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February 22, 2006
"From the dawn of our species, Man has been blessed with curiosity."
- Lost fans are, I've decided, even more obsessive than Carnivale fans were. Last Wednesday, the clock in the hatch finally ran down, and the numbers were replaced with red and black hieroglyphs. They were on the screen for five seconds, tops. Within a day, someone tracked down the relevant page from a forty year-old, handwritten, middle Egyptian --> English dictionary. The glyphs are so similar that it's obvious Lost's set dresser copied them stroke-by-stroke. So what's the translation? The causative form of the verb "to die."
Some fun Ask MetaFilter questions from today [I haven't been reading AksMe as often as I should...]:
- The Great Books: where should I start? I seek timeless wisdom.
- What are some of your favorite romantic dinner recipes for the kitchen impaired?
- What is the label for an entity or idea which began as nothing and came to have identity through its own fictionalisation?
- Apple's got some "fun new products" to announce next Tuesday.
- Ever since I took AP Biology in high school, I've wondered about prions and junk DNA. I remember being blown away by the role geometry played in the creation of life. One complex folded clump of protein string might be totally inert. Another? You place it in the presence of the right amino acids and enzymes and it "catches" the right bits on "sticky" patches and, totally by chance, manages to replicate itself. Here's an excellent MetaFilter discussion entitled "A new branch in the Tree of Life" about a must-read Discover Magazine article entitled "Unintelligent Design." There's this (somewhat) recently discovered DNA virus, Mimivirus. The "Mimi" part is because it mimics a eukaryotic cell. Except, like good nerds, scientists are now asking the question posed in uncountable sci-fi stories: "Which of these is the copy, and which is the original?"
Back when the three domains of life were emerging, a large DNA virus very much like Mimi may have made its way inside a bacterium or an archaean and, rather than killing it, harmlessly persisted there. The eukaryotic cell nucleus and large, complex DNA viruses like Mimi share a compelling number of biological traits. They both replicate in the cell cytoplasm, and on doing so, each uses the same machinery within the cytoplasm to form a new membrane around itself. They both have certain enzymes for capping messenger RNA, and they both have linear chromosomes rather than the circular ones typically found in a bacterium.
"If this is true," Forterre has said of the viral-nucleus hypothesis, "then we are all basically descended from viruses."
"The better part of the human genome is composed of viral DNA. That's true of nearly all eukaryotes, and the more complicated the organisms, the more of those sequences you have. We aren't sure exactly what they all do, but they are part of our genetic identity, this stuff we dismiss as junk."
"We haven't even begun to scratch the surface. The numbers are mind-boggling. If you put every virus particle on Earth together in a row, they would form a line 10 million light-years long. People, even most biologists, don't have a clue. The general public thinks genetic diversity is us and birds and plants and animals and that viruses are just HIV and the flu. But most of the genetic material on this planet is viruses. No question about it. They and their ability to interact with organisms and move genetic material around are the major players in driving speciation, in determining how organisms even become what they are."
Posted by Jon Rubin at February 22, 2006 03:43 PM
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