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FRIDAY REPORT OF 11/24/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
“DNA VARIES MORE WIDELY FROM PERSON TO PERSON, GENETIC MAPS REVEAL”
by JAMES OWEN for NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NEWS
“The genetic makeup of the human race is much more varied than previously believed, new research shows. Scientists say that surprisingly many large chunks of human DNA differ among individuals and ethnic groups. The new findings, based on several studies, will have dramatic implications for research into deadly diseases, the researchers add.
“In the lead study, reported tomorrow in the journal Nature, scientists created the first map of the human genome that shows that large segments of DNA are missing or duplicated between normal, healthy people…
“The new map provides a much clearer picture of human genetic variation, says geneticist and co-researcher Charles Lee of the Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. ‘This evidence is showing that we are more genetically unique from one another – we all have individualized genomes,’ he said.
Until now only relatively small amounts of genetic difference between people had been identified. “The number and magnitude of this type of variation was totally unexpected,” said Huntington F. Willard, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “The variation among seemingly ‘normal’ human genomes is quite astonishing,” added Willard, who was not involved in the study…
“The findings also suggest ‘more genetic variation between human genomes and chimpanzees genomes than we had previously appreciated,’ Lee said. Past studies suggest chimps share around 99 percent of their DNA with humans. ‘If you add on CNVs, you do see a lot more differences between the two species,’ Lee added. The researchers say their findings suggest a figure in the region of 96 to 97 percent similarity…”
To read the complete article, click on the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NEWS SITE for the proper date.
“MIDDLED-AGED SPREAD”
from the 11/21/06 issue of THE ECONOMIST
“Internet time ticks away fast. Only yesterday Yahoo! and AOL were new media upstarts threatening the very existence of traditional old media firms. As their share prices went through the roof, the shares of their supposedly obsolescent rivals tumbled. That panic led some old media firms into spectacularly bad decisions, none worse than Time Warner’s marriage to AOL just before the dotcom bubble burst in 2000.
“Now some of those once-new media upstarts are feeling the heat from even newer media upstarts. AOL and Yahoo! are the leading examples of what have been christened the ‘new old media.’ Although barely teenagers, they are struggling with the hot flushes and mood swings of corporate middle age.
“AOL has belatedly got round to a radical change of its business model, long after it missed the chance to fill the space now occupied by Google. It is hard to say how much value remains in the franchise.
“Over at Yahoo! the firm’s share price has fallen 31% so far this year, against a 20% rise for Google. Panic may be creeping in at the edges, to judge from a leaked memo which is being called the ‘Peanut Butter Manifesto,’ and was penned by a Yahoo! executive who once shaved the letter Y on the back of his head.
“The note complains that Yahoo! has become an underperforming bureaucracy with staff sequestered in silos scarcely talking to each other. It is said to combine a lack of accountability with an aversion to risk and a do-everything strategy that is like ‘spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.’ How are the mighty upstarts fallen!
“There is nothing terribly surprising about this. Why should online firms be immune to the same forces of bureaucratization and risk-aversion that caused earlier generations to lose their youthful vigor? But nor is this necessarily the end of the world for the new old media...”
To read the complete article, click on http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/businessview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8310248
“‘SMART DUST’ CENSORS TO BE USED FOR ECO DETECTION”
BY MASON INMAN FOR NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NEWS 11/14/06
“Smart dust is the name researchers have given to the idea of having handfuls of tiny, cheap sensors called motes that can be scattered around to measure all manner of things in the environment, from chemicals in the soil to scents in the air. So far, the motes that are the size of dust particles aren’t that smart, and the smart ones are far bigger than dust, as Michael Sailor puts it…
“‘If we tried to build these [sensors] 15 years ago, they would have cost millions of dollars a piece,’ said Michael Hamilton, director of the James San Jacinto Mountains Reserve, run by the University of California. ‘Today they cost hundreds of dollars. And we expect in ten years, they’ll be just a few dollars.’ At the James Reserve, nestled in the mountains of southern California, Hamilton oversees a pioneering project in which arrays of larger by smarter sensors watch the minutiae of life, revolutionizing ecological studies…
“They also have inconspicuous cameras watching birds’ nests to monitor how many eggs hatch. Birds’ reproductive success is closely tied to climate, since the temperature has to be in the right range for eggs to develop properly and for the birds to find enough food to feed their hatchlings. The system has revealed that ‘there’s a lot more nest failure than we expected,’ Hamilton said. Before, the team couldn’t keep track of how many eggs failed to hatch, and ‘we didn’t know why they failed.’ Now the researchers can answer such questions, and hope to someday use their fine details to put together answers to big issues in ecology. ‘The holy grail of all this is: Can we forecast change?’ Hamilton said.
“Meanwhile, Sailor, the UCSD chemist, is striving to create cheaper, smaller, cleverer motes that would also address environmental problems. One of his group’s main projects could be called smart sand. His team’s sensors are engineered at the nanoscale – the size of molecules – and are cheap because they are etched out of flakes of silicon, the stuff of computer chips and beaches…”
To read the complete article, click on the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NEWS SITE for the proper date.
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