banjo_milkman

This is an interesting conjecture. It could be a cunning Microsoft competitive strategy.

They convince cost-sensitive IT infrastructure groups in other businesses to use Teams by offering it for free, reducing company productivity massively, hobbling product development.

Meanwhile, Microsoft adopt some other pay messaging/video service internally, accelerate product development 10x, become insanely competitive in a whole host of new markets rapidly.

Yes, I use an Onyx Note Air 2 for this purpose. It works nicely, much easier on the eyes than a laptop/Ipad. The Note Air 2 is fairly big - 10.3" - works well for books.

Illumina

They are talking about one 'reference genome'. The variation from human-to-human is relatively small (a few million bases out of 3 billion). The reference genome has historically been some kind of average/mosaic of several individuals (this has obvious disadvantages), good enough to put reads in the right place (mostly), and call 'variants' - the differences that make the test genome unique.

The latest/greatest end-to-end T2T reference is entirely based on 'HG002' an individual from Utah, due partly to new information derived from long read technologies.

Siddhartha Mukherjee's books 'The Gene', 'Emperor of all Maladies', 'The Song of the Cell' all mix biology and history with lots of detail and are easy to read.

The UK has had an industrial intervention policy for ages. Its undeclared but it basically involves supporting finance, real estate, business services and insurance in London above all other stakeholders in the country.