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HELLO WORLD is now on tee shirts. I was in a bed and breakfast in Cambridge recently and some conference attendees were wearing Hello World tee shirts. I had to smile at the cryptic reference. View in LinkedIn

BEYOND THE CLUSTER. "The clustering of natural products biosynthetic pathway genes is an obvious organizational feature. However, on closer examination, many of those clusters and their gene products appear to have further pathway connections that lie outside the cluster but nevertheless are coordinatedly linked in the biosynthesis process." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn

INNOVATION. "As spotted by Hack a Day, a chap named Kory Becker recently made use of a minimalistic yet Turing-complete language called brainfu*k to create a program that can generate 'hello world' programs. Sure, it's considerably less impressive than, say, making Skynet, but it's still a step in what may or may not be the correct direction." https://lnkd.in/d5enhBP View in LinkedIn

GENE RECRUITMENT. "Another recurring theme that appears common is the recruitment of (or the seeding by) genes originally involved in primary metabolism for the natural product biosynthesis gene clusters." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn

GAPING HOLES. "Memory corruption vulnerabilities have become significantly more difficult on modern operating systems. There are still gaping holes in stack input/output that can be exploited." https://lnkd.in/dzU4CYK View in LinkedIn

WEAK POINT. "Buffer overflows can be triggered by inputs that are designed to execute code, or alter the way the program operates. This may result in erratic program behavior, including memory access errors, incorrect results, a crash, or a breach of system security. Thus, they are the basis of many software vulnerabilities and can be maliciously exploited." https://lnkd.in/dvGXWzj View in LinkedIn

BUFFER OVERFLOW. "In computer security and programming, a buffer overflow, or buffer overrun, is an anomaly where a program, while writing data to a buffer, overruns the buffer's boundary and overwrites adjacent memory locations. This is a special case of the violation of memory safety." https://lnkd.in/dvGXWzj View in LinkedIn

SELF-MODIFYING CODE. "The term is usually only applied to code where the self-modification is intentional, not in situations where code accidentally modifies itself due to an error such as a buffer overflow." https://lnkd.in/dhsfBc5 View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this peek at the evolution of metabolic pathways, with evidence both for chaotic assembly and elegant modularity. Biochemistry and genetics are the fundamental templates that nature acts upon, and should be immensely revealing about questions of evolutionary design or happenstance, but so typically of nature, the answers are mixed, with evidence on both sides. View in LinkedIn

MODULAR ARCHITECTURE. "In addition to the recurrence of these topological categories among MBPs, we find that some specific structures are used repeatedly, often in a modular fashion. Specifically, many simple MBPs are used hierarchically as a toolkit for the construction of progressively more complex MBPs (data not shown), similar to what has been observed in real metabolic networks." https://lnkd.in/dUHqnYU View in LinkedIn