Researchers found that the cephalopod is the only creature that can edit its RNA outside the nucleus.. now that his team knows that the squid has the cellular machinery to do this RNA editing, the next task is to understand why. He suspects it has something to do with allowing the squid to better adapt to changing environmental conditions such as water temperature.
Month: March 2020
USACE & Covid-19
Creating that kind of capacity in a matter of weeks in unlike anything the Army Corps of Engineers has ever done before. It’s also exactly what the Corps was built to do.
555 ma animals ancestor
they used a 3D laser scanner that revealed the regular, consistent shape of a cylindrical body with a distinct head and tail and faintly grooved musculature. The animal ranged between 2-7 millimeters long and ~1-2.5 millimeters wide, 555 ma BP
Meena
Towards a human-like open-domain chatbot. Meena is the new eliza, and is getting close to human levels of performance.
Solving traffic jams
with autonomous driving, because humans have too slow reaction times to not cause speed ripples due to braking etc.
Against DPA
Many people are calling for the President to use the Defense Productions Act (DPA) but the reality is that the DPA is neither especially useful nor necessary. The markets are already redirecting resources in a rapid and sophisticated manner.
Borrowing from the Fed
If the Fed wants money to go to businesses quickly, it might have to bypass the banks and just give the businesses money directly.
Noise Phenotype
All marbled crayfish which exist today derive from a single animal. They are all genetically identical. These aquatic clones actually vary quite a bit in their color, size, behavior and longevity. randomness in development may be just as important as genetic and environmental variation.
COVID-19 Testing
Pooling is good:
If we look at this from the view of whole-population biosurveillance after the outbreak period is over and we have a 0.1% base infection rate, pools of 32 samples have an expected number of tests per person at 0.0628 or a 15.9x multiple on throughput/cost reduction.
Not even people dying left and right causes organizations to abandon the rules. Third world processes: Because of privacy concerns, the company’s call center does not leave voice messages. Its operators call back only 2x before moving to the next patient.
There’s also a lot of wishful thinking about serology tests:
There is no “serology test” – there are millions of possible serology tests, which need to be carefully compared and characterized to select ones that do more than just show you if some antibody against the virus is present. Reliable titres are going to be essential in the next phase of understanding this new viral infection – identifying who has protective immunity.
FDA delenda est
An innovative testing program in the Seattle area — promoted by the billionaire Bill Gates and local public health officials as a way of conducting wider surveillance on the invisible spread of the virus — has been ordered by the federal government to stop its work pending additional reviews.
Frequent, fast, and cheap is better than sensitive:
when you compare testing regimes it’s hard to come up with a scenario in which infrequent, slow, and expensive but very sensitive is better than frequent, fast, and cheap but less sensitive
Bill Gates is not impressed:
The majority of all US tests are completely garbage, wasted. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reimburse at the same level, of course they’re going to take every customer. Because they are making ridiculous money, and it’s mostly rich people that are getting access to that. You have to have the reimbursement system pay a little bit extra for 24 hours, pay the normal fee for 48 hours, and pay nothing And they will fix it overnight.
Prince of Persia history
Prince of Persia used xor to have enough memory for an opponent.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 