Gene drive involves "stimulating biased inheritance of particular genes to alter entire populations of organisms."[1] Gene drives based on endonucleases were first proposed in 2003.[2] One possible application is to genetically modify mosquitoes and other disease vectors so they cannot transmit diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.
Gene drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
9 years
Perhaps, though, it’s time to take a more searching interest in the minds of those to whom we entrust our safety when we fly. The industry tests its pilots regularly to see how they would handle an emergency, but it barely evaluates the risk that they might cause one them...
Inside a Pilot’s Mind - NYTimes.com
9 years
...is probably enough. It's not hard to understand why. Airplanes at their core are very simple devices—winged things that belong in the air. They are designed to be flyable, and they are. Specifically, the 767 has ordinary mechanical and hydraulic flight controls that provide the pilot with smooth and conventional responses; it is normally operated on autopilot, but can easily be flown by hand; if you remove your hands from the controls entirely, the airplane sails on as before, until it perhaps wanders a bit, dips a wing, and starts into a gentle descent; if you pull the nose up or push it down (within reason) and then fold your arms, the airplane returns unassisted to steady flight; if you idle the engines, or shut them off entirely, the airplane becomes a rather well behaved glider. It has excellent forward visibility, through big windshields. It has a minimalist cockpit that may look complicated to the untrained eye but is a masterpiece of clean design. It can easily be managed by the standard two-person crew, or even by one pilot alone. The biggest problem in flying the airplane on a routine basis is boredom. Settled into the deep sky at 33,000 feet, above the weather and far from any obstacle, the 767 simply makes very few demands.
The Crash of EgyptAir 990 — The Atlantic
9 years
... code that they find lying around in various places (including the Internet), and repeat things that they've done before with whatever variations are necessary this time around. If it works, ship it. If it doesn't work, fiddle things until it does. What this creates is a body of superstition and imitation. You don't necessarily write things because they're what's necessary and minimal, or because you fully understand them; instead you write things because they're what people before you have done (including your past self) and the result works when you try it.
Chris's Wiki :: blog/programming/ProgrammingViaSuperstition
9 years
...r the starting locations. Taxi service is usually readily available at the On In if you have any concerns about the subway. Your Small Bag of dry clothes will be transported by the Hare to the On In. The Run is set by another Hasher called the Hare. The Hare marks the trail in flour or chalk. Periodically the Hare ends the trail with a ‘check’, and starts the trail again somewhere nearby. The Hashers – called a Pack – try to find the continuation of the trail. The idea is that the fast runners will get to the check before the slower runners; will expend a lot of time and energy finding the continuation of the trail; this will allow the slower runners to catch up; and the whole pack – fast and slow – will finish the run at about the same time. There is an explanation conducted by the Hare of the marks used at the start of each run. Length of runs varies from too short to too long. Forty-five minutes for a good run, one and a half hours for ...
HashNYC Info | New York City Hash House Harriers
9 years
I suppose the point of this post is to articulate my growing concern that we are so damn good at coming up with post-facto historical explanations to contextualize any given observation, that we are particularly susceptible to confabulating these post-facto rationalizations with the idea that we somehow knew the results of this quantitative wor...
Confabulation in the humanities - Matthew Lincoln
9 years
...ways the case, though: Plavix (clopidogrel) is the canonical example of a thiophene that gets metabolically unzipped (scroll down on that page to "Pharmacokinetics and metabolism" to see the scheme). You're not going to see a phenyl ring do that, of course - it'll get oxidized to the phenol, likely as not, but that'll get glucuronidated or something and sluiced out the kidneys, taking everything else with it. But note also that depending on things like CYP2C19 to produce your active drug for you is not without risks: people vary in their enzyme profiles, and you might find that your blood levels in a real...
Come Back Thiophene; All Is Forgiven. In the Pipeline:
9 years
9 years
19,300