Tag: images

TCA cycle origins

Instead of trying to find the precursor to the TCA cycle by swapping in simpler versions of its components, they started by asking what versatile reactants might have been present in the prebiotic world and then looked at how much they could do under various circumstances. Astonishingly, they found that the glyoxylate and pyruvate reacted to make a range of compounds that included chemical analogues to all the intermediary products in the TCA cycle except for citric acid. Comparatively, the chemistry we discovered here was a dream to run: All you really needed to do to get the pathway started was to drop 2 stable reactants into buffered water and stick it on a warm hotplate. The chemistry was extremely robust.

Drone Design Evolution

We’ve seen a sharp evolution in designs from Amazon. The most primitive was this testing drone we saw from them back in 2013:

To me, this is the most exciting design because it is both a sharp departure from what came before, yet still integrates elements of each previous iteration, showing that the designers/engineers are learning. The total number of rotors has again been changed, this time to 6, and the rear propeller has been nixed. The dual fixed wings have been replaced by a single wraparound wing that takes a hexagonal configuration. The drone takes off vertically, like a helicopter, but then pitches forward at an angle for straight-line flight, using the lift provided by the unusual wing design.

very impressive learning rate.

Ancient Egyptian Tattooing

It seems that women were primarily being tattooed The tattoos from Deir el-Medina are on women associated with temples as priestesses, who had roles in singing and dancing and performance. The most eye-opening find was a single mummy that bore at least 30 tattoos, based on the current analysis. Some of the tattoos, adorning the arms, chest, and neck, were visible with the naked eye—and sound more Brooklyn than Egypt.


2021-09-29: Now combine that with DNA facial reconstruction

Mummy samples were estimated to be between 2023 and 2797 years old. Researchers performed enzymatic damage repair on each mummy before conducting DNA sequencing. Then Parabon used the resulting whole-genome sequencing data and selected 3 samples with the highest quality to analyze. The This is the first comprehensive DNA phenotyping the company has performed on human DNA of this age. They used Snapshot, a phenotyping method to predict the ancestry of mummies, to predict the ancestry, pigmentation, and face morphology of the 3 mummies. The overall genetic makeup of the mummies is closer to the modern Mediterranean or the Middle East people than modern-day Egyptians. Researchers generated 3D meshes for the outline of the faces and calculated heat maps to highlight differences between the 3 faces. They combined these results with the Snapshot predictions and reveal that the mummies once had light brown skin with dark eyes and hair.