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Woman's DNA discovered in 20k year old deer-tooth pendant (2023)
- userbinator 2y ago3 billion bases long[...]we were able to recover roughly 70 per cent It's impressive how resilient DNA is as a data storage medium. That's the equivalent of ~500MB of raw data they've recovered, if my calculations are correct.
- bloomingkales 2y agoWhen can I start storing passwords in mine?
- brianmaurer 2y agoSooner than you'd think! https://wyss.harvard.edu/technology/dna-data-storage/ https://wyss.harvard.edu/technology/dna-data-storage/ (though passwords aren't a great application)
- mkoubaa 2y agoOh great when i get into old age not only will I forget my password but my DNA will have mutated to the point that it technically isn't my password any longer
- brianmaurer 2y agolol
- Y_Y 2y agoMight be a poor idea if anyone who can collect and sequence your DNA gets your passwords.
- egillie 2y agoAll of my passwords are encoded in pi…somewhere
- magneticnorth 2y agoWell, probably! But it hasn't actually been proven yet that pi is a "normal number" [0], though most mathematicians think it must be. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number#
- thaumasiotes 2y agoIt's not necessary that pi be normal in order for it to contain every possible sequence. Sufficient, but not necessary.
- chmod775 2y agoThat's a stronger claim anyhow. We'd merely need Pi to be a rich number, ... which hasn't been proven either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjunctive_sequence#Rich_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjunctive_sequence#Rich_numb...
- Y_Y 2y agoIf the OP is anything like me, then they have no trust in number theory researchers and deliberately choose passwords like "141592" so they can be sure
- billforsternz 2y agoI enjoy thinking about this. Not only is a sequence of digits encoding the complete works of Shakespeare in there somewhere, it's in there again. And again, an infinite number of times.
- Y_Y 2y agoIn my encoding I represent the works of Shakespeare by the digit 0, anything else by the digit 1 followed by its ASCII representation.
- almosthere 2y agoWhy do you have all those eyeballs on your arm? Oh, that... yeah, they said I had a lot of special characters in my LinkedIn password, and this is the best way to encode those.
- SlightlyLeftPad 2y agoThey require at least one emoji and an uppercase character
- selcuka 2y ago- Your password has expired. You must choose a new one. - Uh, oh. How am I going to see behind me, then?
- ryao 2y agoYou could likely store them in the junk DNA without much risk, as long as you avoid encoding sequences that are the start of coding regions. That said, if you managed to inject them into every cell of your body, this would be the biological equivalent of dropping pamphlets containing your passwords everywhere you go.
- epistasis 2y agoYou can order DNA sequences from all sorts of companies. IDT is by far one of the most popular, using classical biochemical means: https://www.idtdna.com/pages/products/genes-and-gene-fragments/double-stranded-dna-fragments/gblocks-gene-fragments https://www.idtdna.com/pages/products/genes-and-gene-fragmen... https://www.idtdna.com/pages/products/custom-dna-rna/dna-oligos/custom-dna-oligos https://www.idtdna.com/pages/products/custom-dna-rna/dna-oli... And a newer player that uses tech from integrated circuit manufacturing (I think?) is Twist Biosciences: https://www.twistbioscience.com/twist-ordering-platform https://www.twistbioscience.com/twist-ordering-platform Retrieval of information has a bit of latency, however.
- gww 2y agoThey didn't sequence the whole human genome (~3 billion bases) for multiple reasons. I am not an expert on ancient DNA but I will try to explain the paper as best I can: 1. Contamination with other flora and fauna DNA 2. Relative low proportions of human DNA 3. The DNA is usually highly degraded, which limits the analyses to short read sequencing (in this case they used 76 bp reads). The halflife of human DNA is ~521 years. To mitigate these problems they used multiple targeted approaches including one to isolate mitochondrial DNA, where they managed to sequence the whole ~16kb human mtDNA, where each base was covered by 62 sequencing reads on average (62x coverage). They used another to isolate specific regions containing single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are DNA mismatches known to be related to ancient human DNA and humans. They targeted 470,724 single nucleotide polymorphisms of which 70% (336,429) were recovered. They did perform shotgun sequencing on all of the DNA isolated, but due to species assignment issues they again focused on fragments that contain diagnostic SNPs in these cases they only recovered a small number of SNPs per sample, again due to the relatively low proportion of human DNA and its degradation (20,526, 3,734, 124,862, 85,901, 34,756, 41,632, 34,677 and 72,992) as per the legend in figure 3.
- dexwiz 2y agoThat analysis makes me think of matching more than recovery.
- thangngoc89 2y ago"matching" is exactly how we do DNA sequencing right now. The current technology is called next generation sequencing (NGS), we multiply the DNA and perform matching digitally to construct the full DNA.
- vintermann 2y agoIt's quite fascinating. It's like if order to figure out the shape of a teacup, we generate thousands of identical copies, smash them all to rather small bits, and then try to count the different types of shards as a first step to piecing together one full copy. Impressive that it works.
- kevincox 2y agoKeep in mind that this is survivorship bias. The vast majority of DNA from this period has lots. Sure, there is tons that exists but we haven't found but without a doubt almost all of it has been lost. This is DNA that happened to be the right conditions to survive. It isn't so much that the medium is resilient but that if stored in the correct conditions it can survive.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Terr_ 2y agoIt makes me think about how many ancient ruins don't exist simply because the people nearby didn't see reason not to reuse all that convenient unowned pre-quarried rock. Even today, it's not a very compelling plea: "No, don't tear down the recently-abandoned building, it would look cool several hundred years after you die." So too on the microscopic label, if there are convenient molecules nobody else is using...
- wlesieutre 2y ago"Spolia" is a fun architectural term for this sort of material reuse, particularly with the more interesting decorative pieces. Many of those stones taken from ancient buildings have become notable newer ancient buildings in their own right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spolia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spolia
- teruakohatu 2y ago> It makes me think about how many ancient ruins don't exist simply because the people nearby didn't see reason not to reuse all that convenient unowned pre-quarried rock. In the case of Ostia near Rome, they mined it for building material until it became a malaria swamp. It wasn't drained until the 20th century. Around 20% of the workers draining the swap contracted malaria.
- biophysboy 2y agoIt’s even more impressive when you compare it to rna, which “lives” minutes. Take away the pair strand, add a hydroxyl group and a uracil, and it’s a totally different thing.
- bloqs 2y agoIm fascinated, any noob friendly reading material?
- biophysboy 2y agoHonestly, scientific papers. The pain of jargon will be less than the pain of a popsci book. Especially with all the tools to rewrite/summarize/search these days.
- skyyler 2y agoYes, but which ones? There are so many out there... It seems like you're educated on the subject, so you may be able to recommend good ones.
- biophysboy 2y agoA good start would be the review articles listed here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=rna+half-life&hl=en&as_sdt=0,11&as_rr=1 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=rna+half-life&hl=en&as_.... If there's a paywall, use sci-hub or check the lab's page for a pdf. I should caveat that there is no one rna half life, some live much longer
- Waterluvian 2y agoSo this is how I should be storing family photos.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoThinking on how to save things long term is a fun exercise. If I were super rich and felt that highly of myself, I would totally build a monument to myself built to last the ages; elevated (against flooding), tonnes of erosion resistant rock, a library of all human knowledge in many different formats, sealed off. But with an exact copy near it for tourists.
- Waterluvian 2y agoYou’ve gotta have a series of timed vaults that give access to precious metals every few generations.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoYou'd find yourself in company with many religious organizations. The Mormon Church has a couple of records vault carved into the granite outside SLC, while the church of Scientology has 3 geographically separated primary vaults dug into the mountains (Petrolia and Creston CA, and a place in the desert outside Albuquerque).
- saagarjha 2y agoIn a sense your DNA is your family photo.
- m463 2y agoI was going to say... except without that mole on your arm. But then I thought, it probably has all kinds of battle scars with disease and other adversity coded in it, making a mole inconsequential.
- m463 2y agoI think of the error correction codes used by CDs. But for DNA, the data is needed to literally stay alive as replication occurs constantly through our bodies. And this has been refined over maybe billions of years.
- dgfitz 2y ago> "It was clear that a human handled it…” Ah, science.
- jdiff 2y agoThere actually was human DNA in it so I don't know why we're scoffing as successful methods as if they're unreasonable.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoIt's like IT, gotta make sure you have the basics right like whether it's plugged in before you start with more advanced stuff.
- fortran77 2y agoMy first thought, after reading the headine, was that the deer bit her.
- dgfitz 2y agoWe have vastly different experiences with deer I suppose.
- ursuscamp 2y agoThe article says that it belonged to a species of deer called “wapiti”. Since I never heard of it, I looked it up and it’s just an elk. Why didn’t the article just say “elk” which is the much more common term?
- dan-robertson 2y agoElk is pretty ambiguous — it refers to different species depending on the context (in Europe, ‘elk’ refers to what in north America is called a moose. Wapiti is a name for what ‘elk’ refers to in North America). You get a similar problem with the words ‘hawk’ and ‘buzzard’
- jhbadger 2y agoAnd badger -- In Europe they are small adorable members of the Meles genus. In the Americas, Africa, and Asia the word refers to larger and more aggressive animals in the Taxidea and Mellivora genera that just look superficially like Meles.
- chmod775 2y agoTwo reasons: - Elk is ambiguous. There's an Elk/Wapiti in North America, Central Asia, and East Asia, and another species of deer referred to as an "Elk" by people in Eurasia, but which is known as a "Moose" in North America. - Because journalists these days don't have time to look these kinds of things up. The original paper only refers to it as wapiti/cervus canadensis/deer. If the whoever wrote that article knew it refers to an elk, they'd have pointed that out for the reader.
- bregma 2y agoThe wapiti is the animal on the reverse of the Canadian 25 cent definitive coin. Perhaps the folks who write the article are just educated and worldly.
- sitkack 2y agoSend that to a consumer DNA analysis company and find her closest living relatives!
- b112 2y agoIt's basically everyone!
- sitkack 2y agoI know that person!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- theWreckluse 2y agoOr, it could be no one at all!
- hackeraccount 2y agoIf you go back far enough (and I don't know if this is) isn't the answer always everyone or no one but never "some".
- peeingpoop 2y ago[flagged]
- epistasis 2y agoDNA has a very strong signal for man, woman, and everyone in between.
- epistasis 2y agoI was a little blithe with my reply here, and feel bad about the scientific inaccuracy I'm perpetuating. The "everyone in between" spectrum often has strong signals, but sometimes it's not very strong straight from DNA alone! And it's also incredibly complex, far far more complex than doing mutation calls, to the point that automating it is quite difficult. Sure, finding XX, XY, XXY, and the many other combinations of sex chromosomes as they appear in nature is easy. Finding subtle inactivations of the genes on the Y chromosome is much harder. In fact analysis of genomes of intersex people is a common use of consumer whole genome and whole exome sequencing, so any consumer sequencing company that simply reports XX as female and XY as male is laughably amateurish, and your customer support lines will be swamped with extremely knowledgeable self-educated intersex people that will being providing tons of information for the company to up their game.
- fastball 2y ago> so any consumer sequencing company that simply reports XX as female and XY as male is laughably amateurish To my knowledge there is no XX person who can produce sperm and there is no XY person who can produce eggs. So while "XX is female" is over-simplified, "XX is not male" seems fairly clear.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago> your customer support lines will be swamped with extremely knowledgeable self-educated In no other field this combination (self-educated, actually knowledgeable, and calling customer support) seems to exist, so that alone might be worth further study.
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- mparnisari 2y agoHow did they know to explore this cave in particular? Blows my mind. Or was it by accident?
- AlotOfReading 2y agoDenisova cave has been known for about 150 years or so. Back in the 1970s, the Soviet Union sent some archaeologists out to see what was in the cave. They found some upper paleolithic stuff (e.g. like what the article is about), as well as some mousterian stuff (very weird this far north and east). They did excavations over the next couple of decades and eventually, some of the dating/sequencing technology improved to the point where it could actually be used on the cave artifacts. That's when they discovered denisovans and immediately made the cave one of the most important archaeological sites on the planet. There's been no lack of funding since.
- metalman 2y agothis is just the begining of DNA as a tool in archiology. Earlier work with densovian dna, showed not only a genetic profile,of indivuals, it showed a familial relationship, father/daughter. The implication is that we will start to get a clearer look into human migration patterns ,including tribal, and familial groups, which while interesting, will also be prone to every kind of abuse in the forwarding of various agendas,...racial,ethnic,religios, nationalistic. Makes me want to stir the pot sometimes, and feed back in a lurid interpretation of ancient DNA, proving, i dont know, how about our ancestors throwing off our alien overlords, but now the death star has activated and is beaming alien DNA data right into us from the 5G, but, but, (marketing angle), ....eating , "product xx" or product xy, strengthens your imune system and prevents the alien download from finishing. The real issue in my blathering, is that fiction is fighting an uphill battle, to be stranger than reality.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoI thought that it was already established that we're descendant of the ancient astronauts from the 12 Colonies of Kobol, and that the "mitochondrial Eve" was a child of a human and a Cylon. (Part of me wishes to see this resurface as a bona fide religion, oblivious to the source material.)
- throwaway173738 2y agoAll of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
- neRok 2y agoThe article (which is from 2023 by the way) doesn't discuss the findings of the DNA analysis, so I went and looked up the original - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06035-2 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06035-2 > with estimates of present-day human and faunal contamination both below 1%. Comparisons with present-day human populations²⁶ using ƒ3-statistics and D-statistics²⁷,²⁸ show high affinities to Native Americans (Extended Data Fig. 5). When projected into a principal component analysis with other ancient human individuals (Fig. 3c), DCP1 falls within a group of Ancient North Eurasian individuals from further east in Siberia, which includes the approximately 24 ka Mal’ta 1 and the approximately 17 ka Afontova Gora 3 individuals²⁹,³⁰. Both of these individuals are genetically closer to DCP1 than non-Ancient North Eurasian individuals when tested with D-statistics (Extended Data Fig. 6b), and all three show similar affinities to ancient Siberians and Native Americans with ƒ3-statistics and D-statistics
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- jvandonsel 2y ago...and also showed that she had antlers. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist)
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- throw0101c 2y ago> The cool and dry conditions in the cave have made it possible for scientists to recover preserved DNA left behind by ancient Denisovans, Neanderthals and humans, all of whom occupied the cave at different times over 40,000 years. That's a long time to have people live in a particular area generally, and a particular "home" in particular. AIUI, some of the oldest writing we have dates to Ur III at 2000 BC, so that's 'only' 4000 years ago, or perhaps the Uruk period, which at 3500 BC, is 5500 years old: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_documents * https://www.sfu.ca/~poitras/jesho_UR_14.pdf https://www.sfu.ca/~poitras/jesho_UR_14.pdf So the oldest document(s) we have are only about 1/10th how long this cave was occupied. Some of these time scales are mind-boggling.