Watch Rep. Katie Porter’s sister, who happens to be a doctor, explain exactly why staying home is saving lives

www.edu-cyberpg.comWatch Rep. Katie Porter’s sister, who happens to be a doctor, explain exactly why staying home is saving lives

Artist pays tribute to DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin with DNA-laced paint and DNA-coded images

Artist pays tribute to DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin with DNA-laced paint and DNA-coded images

 

Art imitates life, but few works of art reflect their subject as thoroughly as the portrait of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin that’s now hanging in the University of Washington’s Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science and Engineering.

On one level, multimedia artist Kate Thompson’s work shows the black-and-white visage of Franklin — the late biochemist whose famous “Photo 51” revealed the double-helix structure of life’s most vital molecule, even though she didn’t get her full share of credit for it.

Look more closely, and you’ll see a mosaic of 2,000 images submitted by the general public as part of UW’s #MemoriesInDNA project.

And if you were to scrape off a few flakes of paint and process them in a DNA lab, you could read out the pixels that make up all of those images and more, translated from the four-letter genetic code of life to the ones and zeroes of digital data.

“This portrait is not only preserving Franklin’s memory, but preserving the data as well, in a form that will be accessible to future generations,” Karin Strauss, co-director of UW’s Molecular Information Systems Laboratory and principal research manager at Microsoft Research, said today in a news release about the art project.

Thompson’s portrait arguably ranks as the most visual and publicly accessible demonstration of mass data storage in DNA, which has been the focus of study at MISL for years.

“We’re making steady progress,” UW computer science professor Luis Ceze, the lab’s other co-director, told GeekWire. “We are well, well past the 1-gigabyte mark. But more importantly, it’s less about the volume of data stored in DNA now, and more about showing that there’s a path to getting there.”

Covid-19 Silent Carriers are Deadly

Dr. Anthony Fauci once dismissed concerns about ‘silent carriers’ of coronavirus, but not anymore. Here’s what changed.

millions — of “silent carriers” may be unwittingly spreading the coronavirus across the United States because they don’t realize they’re infected.

Fauci’s estimate was.

“It’s somewhere between 25 and 50 percent” of the total, Fauci said. But “right now,” he went on, “we’re just guessing.”

Fifty percent is a staggering — and scary — number. To put it in perspective, an asymptomatic rate that high would theoretically double the confirmed U.S. case count to more than 700,000 infections (even though the actual number of infections is likely much larger, given all the issues with testing).