aaronmck

The article title seems like an overreaction to a really sad situation. We have to trust at least someone, and although he clearly had some issues (maybe recent), he wasn't out to hurt anyone or aligned with any groups that wanted to inflict harm.

Fighter jets were there immediately, people tried to talk him down, and he was lost. Nothing better could have been done all around. Yes, commercial planes could be keycoded or controlled in some other way, but I think most engineers in a controlled setting will agree this creates exponentially more day-to-day headaches than catastrophic situations it prevents.

Well, you'll have to wait for the genetics to catch up -- we know nearly nothing about the effects of variation on complex traits like intelligence or athletic performance. Even in known 'cancer genes' like BRCA1, we know what only a few of the thousands of single-base changes do. Without this information, things are going to be limited to known disease variants (a good thing)

Why doesn't my FRT site logo invert when I reverse complement it? (not a serious complaint..) Signed up and played around a bit tonight. Really great concept. I think a couple of features will probably be helpful to your target audience, though some are a bit tricky to implement:

-User designed sequences (maybe I just couldn't find it). Everyone wants to drop their primer of interest in, their unique tag, their CRISPR site, etc. Also, some well-balanced GC spacers would be helpful, even make them unique so people could PCR off them if needed.

-Barcoded sequences. This will ruin / complicate the auto IDT pricing, but a nice drop-in feature would be a degenerate barcode sequence. This is all the range with MPRAs or other high-throughput methods, and could be really helpful

-Architectures. Say I want to design a lentivirus construct. Give the user the scaffold to drop their payload in, with set LTRs, etc. Screen for no polyA signals in their design, etc. An easier way to walk novice users into design (maybe best not to start with lenti...)

Anyway, keep up the good work, it's a cool product!

Yes an no. Of course, in something like an animal model it can be really hard to control everything, and the result you find could just be 'luck'.

On the other hand, figuring out what variables to control is huge part of science. Say the development of next generation DNA sequencing technologies. People tried a ton of different variables, conditions, reagents, flow cells, etc. And failed and failed. But eventually they controlled the right conditions, optimized the right things, and now the process is done in thousands of labs every day as a routine tool. This is a technology development example, but the same could be said of the conditions needed to make stem cells.

Ironically they're targeting the wrong end of the person. The sewers would be a great place to collect DNA and narrow down a manhunt in a large metropolitan area.

Yeah I think the use-case here is more the writing that you have to do, but don't want to do. For me, I have to write up some method sections for a paper. Boring, but easy. This 'app' is nice for that; you don't want to lose progress so you just crank something out as fast as possible and fix it later. You're right though, it's probably not for inspired writing...