jacel

Are these obscenities received every waking moment, or only during the game? Do they know your real name, your home phone number, your address, or just your avatar name? Are they threatening your online personality, or threatening you?

And most importantly, can you avoid these threats by logging out of a game? Or are these people calling your home after you've turned off your computer at night?

Please don't trivialize these threats by comparing them to in-game banter.

Your last point would hold if we only had the mental capacity to pity one person at a time, in which case would Rebecca Black really win over, say, victims of child sex trafficking?

We do understand a lot of the base modifications pretty well, but that's all they are - modifications. I agree that it could be useful to introduce students to the concept of epigenetics, of which base pair modifications such as methyl-cytosine are just one aspect. But it is an aspect that is no more important than all of the other epigenetic mechanisms - so it should be taught in that context.

If you're interested in an overview of epigenetics, this is a great textbook chapter from Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory http://www.cshlpress.com/pdf/sample/epigen.pdf incidentally, James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, still works at CSHL.

I think that this article is somewhat misleading. In terms of replication, heritability, RNA, and protein production, there are only four bases. Adenine matches with Thymine, Cytosine matches with Guanine. As Watson and Crick so famously understated in their seminal paper, 'It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.'

When DNA is replicated, methyl-cytosine pairs with guanine just like cytosine does. The only way to maintain the 'methylation marks' is to add a methyl group back on to the newly synthesized cytosine. When DNA is converted into RNA, which is then converted into protein, whether a cytosine has a methyl group attached makes no difference to the final protein.

So whether a cytosine is methylated or not doesn't change the DNA sequence you inherit from your parents. It doesn't change the structure of the protein produced from that gene. What it can do, is change when and where that gene is expressed - which can make a huge difference to the behaviour of the cell.

For instance, a gene such as BRCA1 could be 'turned off' because too many cytosines are methylated, and this could cause a cell to become cancerous. Or a lack of methylation could cause too much c-Myc to be produced, which could result in the same outcome. But then, there many other genetic regulatory mechanisms that can do that as well - such as histone modifications, chromatin structure, transcription factors, and probably methyl-adenine too! All these mechanisms interact to ensure genes are turned on and off at the right time and place, and this field is known as 'epigenetics'.

Methyl-cytosine is a modified version of cytosine that is a very important part of epigenetics, but since it is almost irrelevant to other aspects of genetics, I would argue that you could not consider it a 'fifth base'. Having read the paper, methyl-adenine is the same - interesting new aspect of epigenetics and gene regulation, but not a new base. Also, this paper doesn't exactly 'discover' it, we found methyl-adenine in bacteria in the 60s....

If you want to read about truly new bases, scientists actually synthesised an entirely new pair of bases last year, that can replicate and encode RNA and proteins! A seriously cool step forward in synthetic life http://www.nature.com/news/first-life-with-alien-dna-1.15179

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe DMT can be produced in the pineal gland? I can't read this paper from 1976 but that's what the title says http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-4159.1976....

DMT is hallucinogenic, similar to LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms), and these NDEs sound quite similar to the results of medical psilocybin trials http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment. I'm surprised the author didn't mention this aspect (or if they did, it was very brief).

As the author alluded to, the disappointment for me is with this false dichotomy - mystical and wonderful or scientific and mundane. Isn’t the idea that a bunch of neurons can produce these incredible experiences wonderful enough? How great is it that we can produce a drug to make the last moments of our life beautiful? Aren’t we lucky that sometimes we get a second chance, and our brain can rewire so dramatically we change the way we live our life? And just think how it will change our understanding of consciousness when we figure out how all of this happens! I think that’s a much more fulfilling explanation than the intangible mind/soul argument. But maybe that’s just me.

Michael Eisen is a genetics professor at Berkeley, and started PLos (a group of open access journals). He's very eloquent on the subject, and it's great to hear that Harvard is supporting open access so publicly - as he says,

'In most scientists’ minds, a publication in an elite journal like Nature or Science is as good as gold – a ticket to a job, grants and tenure.'[0]

So knowing that publishing in PLoS (as opposed to Nature) might not exclude you from a position at Harvard is really great for the future of open access publishing.

[0] http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1346

Some bacteria evolved the ability to induce ice-formation, in order to break up plant tissues so they can invade. The climate effects seem be just a by-product, but there's some really interesting research being done into the biological mechanisms. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131023141119.ht...