanding you must emancipate yourself from ;-) We all freely admit we do not know everything, and probably humankind as a whole might never know "everything". Even more, it may well be, that from a philosophical point of view, "everything" does not exist in an evolving universe. Or it has a limit, a do-not-use-after date printed on it because evolution has made some things different than before. There now is a new "everything" than before and if the rate of change is quicker than the rate of acquisition of knowledge about it, even the Red Queen could not catch up. Just a random thought ;-) But we can be happy like a little child when we found something we think is worth presenting. But i think this takes a wrong course. Do you always use a defined and well formed expression that describes exactly what you want to say ? Or do you say "this is like that, in order not to bore you i'll use the term foo". In a symposium, where time is limited to let's say 15min, would you prefer that the guy takes his time to describe in 3 dimensions what he is talking about when everybody else knows that the subject is "non-coding" or "junk DNA" ? It would be impossible to transport the his point. But, well, now, that we have talked about it, we know what is meant with "junk DNA". We don't have to stay there any longer. Oooh, i could tell stories about ancient genetics, but i leave it for fear of derailment.

That is impossible. Complex things cannot be described with simple words without simplifying to an extent that things are plainly wrong, at least can be misunderstood. If someone explains a complex thing with simple words, he may be trying to mislead you. In this case, "junk DNA" is used in some publications where it can be expected that the reader understands that it means "a part which apparently doesn't code a protein sequence." (was that correct dear geneticists ? :-)) If you like, call it "non-coding dna sequence", just like wikepedia does. Which would be valid until a purpose might be found ;-) Also, we must understand that for all life on earth there is a common ancestor and the basic encoding technique has not changed for hundreds of millions of years (maybe >2 billions). Some sequences may encode something in a different context, for another blueprint. Life isn't invented anew for every species and some sequences can be switched on and off, like for example number of fingers in the mammal skeleton, allowing for horses with 1 finger (+rudiments) or whales with many on the forelimb. Edit: another example for the impossibility difficulties to explain complex things with simple words :-)

3331

I understand you, @Cassel. Keep in mind that Scientific American is a popular science magazine. I am by no means an expert for these things i only follow the parts that deal with paleo-anthropology, and that is complicated enough ... in most parts too hard to understand in detail. In this application, findings are still overthrown too quickly to care about the details ;-) Knowledge about which parts code what and how will probably be improved and defined more sharply in the future, when we understand how it codes a living organism in detail. Until then, seen from a high level, DNA is "only" a highly sophisticated coding mechanism. Nature uses it to code life in a way that nothing changes too quickly but yet stays adaptable. We can also use it to code things. We will see if it is better than other encodings, digital or analogue. Either way, to transmit DNA-encoded things over wire or ether, it still would have to be digitized or made analogue, requiring a de- and encoder on both ends, if i am not mistaken.

Yes, this is extremely annoying and the cause of many expensive (and sometimes hilarious) mistakes, even in spaceflight it happens that screws don't fit where they should. We do have the French originated SI (systéme international), with basic and derived units that is used in almost all relevant publications and is constantly under improvement and ever more detailed definition. If some boneheads :-) refuse to use it, one can either ignore them or apply the necessary conversions, There is no other way. ;-)

Well, if f(x) is constant 0 for all xes than it would be 0. But 1/0 is not defined anyway because division by 0. Or have i missed something ? For my laymen's understanding a proper function definition would be f(x) = dosomethingwithx, or not ? 0*x is still constant 0 for all xes ... Edit: if you're talking computer than yes, if no optimization and other checking is activated, the expression 1/0 would be evaluated at runtime (for C/C++), resulting in a runtime exception. I was astounded that the compiler (GCC 8.3) didn't catch that by default ...

Wasn't that a theme in one of those Star Treks, with a Klingon ? Well, their DNA probably isn't all that complicated anyway :-) Seriously, it is not yet in all detail known which parts code what and how they interact and if a change somewhere may have side effects. Though geneticists are getting better, experiments like those recently shown off from a Chinese geneticist still have a lot of uncertainty in them. Also, i fear, if somebody wants that data, they'll simply graze your bathroom for a hair or scale ....

@Starstruck69, your first post ? Welcome !

Though it touches politics, that is a point imo. Footprints on the moon is a mere status / prestige thing. There is nothing of interest there, at least nothing robots couldn't accomplish or mess up :-) I don't know who's next, if at all. Maybe one of the private companies. Just to show that they can do it and keep up the funding and public attention.

Rome The eternal city. Well, since the mid iron age at least. There are more eternal ones :-) (... take care of your belongings when visiting)

Xanten, Germany A Roman merchant ship was found in the mud of an antique harbour. And reconstructed.

Eschede, Germany Sadly the site of one of the most deadly train disasters in railroad history, when a high speed train derailed due to a wheel rim fracture. The derailment took place at 200km/h right before a bridge, which collapsed from the impact of a car, and the following two thirds of the train were compressed to just a few meters from the weight of the bridge body, their own kinetic energy, and on impact of the trailing power car. For the people in the cars that were buried under the bridge there was no chance of survival.

(NGC) 3319 ... a quiet bar galaxy in the vicinity. Well, astronomically.

Moar of that oldie stuff: Those were hymns :-)

My thoughts, though not an expert: It looks like the main problems that keeps us from mass using of DNA storage are cost (it is expensive per MB) and speed (it is slow). But it would last longer than magnetic techniques that last years at most, especially if stored spooled on a reel, or than optical stuff, that degrades in 10-20 years and must tediously be copied every now and then. I would assume that copying of DNA is less of a hazzle than copying 1000s of disks, especially in case of coding errors or partly degraded data. And, of course, like all storage techniques, the ability to read and decode must still be there when and if the stored data must be read again one day. That's a huge problem inherent to all archiving systems. Another technique could be manipulating single molecules in a 3d crystalline structure, or holographic storage, but i read we aren't that far yet. If DNA storage is not too expensive and fast enough to read and write it'll be used. And it needs less valuable resources for the storage media.

Yulin, China

I am as sorry as possible ... Really thought i had waited long enough. 3307

Now i play this game for years and - as somebody who has Umlaute built-in in the firmware - always pronounced Mün like Mün, not like Mun or Moon. Tell me that wasn't all that wrong ? :-)

Nicely done ! Sagittarius and the galactic centre rise pretty high here at 28°N. Let's compete in spring/summer ;-)

Not more than what is in the paper. Apparently an eruption that spread under the "lid" of a thick package of sediments. Remarkable is the reference to the 2012 eruption off La Restinga here on El Hierro island, which was a real eruption, took place in an area well watched over and is documented quite well. There were visible sea surface phenomena (harbour entrance was actually closed several months) and measurable changes on the sea floor, like rising mounds on a ridge that now reaches to shallow depth. The causes are grossly known (Canary hot spot), though not as well as for instance Hawai'i. The Comores basin is only sparsely probed and watched over by instruments, but it is known to be tectonically active (part of the complex East African rift system radiate to there maybe ?). With better mapping of the sea floor and eventually faults and cracks, relative movement of smaller crustal units and better seismic data of the crust and upper mantle one could maybe tell more about it and its origin. Volcanism is pretty young there, so it is probably not a fossil subduction zone or other remains of an active boundary :-). Sea floor must be pretty old (like Jurassic), if it is still 4km deep despite of a layer of sediments on the oceanic crust. ------------ Edit: found a paper supporting the East African rift system extension (let us dub it EArse :-)) hypothesis as well as the tectonic activity of the Comores basin. Old ocean floor age is mentioned as well. So, as a first unqualified guess, the umbrella term "hot spot activity" may not totally be wrong ... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X18305181