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The Dish: Sampling Today’s News - January 24, 2008
An international consortium has announced the 1000 Genomes Project, an effort to sequence and compare the genomes of at least one thousand humans. The project will receive support from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England, the Beijing Genomics Institute in China, and the National Institutes of Health in the United States. The new Project builds on the earlier HapMap Project by including a more diverse sampling of people and by detecting rarer genetic variances among them. “At 6 trillion DNA bases, the 1000 Genomes Project will generate 60-fold more sequence data over its three-year course than have been deposited into public DNA databases over the past 25 years,” said Gil McVean of the University of Oxford, one of the co-chairs of the consortium’s analysis group (via Wired).
There were 86 reported human cases of bird flu in 2007 compared to 115 in 2006, according to the World Health Organization. The result, says The New York Times, is that preparedness for a pandemic has become less urgent, but it remains as important. New data indicate that more than 700 viruses were cultured after having been submitted to the WHO from 2003 to 2007. More than 100 of those viruses were sent by researchers in Indonesia, which indicates that the country has made enormous progress in playing its part in global preparedness efforts. Ultimately, the WHO recommended that 13 of the 734 viruses should be used for vaccine development (via Effect Measure).
Last week, Drew Baden explained in Science Progress why sending humans to the Moon and to Mars could distract researchers and policymakers from using resources for more significant research about Earth and the universe. Now, investigations have revealed that NASA’s proposed Ares I manned Moon launch vehicle could shake violently during operation, and the results could be catastrophic. The possibility of design mistakes on the part of Boeing or Alliant Techsystems, the private contractors for Ares I, could challenge the continuing value of Project Constellation, NASA’s human spaceflight program (via Knight Science Journalism Tracker).
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