211–220 of 232 posts
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I assume it's one person's DNA. The last time there was talk about this in popular media was the DNA of one person.
Kinda. The Human Genome Project's reference genome is from 4 people. 70% of it is from one person, because that sample happened to be very good.
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TIL that. I was 100% sure the DNA was completely sequenced. Even have a friend with a sequencing company. It is incredible how ignorant one can be. Thank you 10g1k and HN.
FWIW, the DNA was 100% sequenced. However, a proportion of that data that came back from the sequencing machine was too similar to each other, so it was impossible to assemble it into a coherent full set of contiguous chromosomes. Imagine it like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, except that the picture on the front of the puzzle has lots of repeating motifs, so you end up with multiple pieces that look identical. Yo…
Modern sequencing techniques allow us o read 200 to 500 bases at a time. So after hat we need do find a way o arrange these short sequences into a single sequence. And this can be prety hard, especially when you are doing 'de novo' assembly[0].
Besides that, there is the fact that some regions of DNA are repeated[1].
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-generation_sequencing#De...
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I'm curious if these 750MB + the DNA of mitochondria + the protein metagenomics contain all the information needed to build a human, or if there's extra info stored in the machinery of the first cell. That is if we transfer the DNA to an advanced alien civilization - would they be able to make a human.
"if we transfer the DNA to an advanced alien civilization - would they be able to make a human." I'm really surprised that in all these responses to your question no one's mentioned the womb or the mother, who (at least with current technology) is still necessary for making a human. That's not to mention the necessity of the egg. We're not just DNA.
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They weren't using pentium pros, they were using Alpha's because the memory interconnect between a beowulf cluster of pentium pros would be orders of magnitude slower. So likely 'the same, but much slower'.
oh, ha. yeah, that was sort of the root of the joke. companies like Celera, or whoever had the money would write a (large) check for big iron. smaller organizations were realizing they could get slower computers power pretty cheap, and they could get a whole lot of them. There was a little flurry of activity with flocking algorithms, objective-c had a little renaissance due to swarm computing. probably the most famou…
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TIL that. I was 100% sure the DNA was completely sequenced. Even have a friend with a sequencing company. It is incredible how ignorant one can be. Thank you 10g1k and HN.
FWIW, the DNA was 100% sequenced. However, a proportion of that data that came back from the sequencing machine was too similar to each other, so it was impossible to assemble it into a coherent full set of contiguous chromosomes. Imagine it like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, except that the picture on the front of the puzzle has lots of repeating motifs, so you end up with multiple pieces that look identical. Yo…
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The larger news outlets are some of the few remaining places that actually hold their news rooms to some kind of factual standard and facsimile of objective reality. If NYT or the Economist or the BBC tells me the sky is blue, I'm pretty sure it is. If they report on some scientific topic the reporter is not an expert on, I understand that there's probably some signal lost. If they publish something on a contested po…
> The business model of having an autonomous news room that holds itself to factual standards and is largely sequestered from advertising is shrinking and shrinking. In large corporations it's effectively already dead, because many of the "trusted" names have already abandoned it, and you can't even tell which ones they are without being inside the newsroom to know if stories there get spiked on behalf of advertisers…
I think there's too much focus on advertising and corporate interests as the thing that undermines journalism. There's such a thing as to little focus, but right now there's too much focus.
For example, I have seen people lionize particular doctors, or researchers, or climate scientists, or what-have-you, who hold contrarian opinions on particular subjects. Clearly those people, in the minds of those who lionize them, have fewer conflicts of interest than advertising-driven journalists or powerful government officials.
The problem is that there are powerful motivations for people to lie or deceive that are equal in power to advertising money. Power through influence. Power through self-righteousness.
For example: I've looked into various vaccine conspiracy theories that have been touted online, and some of them come from highly credentialed people, sometimes with excellent historical track records in medical fields, who none-the-less are playing fast and loose with the data, or drawing conclusions that cannot be backed by research. The people who tout those theories look to those originators, those highly credentialed people, and say, "Look, there's Dr. So and So, they aren't part of Big Pharma, so they must be on to something". Then I look into Dr. So and So's blog, and look at the research they're citing, realize they're misinterpreting, or exaggerating, or what-have-you. In short, they are deceiving the public. They aren't financially motivated to do so. So why do they do it? Well, there's plenty of reasons. A desire to be right. A desire to be relevant and respected. A desire to have an audience. I think these things are easily as powerful, and often more powerful, than advertising money held over a journalist at a large media company.
And I see benefits to journalists working in groups with editorial control. I've seen great authors go astray in terms of quality when they start self publishing, or somehow become influential enough that they can shrug off their editors. I believe any journalist would be subject to the same forces of ego, influence, etc. If a journalist is making their money through Substack subscriptions, that may be even more of an existential threat than one faced by a journalist at the NYT, who can more readily absorb the financial hit of a story that goes nowhere. The subscribers, after all, now have expectations of what they will get from that journalist. Juicy stories -- at any cost?
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This is a complex question. The cocktail soup in a gamete (sperm or egg) and the resulting zygote contains an awful lot of stuff that would be extremely hard to replace. I could imagine that if the receiving civilization was sufficiently advanced and had a model of what those cells contained (beyond the genomic information) they could build some sort of artificial cell that could bootstrap the genome to the point of…
What do you mean by "LR"? I queried an LLM but no results there either.
Based on the way the person is using it, it does not seem to equate to the Kardashev scale, as my peer stated
For those who don't recall: Back in the Dark Ages, there was a race to decode the human genome. The leading competitiors (wealthiest) were Celera Genomics and the Human Genome Project. After some time, Celera (headed by Craig Venter), announced they had done the deed. However, what Celera had actually done was used what they called a "shotgun method", which meant they took small samples here and there, then built a m…
My recollection of the contentious issues at the time are that a) the Celera project needed the information being made public by the NIH/international Human Genome Project in order to assemble sequences, but was keeping secret its own results, and b) it was intent on acquiring IP rights before the information entered the public domain.
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What do you mean by "LR"? I queried an LLM but no results there either.
It's likely just a typo. LR5 "civilisation"/"civilization" brings up nothing on google. I don't know why you would an LLM to know more. Based on the way the person is using it, it does not seem to equate to the Kardashev scale, as my peer stated
Humans are currently LR2 (food security) and approaching LR3 (artificial general intelligence, self genetic modification). LR4 is generally associated with multiplanetary homing (IE, could survive a fatal meteor strike on the home planet) and LR5 with multisolar homing (IE, could survive a fatal solar incident). LR6 usually has total mastery of physical matter, LR7 can read remote multiverses, and LR8.2 can write remote multiverses. To the best of LR8's knowledge, there is no LR9, so far as their detectors can tell, but it would be hard to say, as LR9 implies existence in multiple multiverses simultaneously. Further, faster than light travel and time travel both remain impossible, so far as LR8 can tell.
“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.” ― Iain M. Banks, Excession
“Unbelievable. I’m in a fucking Outside Context situation, the ship thought, and suddenly felt as stupid and dumb-struck as any muddy savage confronted with explosives or electricity.” ― Iain M. Banks, Excession
“It was like living half your life in a tiny, scruffy, warm grey box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better...and then discovering a little hole in the corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get your finger into, and tease and pull apart at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you... so that you stepped out of the tiny box's confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snow fields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn't even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story.” ― Iain M. Banks, Excession
Could someone explain exactly what it means to be "completely sequence" the human genome when all humans have distinct genetic makeup (ie, different sequences of nucleobases in their DNA/RNA)?