31 MAY 2015 by ideonexus

 Genetic Language is Abstract and Flexible

The awesome power that genetic engineering will one day place in our hands was foreshadowed recently by some experimenters at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Walter Gehring and his students were studying the effects of the eyeless gene in fruit flies. The gene is called eyeless because its absence causes flies to grow without eyes. The gene actually causes eyes to grow. Gehring and the students inserted the gene into various tissues of embryonic flies, and the embryos grew into flies ...
Folksonomies: genes genetics dna heredity
Folksonomies: genes genetics dna heredity
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03 JAN 2011 by ideonexus

 Number of Bits for a Set of Encyclopedias are Minuscule C...

I have estimaged how many letters there are in a the Enclyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10^15). For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredths of an inch wide--which is the barest piece of dust t...
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Feynman estimates the number of atoms neccessary for storing a set of encyclopedias, and then compares that to the amount of data included in a DNA string.