What a great station. When they first came on the air I was skeptical but I have come to expect at least 90% greatness when I tune them in. Today I heard an Ennio Morricone song, "Svolta Definitiva" as one of the worlds most dangerous instrumentals. I had never heard this song before and I enjoyed it. I never thought I'd hear Morricone on the radio, and it just so happens that I was listening to his CD The Legendary Italian Westerns: The Film Composers Series, Volume 2 yesterday. I just love that first song "Gunfight at Red Sands: A Gringo Like Me."
I heard a really cool NPR program today about how the human genome contains fragments of ancient retroviruses. In fact, about 8% of the human genome is made up of ancient retrovirus fragments. See this article. I thought it was pretty interesting that they actually were able to resurrect one of these ancient retroviruses. They basically cut and pasted fragments to create a complete retrovirus DNA sequence. When the virus was introduced to a human cell it caused the cell to reproduce the virus just as it should, therefore the virus they created was close enough to the original that it still worked. Ancient retroviruses resurrected from human DNA, what a world we live in.
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whats also really cool about dna? some animals, like komodo dragons, can reproduce asexually and not create genetic clones. the dna actually rearranges itself so the original komodo dragon can return to sexual reproduction when there are males again.
but...that may just be cool because im being a science geek.
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