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Tuesday, September 5, 2017

The Energy And Market Page, +228 -- September 5, 2017

Houston recovery: Petrobras refinery in Pasadena, TX, reportedly restarted.

STACK update: from Emergent Group --
The SCOOP/STACK is one of the top shale plays in the Lower 48 and situated west of Oklahoma City in the Anadarko Basin. Public and private E&Ps are putting capital to work in the prolific play. In August 2017, Alta Mesa merged with Silver Run and Kingfisher Midstream to form a $3.8 billion pure-play exploration and production company focused on the STACK. Last year, Marathon acquired PayRock in a $888 million transaction. Operators continue to test, refine, and optimize wells in the SCOOP/STACK.
 

Illinois: issues first fracking permit to Woolsey Companies, Inc, of Wichita, Kansas. The Illinois Basin is linked at the sidebar at the right and is tracked here.

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Other News

Oh-oh: Lego to slash 1,400 jobs as it posts first sales drop in over a decade. Toymaker expects to cut 8% of its workforce by the end of 2017. Link at WSJ.
  • currently employs about 18,200 people worldwide
  • grappling with competition from smartphone apps, digital games
  • net profit slipped from 3.5 billion kroner a year earlier to 3.4 billion for most recent six months
  • revenue dropped 5% to around $15 billion kroner
  • however, Lego's revenue topped rival Mattel; the latter reported half year sales of $1.71 billion
  • conversion rate: 1 Danish krone = 16 cents
  • 0.16 * 14.9 billion kroner = $2.384 billion
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Porn Goes Mainstream

Predicted many years ago: porn goes mainstream. Now The Deuce on HBO. I had forgotten about the Drudge link until I saw a full-page ad for this "classy" new television show on the back cover of this week's issue of The New Yorker. Margaret Sanger would be cheering. Takes me back to September 12, 2014.

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Y Chromosome

From wiki:
Many "cold-blooded" (a technically incorrect term, a colloquial term)  animals have no sex chromosomes. Sex determination determined by environmental factors such as ambient temperature.

Origin? The X and Y chromosomes are thought to have evolved from a pair of identical chromosomes termed autosomes. An allelic variation -- a so-called "sex locus" -- evolved; this allele caused the organism to be male. Over time, the chromosome with this allele became the Y chromosome while the other member of the pair became the X chromosome.

Until recently, the X and Y chromosome were thought to have diverged around 300 million years ago but new research says the XY sex-determination system could have been present more than 166 million years ago (based on the platypus genome).

This re-estimation of the age of the therian XY system is based on the finding that sequences that are on the X chromosomes of marsupials and eutherian mammals are present on the autosomes of platypus and birds.

Recombination between the X and Y chromosomes proved harmful: so, Y chromosomes are the only human chromosomes that do not undergo DNA recombination during meiosis/mitosis (technically 95% of the human Y chromosome is unable to recombine; the tips of the X and Y chromosome still recombine.

By one estimate, the human Y chromosome has lost 1,393 of its 1,438 original genes over the course of its existence, and linear extrapolation of this 1,393-gene loss over 300 million years gives a rate of genetic loss of 4.6 genes per million years. Continued loss of genes at the rate of 4.6 genes per million years would result in a Y chromosome with no functional genes – that is the Y chromosome would lose complete function – within the next 10 million years, or half that time with the current age estimate of 160 million years.

However, comparisons of the human and chimpanzee Y chromosomes (first published in 2005) show that the human Y chromosome has not lost any genes since the divergence of humans and chimpanzees between 6–7 million years ago, and a scientific report in 2012 stated that only one gene had been lost since humans diverged from the rhesus macaque 25 million years ago. These facts provide direct evidence that the linear extrapolation model is flawed and suggest that the current human Y chromosome is either no longer shrinking or is shrinking at a much slower rate than the 4.6 genes per million years estimated by the linear extrapolation model.

The human Y chromosome is particularly exposed to high mutation rates due to the environment in which it is housed.

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