Month: May 2014

New nucleotides

From the moment life gained a foothold on Earth the diversity of organisms has been written in a DNA code of 4 letters. The latest study moves life beyond G, T, C and A and introduces 2 new letters of life: X and Y.

and here’s P and Z:

Researchers have shown that 2 synthetic nucleotides called P and Z fit seamlessly into DNA’s helical structure, maintaining the natural shape of DNA. Moreover, DNA sequences incorporating these letters can evolve just like traditional DNA, a first for an expanded genetic alphabet. The new nucleotides even outperform their natural counterparts. When challenged to evolve a segment that selectively binds to cancer cells, DNA sequences using P and Z did better than those without.

more on Z and other noncanonical bases:

Z and other modified DNA bases seem to have evolved to help viruses evade the defenses with which bacteria degrade foreign genetic material. The eternal arms race between bacteriophages and their host cells probably provides enough selection pressure to affect something as seemingly “sacrosanct” as DNA. “Right now, everyone thinks the modifications are just protecting the DNA. People almost trivialize it.” But something more may be at work: The triple bond of Z might add to DNA’s stability and rigidity, and perhaps influence some of its other physical properties. Those changes could carry advantages beyond hiding from bacterial defenses and could make such modifications more broadly significant. After all, no one really knows how many viruses may have played with their DNA like this. “Standard genome sequencing methods for looking for biological diversity in nature would fail to find these, because we are looking in a way that assumes a common biochemistry that is not present.”

Shadow of the Swan

The Lord Alexand DeKoven Woolf was born destined to lead the Concord, the 2 System’s ultimate empire, but to prevent it from imploding into a Third Dark Age, he surrendered his birthright of power to become Alex Ransom, leader of the outlawed Society of the Phoenix, and in the process, he surrendered the one woman he has ever loved, the Lady Adrien Eliseer. But the Lady Adrien proves her love for Alexand with unexpected and breathtaking courage in Shadow of the Swan.

Helix RE

construction is one of the most hidebound, wasteful, and slow industries. until we can build 100x faster, we’ll be stuck with detroit-style bombed-out cities and decrepit suburbia. related, this sensor-heavy building management system from microsoft

Excited to see my most recent investment announced today! Flux (now Helix.Re) is the first Google X spinout, taking a data and software-driven approach to building design and optimization.

Marketing to your assistant

Your energy bills and contracts, supermarket, entertainment packages; all of these relationships could be managed by your personal OS. Brands could find themselves dealing with the digital butler, in which case marketing in these sectors could become programmatic in the truest sense.

this is why this whole “follow us on xyz” from your detergent is utter bs and i can’t wait for it to die (and take the “social media” cottage industry with it)

Precambrian land life?

While many paleobiologists now accept Knauth’s premise that simple, unicellular life forms existed on land during the Precambrian, others recoil from his more radical proposal that complex, multicellular life — and even animal life — also thrived on land 600 ma BP. “In my old age, I am so disappointed that people close their minds and jump on whatever splashy, simplistic bandwagon is in vogue. But if you start with the rocks and work upward to an interpretation, it often reveals a reality that is not the one in vogue.”

A Troublesome Inheritance

The word “Denisovan” didn’t appear nearly enough. Ashkenazim Jews may have sacrificed visual and spatial skills for other forms of (superior?) intelligence, but what about all the great Soviet Jewish chess players and mathematicians? And did the shtetl really have so many more centuries of capitalistic training to offer than did Istanbul? I’m not suggesting anyone is required to answer these questions, but once you start playing the generalization game — especially on this particular topic — one ought to spend a lot of time picking up or at least recognizing all these loose ends and indeed there are many of them.

Antivirus is dead

Antivirus joins firewalls in the hall of security technology from another time

Put simply, a crypting service takes a bad guy’s piece of malware and scans it against all of the available antivirus tools on the market today — to see how many of them detect the code as malicious. The service then runs some custom encryption routines to obfuscate the malware so that it hardly resembles the piece of code that was detected as bad by most of the tools out there. And it repeats this scanning and crypting process in an iterative fashion until the malware is found to be completely undetectable by all of the antivirus tools on the market.

amazingly honest given how terrible “anti virus” software is.

Panda users had a bad hair day on Wednesday, after the Spanish security software firm released an update that classified components of its own technology as malign. As a result, enterprise PCs running the antivirus software tied themselves in something of a knot, leaving some systems either unstable or unable to access the internet.

err, no. “anti virus” has been snake oil since forever.

There was kind of an unspoken rule not to attack the security industry. But now they are ruining the last island of safety for all these organizations and companies, which is very alarming for us