Rand Paul, Ted Cruz try to bond with libertarian techies

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The two senators were key attractions at a conference in Washington hosted by LincolnLabs, a group of entrepreneurs and digital operatives that hosted a similar event in Silicon Valley last year.

"I love tech," Cruz said, kicking off his speech to the crowd and not-so subtly mentioning that both of his parents were computer programmers.

READ: Huckabee heads to Holy Land

The 2008 presidential election saw an infusion of tech with politics, and President Barack Obama's savvy operation has widely been referenced as the precedent for harnessing data and digital models for political campaigns. Many of Silicon Valley's biggest names -- and their wallets -- are considered potentially big power players in the 2016 presidential election.

Bush, whose last campaign took place in 2002 -- long before the political world got smart on tech -- has attempted to show that he's still ahead in the digital realm.

"I was digital before digital was cool I guess," he said in December, noting his prolific use of email as governor of Florida from 1999-2007.

His Blackberry can be seen in his official portrait.

But two incidents this week revealed Bush might not have caught up with modern times.

In an effort this week to show his transparency and accessibility, Bush released 250,000 emails to the public, but the dump included some personal information like names, emails and even Social Security numbers -- a huge no-no for online documents. The error was first reported by the tech blog, The Verge.

Bush's digital efforts were also in the spotlight after his team was forced to let go of their chief technology officer one day after announcing the hire. The aide resigned after it was made public that he deleted part of his online footprint, including tweets that referred to women as "sluts" and commented on gay men at the gym.

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Marshall Islands setback on disarmament

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Marshall Islands setback on disarmament By Josh Butler

UNITED NATIONS - A lawsuit by the Marshall Islands accusing the United States of failing to begin negotiations for nuclear disarmament has been thrown out of an American court.

The Marshall Islands is currently pursuing actions against India, Pakistan and the United Kingdom in the International Court of Justice, for failing to negotiate nuclear disarmament as required in the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Action against the US had been filed in a federal court in

California, as the United States does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICJ.

David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, said the US conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs detonating daily for 12 years.

Despite documented health effects still plaguing Marshallese islanders, US Federal Court judge Jeffrey White dismissed the motion on Feb. 3, saying the harm caused by the US flouting the NPT was "speculative".

White also said the Marshall Islands lacked standing to bring the case, and that the court's ruling was bound by the "political question doctrine" - that is, White ruled the question was a political one, not a legal one, and he therefore could not rule for the Marshalls.

Krieger, whose Nuclear Age Peace Foundation supports Marshall Islands in its legal cases, called the decision "absurd".

"I think it was an error in his decision. There were very good grounds to say the Marshall Islands had standing, and this shouldn't have been considered a political question," he told IPS. "The Marshall Islands know very well what it means to have nuclear bombs dropped on a country. They've suffered greatly, it's definitely not speculative."

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School assignment inspires 8th graders to try to save tiny island

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On a cold winter morning, Olivia Arnold joins her friend Valerie Vujnovich on an exotic trip with their fathers down the Wilkinson Canal in Plaquemines Parish, past the fishing camps and into Barataria Bay.

About 10 miles east of Grand Isle, they step onto a tiny island where hundreds of brown pelicans and other species have nested.

"It's pretty great that it's still here at least," said Valerie as the girls walked along a shell beach.

Heavily oiled in the 2010 Gulf oil spill, the four main islands of Cat Bay have all but vanished. Although the islands had steadily eroded in recent decades, and were heavily damaged in the 2005 hurricanes, Plaquemines Parish government has blamed the spill for hastening their demise.

"It's sad to see something this beautiful wash away," Olivia said.

Until recently, Olivia had only vague idea about the coastal land loss that has changed the landscape of south Louisiana.

"I've heard it once or twice, but I never actually took interest in finding out what it actually is."

That all changed when the girls and their eighth-grade classmates were assigned a social justice project at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Belle Chasse. Like the eighth-graders one year earlier, they adopted another island, which locals call "Cat Island." Not to be confused with its famous namesake in Mississippi, this Cat Island serves as a poster child of the spill.

Classmate Katie Goens said she tells people the island is, "the size of a speed bump and it's shrinking."

That turns out to be only a slight exaggeration. Stretching roughly 4 acres in April of 2010, Cat Island now is devoid of vegetation. The almost-skeletal remains of dead mangrove trees sprout from the little remaining soil and from shells pushed up by wave action. This very grown-up problem registered with the class along with the urgency of taking action along Louisiana's coast.

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Human genome – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The human genome is the complete set of genetic information for humans (Homo sapiens sapiens). This information is encoded as DNA sequences within the 23 chromosome pairs in cell nuclei and in a small DNA molecule found within individual mitochondria. Human genomes include both protein-coding DNA genes and noncoding DNA. Haploid human genomes (contained in egg and sperm cells) consist of three billion DNA base pairs, while diploid genomes (found in somatic cells) have twice the DNA content. While there are significant differences among the genomes of human individuals (on the order of 0.1%)[citation needed], these are considerably smaller than the differences between humans and their closest living relatives, the chimpanzees (approximately 4%[1]) and bonobos.

The Human Genome Project produced the first complete sequences of individual human genomes. As of 2012, thousands of human genomes have been completely sequenced, and many more have been mapped at lower levels of resolution. The resulting data are used worldwide in biomedical science, anthropology, forensics and other branches of science. There is a widely held expectation that genomic studies will lead to advances in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, and to new insights in many fields of biology, including human evolution.

Although the sequence of the human genome has been (almost) completely determined by DNA sequencing, it is not yet fully understood. Most (though probably not all) genes have been identified by a combination of high throughput experimental and bioinformatics approaches, yet much work still needs to be done to further elucidate the biological functions of their protein and RNA products. Recent results suggest that most of the vast quantities of noncoding DNA within the genome have associated biochemical activities, including regulation of gene expression, organization of chromosome architecture, and signals controlling epigenetic inheritance.

There are an estimated 20,000-25,000 human protein-coding genes. The estimate of the number of human genes has been repeatedly revised down from initial predictions of 100,000 or more as genome sequence quality and gene finding methods have improved, and could continue to drop further,[2][3]Protein-coding sequences account for only a very small fraction of the genome (approximately 1.5%), and the rest is associated with non-coding RNA molecules, regulatory DNA sequences, LINEs, SINEs, introns, and sequences for which as yet no function has been elucidated.[4]

The total length of the human genome is over 3 billion base pairs. The genome is organized into 22 paired chromosomes, the X chromosome (one in males, two in females) and, in males only, one Y chromosome, all being large linear DNA molecules contained within the cell nucleus. It also includes the mitochondrial DNA, a comparatively small circular molecule present in each mitochondrion. Basic information about these molecules and their gene content, based on a reference genome that does not represent the sequence of any specific individual, are provided in the following table. (Data source: Ensembl genome browser release 68, July 2012)

Table 1 (above) summarizes the physical organization and gene content of the human reference genome, with links to the original analysis, as published in the Ensembl database at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Chromosome lengths were estimated by multiplying the number of base pairs by 0.34 nanometers, the distance between base pairs in the DNA double helix. The number of proteins is based on the number of initial precursor mRNA transcripts, and does not include products of alternative pre-mRNA splicing, or modifications to protein structure that occur after translation.

The number of variations is a summary of unique DNA sequence changes that have been identified within the sequences analyzed by Ensembl as of July, 2012; that number is expected to increase as further personal genomes are sequenced and examined. In addition to the gene content shown in this table, a large number of non-expressed functional sequences have been identified throughout the human genome (see below). Links open windows to the reference chromosome sequence in the EBI genome browser. The table also describes prevalence of genes encoding structural RNAs in the genome.

MiRNA, or MicroRNA, functions as a post-transcriptional regulator of gene expression. Ribosomal RNA, or rRNA, makes up the RNA portion of the ribosome and is critical in the synthesis of proteins. Small nuclear RNA, or snRNA, is found in the nucleus of the cell. Its primary function is in the processing of pre-mRNA molecules and also in the regulation of transcription factors. SnoRNA, or Small nucleolar RNA, primarily functions in guiding chemical modifications to other RNA molecules.

Although the human genome has been completely sequenced for all practical purposes, there are still hundreds of gaps in the sequence. A recent study noted more than 160 euchromatic gaps of which 50 gaps were closed.[5] However, there are still numerous gaps in the heterochromatic parts of the genome which is much harder to sequence due to numerous repeats and other intractable sequence features.

The content of the human genome is commonly divided into coding and noncoding DNA sequences. Coding DNA is defined as those sequences that can be transcribed into mRNA and translated into proteins during the human life cycle; these sequences occupy only a small fraction of the genome (<2%). Noncoding DNA is made up of all of those sequences (ca. 98% of the genome) that are not used to encode proteins.

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R2d2 Beats Mendel: Scientists Discover Selfish Gene That Breaks Long-Held Law of Genetic Inheritance

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Newswise CHAPEL HILL, NC The force is strong with this one. UNC School of Medicine researchers discovered a gene called R2d2 Responder to meiotic drive 2 that breaks Gregor Mendels century-old law of segregation, which states that you have an equal probability of inheriting each of two copies of every gene from both parents.

For years, scientists had evidence that this law was being broken in mammals, but they didnt know how. Now theyve implicated R2d2, a so-called selfish gene. Led by UNC School of Medicine scientists, researchers from across the country used data from thousands of genetically diverse mice to show that female mice pass on one copy of the R2d2 gene more frequently than the other copy.

The discovery, published in PLoS Genetics, has wide ranging implications. For instance, when doctors calculate the probability of a person inheriting the genes responsible for a disease, the calculations are based on Mendels law. Findings from the fields of evolutionary genetics and population genetics are also based on Mendels law. And the discovery could have implications for the fields of biomedical science, infectious diseases, and even agriculture.

R2d2 is a good example of a poorly understood phenomenon known as female meiotic drive when an egg is produced and a selfish gene is segregated to the egg more than half the time, said Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena, PhD, professor of genetics and senior author of the paper. One notable but poorly understood example of this in humans involves the transmission fused chromosomes that can contribute to trisomies when three chromosomes are passed on to offspring instead of two.

Trisomies are associated with miscarriages or can lead to developmental disorders, including Down, Edwards, and Patau syndromes.

Understanding how meiotic drive works may shed light on the meiotic abnormalities underlying these disorders, Pardo-Manuel de Villena said. Now, we finally have an easily controlled and manageable system so we can study meiotic drive.

The researchers, including John Didion, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH, former UNC graduate student, and first author of the paper, first discovered R2d2 while developing the Collaborative Cross (CC) and Diversity Outbred (DO) two related populations of laboratory mice that were derived by mixing eight genetically-diverse inbred lines. They examined genotype data from hundreds of CC lines and thousands of DO mice and found that in every place in the genome save one, each of the eight parent lines made equal contributions to the population. The one exception occurred in the middle of mouse chromosome 2.

Using whole-genome sequences from the parent lines, the scientists found that R2d2 was responsible for the gain of many copies of a gene sequence present in all females with meiotic drive. Deletion of most of the R2d2 gene copies restored the expected pattern of inheritance. This provided solid evidence that the R2d2 gene was indeed the cause of the unusual mutation found on chromosome 2.

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KADLEC HEALTHY AGES – The Effects of Aging on Joints, Tendon & Bone Jan 2015 – Video

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KADLEC HEALTHY AGES - The Effects of Aging on Joints, Tendon Bone Jan 2015
Kadlec Healthy Ages is a FREE membership program expressing Kadlec Regional Medical Center #39;s commitment to the health care needs and concerns of the 50+ population. This program #39;s speaker:...

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KADLEC HEALTHY AGES - The Effects of Aging on Joints, Tendon & Bone Jan 2015 - Video

Viral Video: Obama promoting health care mission goes viral on social media – Video

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Viral Video: Obama promoting health care mission goes viral on social media
Viral Video: Obama promoting health care mission goes viral on social mediaFor latest breaking news, other top stories log on to: http://www.abplive.in http://www.youtube.com/abpnewsTV.

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Viral Video: Obama promoting health care mission goes viral on social media - Video