Spring caught up with me! It was gardening time, and extra things at school time, and yet another spring bug that hit our family. If you want to read about my gardening, I'm talking about it at my main blog, which right now is only slightly more active than this one. And then came the need to hunker down and get organized. I'm a mom, wife, writer, active volunteer, and church goer. I also knit and garden. And cook my dinners from scratch. If I'm going to keep hold of this rope, I need to make sure the ends don't fray. So I purposefully set the summer to get things under control. And I was pretty successful at it. More of that is on my other blog too.

But now, it's fall. So here is a cool link.



The Human Genome is Far More Complex than Scientist Thought

We already knew that epigenetics was big, but we didn't know it was this big. Around 80% of what we thought of as "junk DNA" is biochemically active. In this active section, there are 70,000 sites which control whether or not nearby genes are activated and over 400,000 sites which influence the activity of genes. And there are only about 20,000 protein encoding genes. Makes you think, doesn't it? Read the article, and then link through to Not Exactly Rocket Science to learn even more.

Also, that image is totally computer generated. DNA does not look like that under an electron microscope. Even if we could actually see it that close up, it would look much lumpier and wouldn't be that regular it all. It would be bunched up or stretched out, bulged out, and sometimes split apart.