I wonder how long until we realize that shift work is a public health issue, like clean water and vaccination and smoking.

Olfactory genes have a higher rate of mutation than most other genes because the DNA they are in gets packed more tightly and gets replicated later than other genes. As a result, they often show up as false positive in cancer gene searches. Read more here:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v499/n7457/full/nature12213.html

This might mean that they're a canary-in-the-coal-mine: If someone's DNA replication is starting to suffer in general, olfactory genes might be where the breakdown shows up first and most dramatically.

Antibiotic resistance? Isn't this a virus?

I'm doing a biohacking-ish workshop next week, as it happens. The Synbiota people are taking care of all the bureaucracy so that I can play with DNA. It's part of a bigger experiment, so it's not like I'm going full-mad-scientist, but it's a fun way for an IT guy with an interest in biology like me to do some experiments.

Is this mess possibly the long-term result of Microsoft's previous embrace of stack ranking? Too much cultural focus on back-stabbing and ladder-climbing instead of writing solid code and testing it properly?

It's too bad that this very interesting research - cancer in hydra! - is being overshadowed by sweeping statements about cancer. There are a number of species which experience little to no cancer, from naked mole rats to some whale species. There are a number of different ways that different species reduce or prevent cancer, from additional cell-death signalling via hyaluronan in naked mole rats to additional cell-death signalling via p53 pathways in blind mole rats to replicative senescence in many large mammals, to who-knows-what in eastern grey squirrels and elephants and whales.

The cancer-fighting idea in each case is something that should be near and dear to systems administrators: Redundancy. The more cell-death pathways there are, the harder it is for a series of mutations to result in immortal cancer cells. Redundant Arrays of Immortality Suppression, if you will.

This doesn't mean that we'll ever get rid of cancer in humans, mind you, because evolving a new cancer-prevention signalling pathway takes a couple of million years. But the fact that hydra get cancer doesn't have anything to do with whether we'll ever get rid of cancer in humans, either.

It's easy to pretend you're a woman online. You should try it, as an experiment. It'll get you a sample of the actual numbers that you're looking for. After you do, your opinion on the subject will be a lot more interesting, whatever it is that you discover.

Look into Gleevec and other tyrosine kinase inhibitors for examples of a few highly specific cancer treatments that we've managed to developed for a few of the "whole bunch of diseases" that cancer is.

It might be that Pixar considers rendering old news, considering what they've come up with for animators:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tech/watch-a-rare-demo-of-pixars-animation-system-presto-98099.html

If you're not familiar with computer animation, that might not seem like much. To the animators where I work, though, it induced a weird combination of frenzy (as they lusted after it) and depression (once they re-opened the scenes they were working on in Maya). The rest of the industry has to spend hours rendering (in Renderman, or Vray, or whatever) to get a result that Pixar is now creating in-house in real time.

The only energy that has "gone into preserving them" is the energy wasted when they mutate and result in a lifeform that doesn't survive long enough to reproduce.

Incorrect. Every day, your body corrects fifty quadrillion or more DNA mutations that happen as the result of random bumping around inside the cell. See, for example DNA Repair. 5000 purine bases lost every day from every cell in the human body that have to be repaired, and that's only one type of mutation which has to be constantly corrected.

I have a half-baked theory that, to a rough approximation, the physical size of a bit and the amount of energy put into creating it is roughly correlated to the length of time it will last. Stone inscriptions, or baked clay cuneiform? Big bits, high energy, long life. CDs, or 148 Gb/in^2 tape media? Small bits, low energy, short life. There are ways to create big bits that are short-lived (e.g. drawing figures in the sand on a beach), but in general, a small bit cannot be made to last longer than a big bit given the same process and energy inputs.

You might say, "but look at highly-conserved DNA sequences!", to which I would answer, think about how much energy has gone into preserving them over hundreds of millions of years.

This is reminiscent of another study which found that asking people how they'd deal with a big car repair bill - just getting them to think about it - lowered their IQ by an average of 13 points, "comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults".

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976

The advantage of the car-repair-bill study is that people were randomly assigned to the control and experimental groups, as opposed to being an observational study like the one in the story (with all the complications that brings). Same basic conclusion, though.

Coincidentally, I was reading Chapter 21 of Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts et al last night, which discusses some of the many experiments which have been done to demonstrate the effect. Intercellular chemical gradients involving counteracting exciters and inhibitors are only one of many effects that control differentiation, however. There are also:

• - intracellular gradients leading to asymmetric cell division (e.g. the place where the sperm enters the egg creates a protein gradient across the egg that determines the future head/ass orientation of the body)
• - timing mechanisms (e.g. the on-off cycle that appears to be responsible for the development of vertebrae)
• - cell-to-cell contact, either directly with neighbours or over longer distances through tubes or spikes

So Turing figured out one of the mechanisms, and it was certainly an important accomplishment. If Google Scholar is telling the truth, his paper has over 8000 citations, including around 1,500 that mention "embryo", so his accomplishment hasn't been ignored. The claims of this new paper for novelty, though, seem a bit weaker.

If a candidate finds technical questions threatening or condescending, you probably don't want them as your boss. You want someone who's okay with the fact that you have more technical knowledge than they do, but is still able to speak (and listen) intelligently about technical subjects.

According to the Gates Foundation Student Survey, the best predictors of a teacher's success are a) keeping control of the classroom and b) continuously challenging the students, keeping them focused and busy.

As you say, good luck with a video (or even a reasonably sophisticated computer program) doing either of those things.