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DNA IS A FOSSIL RECORD, littered with old copies of code from parasitic DNA (transposable elements), some over 900 million years old, making up to 80% of a genome of some species. Some of these randomly incorporated bits of parasitic DNA still have functionality in the modern host. " " http://lnkd.in/dEuD5fG View in LinkedIn

THE SOURCE CODE. "The language of DNA is digital but not binary. Encoding has 0 and 1 to work with (hence the 'bi'nary). DNA has 4 positions T, C, G and A; whereas a digital byte is mostly 8 binary digits, a DNA 'byte' (called a codon) has 3 digits. Because each digit can have 4 values instead of 2, a DNA codon has 64 possible values, compared to a binary byte which has 256. A typical DNA codon is 'GCC' which codes the amino acid alanine." Together these string together to make proteins, and all living things." " http://lnkd.in/dghBZfW View in LinkedIn

AGRIBUSINESS has produced unprecedented cheap food in recent years. Just a generation ago, chicken was a luxury for most households, and salmon was a luxury for the rich. Today both are a cheap commodities. To make cheap food, industrial factory methods have been applied to agriculture. Now we are re-examining the costs of cheap food for our society and the world. View in LinkedIn

DNA AS INFO OR MEASURED BY ENTROPY. "The information content for coding regions is 0.4 bit per triplet and for non-coding regions 0.18 bit per triplet. For 3 billion base pairs, or 1 billion triplets, this gives us an actual information content of 0.4 billion bits or 50 Mbytes assuming the best case scenario that all DNA is coding or about 24 Mbytes if all the DNA is non-coding."" " http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/10/information-con.html View in LinkedIn

WAS MALTHUS RIGHT? "Malthus became widely known for his theories about change in population. His 'An Essay on the Principle of Population' observed that sooner or later population will be checked by famine and disease, leading to what is known as a Malthusian catastrophe. He wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe that saw society as improving and in principle as perfectible."" " http://lnkd.in/dhvgETh View in LinkedIn

GIANT BIOINFORMATICS DATABASES. "Today, computer programs such as BLAST are used daily to search sequences from more than 260,000 organisms, containing over 190 billion nucleotides."" " http://lnkd.in/dGYyHkT View in LinkedIn

INDUSTRIAL FOOD PRODUCTION is clearly unsustainable and full of serious problems. The next series of blogs will touch on some of the problems, and ask what viable alternatives are being discussed in the face of a starving world. These are serious issues. Historically, the transition to industrial food production is relatively new, and like all things, is a transition subject to evolution, modification, and the emergence of new solutions. View in LinkedIn

BIOINFORMATICS mines the enormous amount of comparative genetic information from different species. Comparing the DNA and RNA sequences from many species can reveal evolutionarily conserved sequences which are inflexible to change because they code a vital function, in contrast to variable sequences which mutate a lot. The large databases of bioinformatics are a treasure m-trove. View in LinkedIn

UNSUSTAINABLE FACTORY FARMING of meat. "The industrial production of animal products is nasty business. From mad cow, E. coli and salmonella to soil erosion, manure runoff and pink slime, factory farming is the epitome of a broken food system."" " http://lnkd.in/dDginhy View in LinkedIn

BIG DATA is the key value driver of Facebook and Google, but it is not neutral. “There is a difference between what we want to measure and what we can measure. And we need to be on guard that we don’t confuse the two,” said Kenneth Cukier, co-author of the book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think."" " http://lnkd.in/dUgD5NQ View in LinkedIn