Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss

Essential gene evolution

Essential genes are often thought to be frozen in evolutionary time — evolving only very slowly if at all, because changing or dying would lead to the death of the organism. 100s of millions of years of evolution separate insects and mammals, but experiments show that the Hox genes guiding the development of the body plans in Drosophila fruit flies and mice can be swapped without a hitch because they are so similar. This remarkable evolutionary conservation is a foundational concept in genome research.

But a new study turns this rationale for genetic conservation on its head. Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle reported last week in eLife that a large class of genes in fruit flies are both essential for survival and evolving extremely rapidly. In fact, the scientists’ analysis suggests that the genes’ ability to keep changing is the key to their essential nature. “Not only is this questioning the dogma, it is blowing the dogma out of the water

Werner Vogels

The 8 services were really just the fundamental pieces to get, put, and manage incoming traffic. Most importantly, there are so many different tenets that come with S3, but durability, of course, trumps everything. The 11 9s (99.999999999%) that we promise our customers by replicating over 3 availability zones was unique. Most of our customers, if they have on-premises systems—if they’re lucky—can store 2 objects in the same data center, which gives them 4 9s. If they’re really good, they may have 2 data centers and actually know how to replicate over 2 data centers, and that gives them 5 9s. But 11 9’s, in terms of durability, is just unparalleled. And it trumps everything.

learnings from scaling AWS

Internet-free Star Trek

But, as I watched the PADDs circulate around the show, I slowly realize that they’re not actually used like iPads at all. In fact, they’re more like fancy pieces of paper. Individual PADDs correspond to specific documents like the Earth guidebook shown above. To give someone a document, people carry PADDs around and then leave them with the new owner of the document. From a 2013 point of view, these uses seem completely inside out. Each PADD is bound to an individual document rather than a person or location. This is a universe where its easier to copy physical objects (in a replicator) than digital ones.

Metagenomic testing

Scientists have developed a single clinical laboratory test capable of zeroing in on the microbial miscreant afflicting a patient in as little as 6 hours – irrespective of what body fluid is sampled, the type or species of infectious agent, or whether physicians start out with any clue as to what the culprit may be.

The test will be a lifesaver, speeding appropriate drug treatment for the seriously ill, and should transform the way infectious diseases are diagnosed. Conventional diagnostic tests are designed to detect only 1 or sometimes a small panel of potential pathogens. In contrast, the new protocol employs powerful “next-generation” DNA-sequencing technology to account for all DNA in a sample, which may be from any species – human, bacterial, viral, parasitic, or fungal. Clinicians do not need to have a suspect in mind. To identify a match, the new test relies on specially developed analytical software to compare DNA sequences in the sample to massive genomic databases covering all known pathogens.

Chip Wars

The dispute over Huawei’s access to TSMC has highlighted how vulnerable American industry is to the loss of its sole supply of advanced chips. If the matter cannot be solved by negotiation, China may perceive the restrictions as economic warfare and rapidly escalate, potentially threatening Taiwan. It is not at all clear that Washington has thought through the consequences of its actions here, nor that the current administration has considered chip supply as part of a wider supply chain security and national industrial policy. Given that China has more positive options than the United States, it is surely time for those in charge to consider where this might lead.

T-Cell testing

T cell assays are very labor intensive indeed, and the sample sizes in the papers on them tend to be in the 10s. The Oxford Immunotec people are trying to improve that. “There has. . .never been great demand for wading into the intricacies of T cell tests.” The test is definitely better at determining whether a person has had a previous coronavirus infection (as opposed to antibody measurements), and if we put that together with the other papers mentioned, it could be that this extends to saying how much protection these people retain. So the story is coming together. And just as vaccine work is never going to be the same after the huge amounts of work during this pandemic, it looks like T-cell research is never going to be the same, either. They’re both going to be better, faster, and more detailed, and that’s good. Because we’re going to need all this again some day.

AI Construction

Construction.

It is one of the largest markets in the world and looks ripe for disruption from advancing information technology and machine learning. Consider:

  • Only 3% of a construction site is active.
  • Construction productivity has declined for 30 years in many markets.
  • Large construction projects are 80% over budget and 20 months late
  • $10t spent per year and growing as a % of global GDP.

Until ALICE, a key component missing within the construction technology was the agility to create alternate execution plans quickly, which is arguably the most essential piece to improving project success factors

Indistinguishability Obfuscation

The scheme’s security rests on 4 mathematical assumptions that have been widely used in other cryptographic contexts. And even the assumption that has been studied the least, called the “learning parity with noise” assumption, is related to a problem that has been studied since the 1950s. “You could imagine that maybe 50 years from now the crypto textbooks will basically say, ‘OK, here is a very simple construction of iO, and from that we’ll now derive all of the rest of crypto.’”