I've make a habit of trolling the "There is something wrong with your computer" scams (I get a call ever 3-6 months and string them along for fun/public service)

I'd say about 50% actually know there running a scam, these will put the phone down the moment I start stringing them along (Me:Just a mo while I turn on my computer. Them: [click]). The other %50 act bewildered and answer back when I do the reveal and tell them I know its a scam, if they were in on it they would just ring off and get to the next call.

Its quite interesting to watch how their script develops. Originally they would talk me through opening event viewer so they can show me all the thousands of your computer is going to die warnings.... now they go straight for the logmein and the like. I used to have great fun pertending to boot a Windows 3.1 box and fire up Mosaic (with lots of crashes stringing it out). I'm going to have to perpare a virual machine so the can log in... I'm not sure what theme to go with ... eyewatering medical images for wallpaper, something that looks like a police or gangster computer or perhaps a straight linux box with a windows8 skin on it

Thats pretty much what they did, as Patrick got older they brought in a supporting cast of presenters who have now taken over (Moor also lives on in Jon Culshaw's imporsonations and clips fromt the extensive archives)

If I remember rightly, the 1st Object into inter planetary space was Luna 1 which was ment to be the first first luna probe ... but missed went into solar obit and was hurredly dubbed a "new planet" and renamed Mechta ("Dream")

I'm not mad

You can see my discharge papers.

I've got a complete record of all the pus I ever made.

Do no underestimate the horror of Biology, nothing is simple, the data is never clean and there are always exceptions to the rule (normally not in a good way:-). I speak from experience

A database of mouse traits could well be a valuable resource and more importantly a cool project, but I would go into that project expecting that the vocabulary of trait descriptions not be controlled, formatted or even spell checked and the gene and strain nomenclature to occasionally out of date, misleading or even flat out wrong.

You could well use up half your time simply massaging the data into a usable format and I suspect you don't get any credit for data munging.

Now I'm not saying don't do it! But this is for a qualification, you want a project that should succeed, so you really need someone knowledgeable about the subject ready to help with terminology and shape the search interface. But more importantly take a really good look at quality of the input data before you take on such a project

This

Consider the project 'I want to open my garage door with my phone' OK easy enough, small computer with web-server CGI app and some wires to hook it up to the door motor....

Prior to the Pi you could buy a low power, cheap, computer with USB, Ethernet, video and sound (and no GPIO) but they cost $150+

So now I had to ask the question this is going to be cool but is it $150 worth of cool\? and I'd be forced to conclude no I've got a perfectly serviceable remote control... $35? and a built in way to access the motor? now were talking

That joke was bad and you should feel bad

The thing I'm really struggling with is why on Earth would anyone do such a thing

As others have pointed out it is possible to deduce where genes are by looking at the sequence however this is by no means straightforward DNA is spaghetti code of the very worst kind.

It is possible to "run the DNA to see what it produces", basically when a (DNA) gene is active copy's of its sequence are made in messenger RNA (mRNA, its like DNA but much less stable) the mRNA copy's are perhaps akin to compiled code as there is a fair amount of rearrangement that goes on before its '3D printed' in protein.

Now its possible to take the mash up cells or tissue extract the mRNA convert it back to DNA (stabilising it) then sequence the different DNA molecules to find out what genes are active in a given tissue.

Mapping the sequences back to the genes is not straight forward, genes can exist in multiple identical or near identical copy's making it hard to map back, some genes never express or only express under very specific circumstances or only in certain people

Perhaps its something to do with the 2 week lunar night that a lunar colony would experience.