Vern Whitten's Photographs Continue To Exceed Expectations -- August 31, 2016

One of the most popular posts is always the updated photograph portfolios Vern Whitten sends two or three or four times a year.

The most recent portfolio was received and posted yesterday. Already it is on the top ten list of favorite posts -- based on number of hits and "pace" of hits.

Update: a couple of hours later, now 12:57 p.m. Central Time, Vern Whitten's photographs are now #3 on the list of top 10 posts. Pretty incredible how fast his photographs move up the favorite list.

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The Amazon Page

I'll get back to this article later. Perhaps. From Bloomberg Business.

Did I mention the other day that I ordered three items from Amazon on Saturday, this past weekend. I placed the order after reading a book review in The Wall Street Journal, about noon Saturday. On Sunday, Prime Shipping, the USPS brought the book to our apartment complex -- less than 24 hours later. Delivery was guaranteed to be no later than two days, Monday night by 8:00 p.m. It was at the apartment complex by noon Sunday.

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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

Pages 892+.
It is noteworthy that CRISPR-cas9 is not mentioned in this book.

Thousands of human genes produce noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) as their ultimate product. Examples of ncRNAs:

• transfer RNAs (tRNAs)
• ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs)
• small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs)
• small nuclear RNAs (snRNAs)
• humans have both a major and a minor spliceosome
• major: U2 snRNA-dependent spliceosome, splices most intron
• minor: U12 snRNA-dependent spliceosome, splices a rare class of introns that often have AT/AC dinucleotides at the splice sites instead of the canonical GT/Ag splice site consensus
• telomerase RNA
• 7SL signal recognition particle RNA
• a large Xist transcript implicated in X dosage compensation; enigmatic function
• small vault RNAs found in the bizarre vault ribonucleoproten complex, which is 3x the mass of the ribosome but has unknown function

Other notes regarding ncRNAs

• ncRNAs are very, very difficult to find using current techniques; even if the complete finished sequence of the human genome were available, discovering novel ncRNAs would still be challenging
• BLASTN technique: used to identify genomic sequences that are homologous to known ncRNA genes