Singularity shots is a roundup of beautifully curated notes about science, technology, and all the mesmerizing things indistinguishable from magic. Delivered as 2-minute shots, every 2 days, because we know you are busy. Read on and subscribe as we dissect the world, unfold ancient code and walk you towards wisdom. We read through hundreds of articles each day and find you these treasures and write about them as these small shots so that you always have something awesome to read when you are in the subway, getting comfy in the bed for lights-out, or riding in an Uber.
If you love it, forward it to a friend. If you hate it, well, anyway, forward it to an enemy.
I know that our brains are hardwired to listen to stories. So obviously, it is better to talk about the most important discoveries of our lifetime as stories; instead of boring seminars. This is what this newsletter intends to do; tell stories that inspire awe and attract more people towards that path of knowledge.
This edition is curated by my friend, Aiswarya Krishna - one of the most curious persons I know.
Did you know?
Can we calculate the location center of big bang?
Yes. we already have. The answer is "Everywhere".
What we need to get straight is, as you all think, Big Bang is not a place. It is a moment in time. We all know of it as an explosion, but we miss the most critical point. If we ask "when", then there is a straightforward answer - around 13.7 Billion years ago. If the question is "where", as you might be thinking that there is an epicenter for everything, and we track back the explosion to the point of origin, you are terribly wrong. It is like asking "What is the location of last Monday morning 11 AM?".
The answer is everywhere. It is not a location. It is a moment in time when the Universe was extremely hot and dense. That's all.
Series:
Editing the operating system of life: #2
Recap: Last week, we discussed how a few scientists of Osaka University in Japan found a mysterious palindromic genetic sequence in an E. coli bacteria. You can read the edition here:
At that time, there were only very crude and slow methods to decipher the DNA and it was so difficult for the microbiologists to know whether the sequences were unique to E. Coli. Gradually, the process took speed with the introduction of many other methods - like metagenomics, which revealed identical genetic sandwiches in a staggering number of microbe species. Thus, in 2002, Ruud Jansen of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues started calling these sandwiches "CRISPR", a short for "clustered regularly inter-spaced short palindromic repeats".
Jansen's team also noticed something strange about the CRISPR sequences. They were always accompanied by a collection of genes nearby. They started calling these genes "Cas" genes, a short for CRISPR-associated genes". These genes encoded enzymes that could cut DNA, but no one understood why it did so. It was a small, sharp DNA Scissor of which no one knew the purpose.
This story will continue in the next edition. Stay tuned...
With love,
Aiswarya Krishna.