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> Scientists have long suspected that transcription may go awry with aging, but the new study offers proof that it doesn’t—with a twist. In all five of the spec
by falcor84 4y ago
> Scientists have long suspected that transcription may go awry with aging, but the new study offers proof that it doesn’t—with a twist. In all five of the species tested, as the organism grew older the process surprisingly sped up. But like trying to type faster when blindfolded, error rates also shot up.
I got incredibly annoyed at this piece of writing, and the article as a whole, trying to make it "fun and exciting" to the detriment of being clear. In the case of this particular problem, the short of version is "as individuals grow older, transcription speeds up, which leads to increased error rates". There is no "twist" - the process does indeed go awry.
- SanderNL 4y agoMy plebeian mind finds it interesting the process quality itself is still the same, only the speed changes. This changes the problem from “change fundamental quality of the process” to “change the speed of the process”, which, again to my unwashed and illiterate eyes, seems like an useful and possibly exciting distinction.
- GenerocUsername 4y agoBut it might not be that simple. Perhaps it's 'faster' because it's doing less error checking.
- derefr 4y agoMy understanding of how the development of cancer works is that all the error-checking mechanisms in a cell have to become damaged, before a cell can be damaged in such a way that it mutates into a cancer cell, because if they aren't all damaged before that, then one of them will find the "error" going on, and self-destruct the cell. Cancer itself, then, is a constructive proof that DNA damage can disable DNA-transcription-time error-checking mechanisms. The question in my mind, then, is whether those safety mechanisms are "blocking" / "synchronous" steps done during DNA transcription, such that disabling them would make DNA transcription occur faster. If they are, that would neatly explain the observed effect.
- hoseja 4y agoNot really, a lot of cancer mitigation is done by the immune system.
- CSSer 4y agoPlus the whole point of touch typing is that seeing the keyboard doesn’t matter…
- MiddleEndian 4y agoEven as a touch typist, while I don't look at the keyboard I still make typos here and there so I need to look at the computer screen. I think that's what they were going for.
- bearmode 4y agoI find that as a touch typist, I tend to be able to tell if I've made a mistake as I made it, I don't really need to see the screen
- MiddleEndian 4y agoSame, but I don't always know where my mistake was. Once I start deleting I need to look. Or with a password just delete it all and start again.
- taskforcegemini 4y agosame. my modus operandi is to press ctrl+backspace to delete the typoed word and start anew. on a cli it is ctrl+w instead, to delete a word/command. force of habit sometimes has me do ctrl+w in a browser and we are back at the topic at hand: making mistakes.
- bearmode 4y ago>force of habit sometimes has me do ctrl+w in a browser and we are back at the topic at hand ctrl + shift + t should fix that for you
- perilunar 4y agoThe "like bacon around eight stalks of asparagus" was particularly ham-fisted.