DNA IN THE NEWS
JandersonLee send me this excellent news yesterday. ‘Junk DNA’ Plays Crucial Role In Human Diseases. Turns out the socalled junk in our DNA is far from as passive as thought. Here are one of the shocking highlights from the article:
The human genome has twice as many genes than previously thought.
Mat found this video Human genome ‘more active than thought’ from BBC.
Bits of Mystery DNA, Far From ‘Junk,’ Play Crucial Role is article on the same news, that brings forth some other interesting aspects. As it says:
The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave.
Last I will share the more odd news that, DNA can now be synthesized in the opposite direction to nature. 
DNA synthesis in the 3’ and 5’ direction possible using new template-directed method
DO IT YOURSELF SCIENCE
Image credit: yeko / 123RF Stock Photo
Janelle shared this interesting article Guess What’s Cooking in the Garage. It follows a do it yourself geneticist girl, who is trying to make youghourt glow in the dark.
Janelle mentioned that the article holds a recipe for extracting DNA. Here is a NOVA video demonstrating how to extract your DNA in short simple steps.
I found an interesting BBC documentary by the scientist Adam Rutherford. He investigates what can been achieved with synthetic biology.
Playing God
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GAMIFYING EDUCATION
Image credit: argus456 / 123RF Stock Photo
Mat and I have been talking about games and education for some time. One school have already taken up this challenge, with the aim of making the achievement of knowledge into a game. Check out their somewhat different curriculum.
As a continuation of our discussion, Mat shared some really great news with me.
Thanks to kind donations, game creators and a game research institute are now trying to develop an education program that lives up to educational standards. Here is some of the immediate response from the chat:
Eli Fisker: I love this initiative, I would become a kid in less than a minute
Mat747: That would be cool, I’m off to school to play games
Jieux: Kids might start getting addicted to education… then what would we do?
Jieux: how would we get kids out to the playground?
Eli Fisker: Some have even gamified the playground, getting the kids to move more
Jieux: we could play “chase the ipad”
I think what can be done for education with games and science television like NOVA, will be a huge inspiration for children. Games and tv has an engaging power that most children don’t get from reading about the same in a book. When you are first inspired and tuned in to a topic, you don’t really care how many science papers and chemistry books you have to go through afterwards. Because you understand why you are doing it.
Enchant us, engage us and then challenge us.
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Just after our talk about games and education Mat heard this great news on the radio, about kids “Gaming their way to better hearing”.
He also found this one that answers the question: [Can gaming help kids learn?](http://mashable.com/2012/09/27/gaming-education-infographic/
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BACTERIA WITH EXPENSIVE TASTE
Image credit: kentoh / 123RF Stock Photo
Nascarnut asked if I had seen the article on the gold eating bacteria. I had not, but it definitely sounded interesting.
hotcreek: 0.o they eat gold?
nascarnut: Yep, they disolve it and redeposit it. They always thought it was just a geologic process. This certainly adds a twist to how the big deposits are formed.
hotcreek: well, I think that they have expencive taste
jnicol: lol
nascarnut: Long as they stay away from my computer processor. hehe.
Eli Fisker: Lol, Hotcreek
nascarnut: Or my gold fillings.
Eli Fisker: hehe
hotcreek: haha
Thanks to Hotcreek for the title inspiration.
Al-Hashimi group have been there again. This time with some cool news about RNA switches. It’s an interesting read.
I love this sentence about RNA: “Once believed to merely store and relay genetic information, RNA is now known to be a cellular Swiss Army knife of sorts, performing a wide variety of tasks and morphing into myriad shapes.”
Smallest and fastest-known RNA switches provide new drug targets
ORIGIN OF LIFE - or how to make guanine from scratch
Nascarnut sent me this interesting article on how uv-light may have kick-started the making of the building blocks for life.
The other day I read an article about how scientists have found a shortcut for making cytosine from scratch.
Why is all this interesting? Because it might hold part of the explanation of how life originated. Also these late discoveries follow in the footsteps of Stanley Miller’s experiment with making primordial soup. Back in the 1950’s he was investigating how many of life’s building blocks could be made, starting out with just a few chemicals. Lately his old experiment got a nice twist as his student discovered that more building blocks were present in the old samples from the original experiments.
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HALF-LIFE OF DNA
Image credit: red33 / 123RF Stock Photo
Eli Fisker: I just found the coolest article. Do you know how long a half-life DNA has?
mat747: no, I don’t know - do tell
Eli Fisker: 521 years
Eli Fisker: Here is a link
mat747: eli - “putting paid to hopes of cloning a Tyrannosaurus rex”. Oh what a shame, hehe
Eli Fisker: Yeah, agree on that. I have seen Jurassic park. That baby dino was pretty cute. I don’t know about the grownups though 
Eli Fisker: And I’m sure some scientists will manage to put some dinosaur DNA into some birds and voila, bonsai dino.
macclark52: So when I am 521, half of my DNA will be garbage?
Eli Fisker: hehe, yes, unless you store a DNA sample somewhere safer than the ground. But hey, we suddenly got a longer half life than we expected.
macclark52:
(Cleaned up chat from 11 oktober 2012)
MICROSCOPIC MOVIE STARS
Picture credit NOAA MESA Project
Lately I have been searching for documentaries about life on the microscopic scale. Microscopic Movie Stars is an introduction to the story about filming microscopic creatures and one of its pioneers.
Mat pointed out the Gregarine at 1:51 as being very different. There is certainly something alien to it.
Microscopic Life: The World of the Invisible is a charming educational video from 1958
I also found something that I had only hoped for. The Secret Life of Plankton is the best narrated and most beautiful movie I have encountered on microscopic sealife. This piece is art.
I loved what agastya13rao wrote in the comment section: What planet did they shoot this one on again?
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MICROBIAL OLYMPICS 2012
Here is a picture of one of the contestants:
Image credit Peter Edin
Xaner, one of our newer players, recently introduced me to an article about eterna I had not heard about. It came from Labtimes, which is a biotechnology magazine for students and scientists. I took a look at the online version and I found the article Magical Microbial Moments. It is about the first ever microbial olympics held. This is funny reading.
I’m guessing we have yet another Ig Nobel candidate. That is if this event gets held for real. They might run into trouble with the humans right commission, if they stick to their program.
While we are on sports and microorganisms, I found another fascinating article some time back. It is about some fast and furious bacterias operating at the fastest physically possible copying speed.
Good old RNA is even faster than bacteria at copying, though MicroRNA’s were called ”the new kid on the genomic block” in a podcast title.
Thanks to Mat for giving me the idea to put in a picture of Photobacterium phosphoreum.
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Mat just sent me the third nucleotide to the above collection, already counting guanine and cytosine. Here is an article on how uracil can get made.
Scientists Reproduce a Building Block of Life in Laboratory
Mat added a new tail to this story. Turns out that quartz glass is a candidate for storing data too. I bet it is cheaper than Sapphires.
Hitachi Says Data Lives Forever in Quartz Glass
JandersonLee found the continuation on the story on the Harvard guys incoding books into DNA and how DNA can be used as storage media.
Study conducted by the Harvard scientist reveals ability to encode data in DNA
I am currently reading exacly this book that gets mentioned in the story that JL found and got myself a real good laugh when I saw the carefull instructions on how to encode the book into DNA.
SUPER COOL MICROSCOPE
Here is the best news I have yet heard about Extreme microscopy, as it is called in an article that Mat found.
“New IBM microscope technique has resolution 100 times smaller than an atom”
This will give scientists a new strong tool for measuring and exploring on the nanoscale.
Brourd dug up the news that DNA can now be photographed directly with an electron microscope. As the article states, previously scientists had only seen DNA’s structure indirectly.
I found an article that has direct relevance to our work with RNA switches. Stanford scientists are lucky – they got to watch RNA folding live.
As Steven Block said:
“We were the first to actually see a riboswitch switch”
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ADVANCED BIOTECHNOLOGY PODCAST
I found a small series of beautiful educational videos on biotechnology. They are an visual tour in the cell and the parts in it.
The first one is a fine introduction to [what biotechnology is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFeExvpCjPQwhat biotechnology). There is also one on the Structure of RNA and DNA.
You can find the rest of them on youtube or in Educational resources where I collect good teaching videos, articles and science papers on RNA and related topics.
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ARE YOU REALLY HUMAN?
Mat shared this awesome video about how bacterias communicates with each other. You might get a different view on if you are as human as you think.
How bacterias “talk”
Mat also found this excellent news. Scientists are inviting us to help them discover the missing part of the human genome. Now you can crowdsource your bacterial genome.
Biotech startup uBiome aims to sequence the bacteria that call our bodies home
THE STRANGE WORLD OF SCIENCE PAPERS 2
Here is a continuation on how to understand what science papers say and how to write them.
Are scientists afraid of equations? Check out the episode “Too much math?” on Erik Seligman’s podcast Math Mutation. This episode should cheer us up about getting started writing science papers.
Also check out this funny translation of what is written in science papers and what it means.
This collection was put up by I’m a scientist.
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SEQUENCING OF THE HUMAN GENOME FROM A SINGLE CELL
Mat sent me this amazing news that it is now possible to sequence the whole human genome from just one single cell.
It is even more remarkable, because this new technique is so precise that it can be used to hunt down mutations. This is a game changer in diagnostics for people with inborn mutations that cause illnesses and potentially for treatment too. It is hard to treat when you don’t know what is wrong in the first place. This new technique is also thought to have big potential in cancer treatment. As the genome of the tumor can be sequenced as well and the development of the tumor and its rate of mutations can be monitored.
Want to know something about the history of how the human genome got deciphered before this new revolutionary method was available? Go get an overview of the Human genome project. The speech is given by Eric Lander who took part in the project and is an excellent educator too.
THE STRANGE WORLD OF SCIENCE PAPERS 3
I found something disturbingly fun. Scientist confessing their mishaps or sometimes not too scientific methods in the lab. It all started on twitter and then went viral. Here comes some of my favorite pages.
#overlyhonestmethods reveals the silly side of science
#OverlyHonestMethods Captures All the Hillarious Science Not Fit for Publication
Overly honest methods
Ingo Rohlfing has a fine collection.
My favorite chemist blogger also commented on this new phenomenon.
TRAP A VIRUS
I have long been thinking about sharing some cool stories involving viruses. Here they come.
Recently I read a fascinating article about viruses. I had no idea they could “walk”. I shared my find with Mat. He said: Wow same, I had no idea they could “walk”. As he said it “Sound like something out of a movie”.
Virus caught in the act of infecting a cell
Sometime back I read another article about a guy who made a plan on how to trap a virus and make it commit suicide. Read how he went about it.
New israeli tactic makes deadly viruses commit suicide
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