A new look at the human Y chromosome has overturned longstanding ideas about its evolutionary history. Far from being in a state of decay, the Y chromosome is the fastest-changing part of the human genome and is constantly renewing itself. This is ‘a result as unexpected as it is stunning - truly amazing, said Scott Hawley, a chromosome expert at the Stowers Institute in Kansas City, Mo. The Y chromosome makes its owner male because it carries the male-determining gene. Boys are born with one Y and one X chromosome in all their body’s cells, while girls have two X’s. The other 22 pairs of chromosomes in which the human genome is packaged are the same in both sexes. The Y chromosome’s rapid rate of evolutionary change does not mean that men are evolving faster than women. But its furious innovation is likely to be having reverberations elsewhere in the human genome. The finding was reported online on Wednesday in the journal Nature by a team led by Jennifer Hughes and David Page of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass. In 2003, Dr. Page, working with scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine, decoded the […]
Here is the craziest non-sickening story I know about the Iraqi refugee crisis. It was told to me this October in Syria by an Iraqi architect I’ll call Mazen — a dapper, cosmopolitan man in his 60s who had worked for years with UNESCO, identifying and preserving world heritage sites throughout his country. Early one morning in 2006, while Mazen and his wife were asleep in their home in Baghdad, a bomb — not a rocket or a grenade or an IED, but a bomb, easily 4 feet long, with the letters ‘U.S.A.’ stenciled on its side — tore through the wall of their house and landed on the bed between them, slamming its nose into the headboard. Miraculously, it did not explode. It did, however, wake the couple up in a hurry. They flew out of bed, whereupon the magnitude of their near miss became apparent. Mazen and his wife were entirely uninjured, except for a pair of matching burns on their right and left sides. Awakened by the commotion, the couple’s daughter fetched the family video camera and started recording. Later in Damascus, she showed me the footage: the jagged crater in the wall, the bed […]
Forgot that file on your work computer again? Leave an Excel spreadsheet you need for a presentation on your home laptop? Google on Tuesday introduced a service that will let you upload any type of file to Google Docs and access it from the cloud. Google Apps users will soon be able to upload any file up to 250MB. The service will provide up to 1GB of free storage, with any additional files costing $0.25 per GB per year. Google will start rolling out the service in the coming weeks. ‘Now accessing your work files doesn’t require a connection to your internal office network,’ Anil Sabharwal with the Google Docs team, wrote in a blog post. ‘Nor do you need to e-mail files to yourself, carry around a thumbdrive, or use a company network drive – you can access your files using Google Docs from any web-enabled computer.’ Combined with the shared folders option on Google Docs, users can upload files and give permission for friends or co-workers to edit those documents. ‘For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them […]
Well, we’ve got to hand it to Google-the company’s ‘don’t be evil’ schtick has long worn thin and governments around the globe are already probing its potential monopoly power, but who else would come out swinging against the entire Chinese government and announce an end to its own collaboration in censorship, all while recognizing that it could lose access to the entire Chinese market? And do it in a blog post? This far but no further The extraordinary announcement came this afternoon: Google has had it with China’s pervasive web of censorship and spying, and the company is done censoring its search results in China. The decision wasn’t made in a vacuum, but rather came after years of increasing cyberattacks from the Chinese mainland. A recent, massive infiltration attempt that targeted Google and 20 other tech companies was the final straw. Though Google stops short of naming the Chinese government as the party behind the attacks, the implication is clear. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that […]
