Monthly Archives: February 2015

Meet the space cadets: 5 Bay Area residents selected to compete for one-way Mars voyage

Posted: February 23, 2015 at 10:45 pm

World-traveled, sociable, yearning for a new planet.

That seems to be the typical rsum for those vying to be included on a one-way trip to Mars. Add "Bay Area resident" into the mix and it would seem your chances of becoming one of the first explorers on another planet will improve exponentially.

On Monday, the Mars One project announced that five Bay Area residents are among the 100 finalists for a privately funded space voyage that has the lofty goal of, beginning in 10 years, sending 24 humans from Earth to the red planet annually in groups of four. The catch is that they will never return.

The local finalists are Kenya Armbrister of Oakland, Megan Kane of San Francisco, Yvonne Young of Berkeley, Xuan Linh Vu of San Francisco and Peter Felgentreff of Montara.

More than 200,000 people from around the world applied by August 2013 for the interplanetary exploration project created by two men from the Netherlands, entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp and physicist Arno Wielders. Since then, Mars One trimmed the number of candidates to 1,058 and then to 100, with medical examinations disqualifying more than 300 applicants in between.

The medical examinations ensured that the remaining candidates were in good health and disease free, with stellar vision and a proper amount of body fat.

The next phase required astronaut hopefuls to focus on the mission itself, with interviewers testing the group on Martian-survival questions. Mars One provided the candidates with a study guide that included answers to questions such as, "How much radiation is an astronaut exposed to during spaceflight?"

When contacted by The San Francisco Examiner this week, all five Bay Area contestants were thrilled with the possibility that they would going to Mars.

KENYA ARMBRISTER: LIFE FULL OF JOURNEYS

The 36-year-old Oakland resident said she has traveled to 179 cities in 30 countries since first leaving her hometown of Fresno for Germany at 18 years old. She speaks three languages and has two master's degrees. But until recently, she had never prepared for a dust storm on Mars.

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Meet the space cadets: 5 Bay Area residents selected to compete for one-way Mars voyage

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Gene making human brains bigger found

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By inserting bits of human DNA into mice, scientists were able to make their brains develop more rapidly and ultimately grow bigger in the womb. The study, published in Current Biology, suggests that the evolution of this gene may be one of the things that sets us apart from our close relatives in the primate world.

Human brains are unique, even when compared with our close genetic relatives, such as chimpanzees. Our brains are about three times heavier than those of our cousins, and are more complex and interconnected as well.

It's generally accepted that these neurological differences are what allowed us to evolve the higher brain function that other primates lack. But just what genetic changes allowed humans to surpass chimps in the brain arena is one that's still being answered.

There are a lot of physical differences to examine more closely, but size is such a dramatic one that the authors of the new study chose to start there.

Using databases developed by other labs, the Duke University scientists cross-checked areas of human DNA that had developed differences from chimp DNA with areas of DNA they expected to be important for gene regulation. Regulator genes help determine how other genes will express themselves, and the researchers suspected that some of these regulators might be making brain development more active in human embryos than in chimps.

They ended up focusing on a region called HARE5 (short for human-accelerated regulatory enhancer), which testing indicated had something to do with brain development. They suspected that the enhancer, which is found close to a molecular pathway important in brain development, might have changed in a way that influenced brain size in humans.

We discovered that the human DNA sequence, which only had 16 changes in it compared to the chimp sequence, was being expressed differently in mice, said study author Debra Silver, an assistant professor of molecular genetics and microbiology in the Duke University Medical School.

In fact, HARE5 was regulating how many neural stem cells the precursors of brain cells a mouse embryo could produce.

The human DNA was really able to accelerate the way the stem cells divide, Silver said. And as a result, the mice were able to produce more neurons.

The brains of these genetically modified mice grew 12 percent bigger than ones given the chimpanzee version of HARE5.

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Gene making human brains bigger found

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My First DNA Bomb (Vicious Medal) – Video

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My First DNA Bomb (Vicious Medal)
Didn #39;t quite get to record the DNA Bomb gamplay.

By: Ducky 99

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My First DNA Bomb (Vicious Medal) - Video

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EasyDNA DNA Testing – Video

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EasyDNA DNA Testing
Cheap paternity testing and DNA testing with easyDNA`s fully accredited laboratory. http://www.easydna.co.uk http://www.easy-dna.com http://www.easydna.ie http://www.easydna.com.au ...

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EasyDNA DNA Testing - Video

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"MP11 DNA BOMB" – Call of Duty Advanced Warfare DNA Bomb Gameplay! – Video

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"MP11 DNA BOMB" - Call of Duty Advanced Warfare DNA Bomb Gameplay!
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"MP11 DNA BOMB" - Call of Duty Advanced Warfare DNA Bomb Gameplay! - Video

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DNA Motoring Nissan 370z Cat Back Exhaust Installation – Video

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DNA Motoring Nissan 370z Cat Back Exhaust Installation
EXPAND FOR INFO ---- DNA Motoring is your one-stop shop for all your aftermarket performance parts. We directly import products such as headers, exhausts, turbochargers, wastegates,...

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DNA Motoring Nissan 370z Cat Back Exhaust Installation - Video

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AW – QUICK UPLINK DNA BOMB ON INSTINCT w/ ROYALTY ARX-160 – Video

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AW - QUICK UPLINK DNA BOMB ON INSTINCT w/ ROYALTY ARX-160
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AW - QUICK UPLINK DNA BOMB ON INSTINCT w/ ROYALTY ARX-160 - Video

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Advance Warfare Infected?Getting DNA bombed With Phunnyfish21 – Video

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Advance Warfare Infected?Getting DNA bombed With Phunnyfish21
Phunnyfish21:https://www.youtube.com/user/PhunnyFish21 This is just some fun that my friend Phunnyfish21 and I had on Infected. I know it wasn #39;t the most fun thing to watch, but next time...

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Advance Warfare Infected?Getting DNA bombed With Phunnyfish21 - Video

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COD Advanced Warfare: DNA BOMB & Supply Drops #1 – Video

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COD Advanced Warfare: DNA BOMB Supply Drops #1
In this video I get a DNA Bomb on the new maps of call of duty advanced warfare it was awesome it is like a Nuke like back in the days but anyway I do show off some Supply Drops and it was...

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COD Advanced Warfare: DNA BOMB & Supply Drops #1 - Video

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Police turn to new DNA-powered technology in hopes of finding killer

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By Melody Schreiber February 23 at 2:57 PM

Four years ago, Candra Alston and her 3-year-old daughter, Malaysia Boykin, were murdered inside their South Carolina apartment. Police in Columbia collected DNA at the scene, but the investigation stalled.

Prime-time crime shows would have you believe DNA samples can convict the guilty and clear the innocent, but real life is more complicated. In order to find an assailant, the DNA has to match either a previous offender in the FBIs CODIS database or a sample from one of the victims acquaintances. When it doesnt, the investigation hits a wall. In the South Carolina case, police gathered 150 DNA samples and conducted 200 interviews with likely suspects and still nothing.

Now the Columbia police are experimenting with a new technology that uses tiny amounts of DNA to create a computer-generated illustration of their suspect. Snapshot, a program developed by a Reston, Va., company called Parabon NanoLabs, goes beyond simply listing physical attributes eye color, hair color, ethnicity and facial features and creates a 3-D image of what the killer might look like. The police in South Carolina hope that publicly releasing the suspects image and description will bring up fresh leads in a stale case.

Dabrien Dabe Murphy, the senior solutions architect at Parabon, sits in front of three monitors in a little office on the fourth floor of an unremarkable Reston office building not exactly the first place that comes to mind when you think of a lab. With a few keystrokes, Murphy brings up a revolving 3-D image the back of a head. Another few taps and a face attaches itself along the hairline. The face is a mans: olive skin, greenish eyes, full lips.

Murphy has fed DNA markers, linked to certain facial attributes, into 3-D imaging software to create what he calls a composition. It produces a somewhat distorted image where the face meets the rest of the 3-D model.

Theres a little bit of, okay, manual manipulation to make this not look quite so Frankensteined, Murphy explains. Using his cursor to adjust points and axes in the imaging software, Murphy smooths out the hairline and jaw where the projected face attaches itself to the head.

According to the markers Murphy feeds into the imaging software, the man on the screen is of Northwest African ancestry, with hazel or green eyes; black or brown hair; and few or no freckles. This mans DNA was publicly available, so theyre using it to test their model; they know, from the data included with the DNA, that he is Algerian. The trait predictions come with varying levels of confidence; Parabons scientists are 73.4 percent sure that their skin color prediction is accurate, but they are 94.7 percent confident in the subjects eye color.

All this from 9.6 nanograms of DNA. Thats less than 0.00000001 grams, an amount so small, its hard to compare to anything else.

Snapshot combs through a genotype, searching for significant markers and clusters that might indicate physical attributes and removing unimportant variables.

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Police turn to new DNA-powered technology in hopes of finding killer

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