like a physicist

heythereuniverse:

DNA: Celebrate the unknowns | Philip Ball

On the 60th anniversary of the double helix, we should admit that we don’t fully understand how evolution works at the molecular level, suggests Philip Ball.

This week’s diamond jubilee of the discovery of DNA’s molecular structure rightly celebrates how Francis Crick, James Watson and their collaborators launched the ‘genomic age’ by revealing how hereditary information is encoded in the double helix. Yet the conventional narrative — in which their 1953 Nature paper led inexorably to the Human Genome Project and the dawn of personalized medicine — is as misleading as the popular narrative of gene function itself, in which the DNA sequence is translated into proteins and ultimately into an organism’s observable characteristics, or phenotype.

Sixty years on, the very definition of ‘gene’ is hotly debated. We do not know what most of our DNA does, nor how, or to what extent it governs traits. In other words, we do not fully understand how evolution works at the molecular level.

That sounds to me like an extraordinarily exciting state of affairs, comparable perhaps to the disruptive discovery in cosmology in 1998 that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating rather than decelerating, as astronomers had believed since the late 1920s. Yet, while specialists debate what the latest findings mean, the rhetoric of popular discussions of DNA, genomics and evolution remains largely unchanged, and the public continues to be fed assurances that DNA is as solipsistic a blueprint as ever.

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thenoodledude:

thesmilingfish:

The fact that Neil is playing with Pluto makes this all the more badass.

I GET IT

pappubahry:

The comet Hartley 2, photographed by Deep Impact as part of its extended EPOXI mission, 4 November 2011.

The original photos from this encounter were blurry (I’ve uploaded an almost equivalent gif here for comparison) because of a problem with the lens.  By pointing the camera at a star, effectively a point-source of light, and studying the precise way in which the point got blurred, the EPOXI team was able to work backwards and “deconvolve” the photos of Hartley 2.  This procedure makes them much sharper, but also introduces some ringing artefacts, which are especially visible in the first few frames.

spaceplasma:

This “lightbulb” Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) shows the three classical parts of a CME: leading edge, void, and core. In coronagraph images, direct sunlight is blocked by an occulter, revealing the surrounding faint corona. The approximate size of the Sun is represented by the white circle. Taken on February 27, 2000 by the LASCO C3 coronagraph.

Credit: SOHO (ESA & NASA)