News And Comment: Nothing About The Bakken -- August 29, 2016

One can only laugh. I canceled my subscription to The New Yorker about a month ago but I still "read" it every week at the Southlake Library. I canceled my subscription because the magazine had turned into a political mouthpiece for Hillary.

One of my favorite pieces in The New Yorker was always "A Reporter At Large." This week's story: "The Moscow Laundromat: How Deutsche Bank helped Russians spirit billions out of that country."

I wonder if next week we will see "The DC Laundromat: How President Obama helped Iran get its half-billion dollars back."

Or even, "The DC Laundromat: How Solyndra served as a conduit for Democratic campaign contributions."

Nope. Probably not.

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Two Staff Writers At The NY Times  

Recognize That ObamaCare Marketplaces Are In Trouble

This is an absolutely worthless article, but it provides readers an update on where things stand, what people are talking about and what they are considering. It's a fluff piece to say the least. If interested, google ObamaCare marketplaces are in trouble what can we do NY Times. 

Looks like Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz are two new nominees for the 2016 Geico Rock Award.

Rick Newman over at Yahoo!Finance has noted the same thing: ObamaCare is in trouble. It is interesting that mainstream media is finally willing to note the obvious -- now that President Obama is down to less than 150 days in office.

He has been so incredibly awful, even grandmother Hillary is starting to look good. 

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A Note For The Granddaughters

The Human Genome

Nature: The Human Genome

Editor: Carina Dennis and Richard Gallagher

c. 2001

DDS: 599.935 HUM

The genome size is usually state as the total number of base (A, T, C, and G) pairs; the human genome contains roughly 3 billion.

There is little correlation between the complexity of an organism and the size of its genome.

• human genome: 200 times more DNA than yeast
• human genome: comparable in size to that of frogs and sharks
• human genome: dwarfed by the genome of the newt, with 15 billion base pairs
• a single-celled micro-organism, Amoeba dubia, is 200 x bigger than the human genome

One thought: an Amoeba -- threatened by its environment much more than a human -- may need that size of toolbox. If the environment threatens me personally today, I can always flee. An Amoeba cannot flee very far nor very fast.

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Genes (in more complicated organisms than bacteria) are divided into sections that code for proteins, called exons (meaning "expressed sequences"), interrupted by non-coding spacers called introns (meaning "intervening sequences").

Human genes vary greatly in length; where the average protein-coding sequence of a gene is about 1,000 to 2,000 base pairs, long stretches of non-coding sequence interspersed between exons can extend the boundaries by 20,000 -- 100,000 base pairs. The largest known human gene, which encodes dystrophin (an important protein in the scaffolding of muscle cells), is 2.4 million base pairs long, of which only 14,000 actually code for the protein.

Less than 2% of the human genome is made up of protein-coding sequences. We do not understand what most of the other 98% of the human genome is there for.

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A selection of notable genomes that have been sequenced:

• 1977: a bacteriophage; the first genome sequenced, 5,386 base pairs
• 1995: Mycoplasma genitalium; smallest genome of any free-living organism; 580,000 base pairs
• 1996: Saccharomyces cerevisiae; first genome of a "eukaryotic" organism; yeast used by brewers and bakers; 12 million base pairs
• 1996: Methanococcus jannaschii; the first genome from the third kingdom, Archae, which comprises microbes that live in harsh environments; 1.7 million base pairs
• 1997: Escherichia coli; workhorse bacterium for biologists; 4.7 million base pairs
• 1997: Heliobacter pylori; bacterium assoc with gastric disease; 1.7 million base pairs
• 1998: Mycobacterium tuberculosis; causes tuberculosis; 4.4 million base pairs
• 1998: Caenorhabditis elegans; the first genome sequence of an animal, the roundworm; 97 million base pairs
• 1999: Deinococcus radiodurans; highly radiation-resistant bacterium; 500 rads can kill a human being; some members of Deinoccocus can withstand millions of rads; 2.6 million base pairs
• 1999/2000: Homo sapiens; first human chromosomes; chromosome 22 (HSA 22; 48 million base pairs); HSA 22, 45 million base pairs
• 2000: Drosophila melanogaster; the fruit fly; important in laboratory genetic studies; 180 million base pairs
• 2000: Vibrio cholera; causes cholera; 4 million base pairs
• 2000: Arabidopsis thaliana; the first genome of a plant, the mustard weed; 120 million base pairs
• 2001: Mycobacterium leprae; leprosy; 3.3 million base pairs

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Interesting: Nature says we have "24 chromosomes, 3.2 billion bases, and around 31,000 genes." Note: 24 chromosomes. Standard textbooks tell us we have 23 pair of chromosomes.

Human genome project: in less than 15 months, a draft sequence of 90% of the total human genome had been sequenced. The human genome sequencing project is of interest because:

• it is the largest genome to be extensively sequenced so far
• it is 25x as large as any previously sequenced genome
• it is 8x as large as the sum of all such previously sequenced genomes
• it is the first vertebrate genome to be extensively sequenced
• uniquely, it is the genome of our own species

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LTR: long-terminal repeat
LTR retroposons: long-terminal repeat retroposons
SNPs: single nucleotide polymorphisms