this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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Science Memes

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[–] rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm a data analyst at a medical nonprofit, primarily doing analyses on germline variants for rare forms of cancer. I'm new to this kind of work, but had a decent educational background in biology.

Something I've learned is that genetics are complicated as hell. A single gene can produce multiple different proteins, and proteins change over time due to somatic variation. Only 1% of the genome are protein coding, called exomes. Exomes can be affected by variations to start and stop codons, non coding regions, and untranslated regions. There are entire fields dedicated to studying genome-wide, exomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, phenomics, and probably several others that I don't know about. The amount of data involved with these fields is in the tebibytes region. Have you ever seen a "small" 3GiB csv? I have. The filtered and cleaned data frames created by genetics are over 100 columns wide and have nearly 5 million entries.

There are companies creating artificial life by generating custom chromosomes. There's a whole field of computer science dedicated to biological computing, using DNA as a storage medium. There are companies dedicated to simply classifying genes.

DNA is cool as hell.

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There are companies creating artificial life by generating custom chromosomes.

My dude, not a fun thing to think about who might have control over that. Is it a musk, zuck, cook or epstein?

[–] rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No, none of those guys are involved afaik. The one that made the first breakthrough in artificial life is ran by the same dude who competed with the Human Genome Project to map 99% of the human genome. They modified an extremely simple bacteria that only had something like 300 base pairs

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We still don't know what type of person they are. Them being smart and focused on the research, doesn't give them a pass. They could even not care who else has the info.

[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yup. Many Nazi scientists only cared about the research. A lot of medical and physics breakthroughs last century directly resulted from those experiments.

[–] Koarnine@pawb.social 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago
  1. Pervitin was an early form of methamphetamine, in large use by the Nazi military. Kept soldiers awake and alert and minimized appetite to stretch rations. Research around it and similar things helped further addiction and psychological distress.

  2. Elektroboot was the first electric submarine able to stay submerged for large lengths of time without needing to vent things like diesel exhaust. Even being able to charge while submerged.

  3. The Intramedullary Rod, an essential part of modern orthopedic surgery to heal broken bones.

  4. The Horton Ho 229 was an early attempt at stealth and flying wing aircraft. While never fully produced, the development led to further research after resulting in modern stealth aircraft and overall aircraft efficiency, and by extension detection and tracking.

  5. The Enigma Machine was a marvel of cryptographic security. Pretty sure this stands on its own.

  6. Messerschmitt Me 262 was the first mass produced fighter jet. Much of even modern jet propulsion technology stemmed from this research.

  7. 3D Films were used to enhance their propaganda well before Hollywood considered it.

  8. The Z4 Computer was one of the earliest commercial digital computers.

  9. Of course the V2 rocket. And by extension every Project Paperclip scientist brought back to the US to develop space technology at NASA, up to and including the Saturn V rocket and Apollo missions.

  10. The jerrycan, for fuel transport. Literally named after the British slang for German soldiers. So useful the Allies adopted it during the war.

  11. Chloroquine, an anti-Malaria drug developed by the Nazis, initially toxic but further refined after the war.

  12. Night vision technology also had massive developments made by their military scientists.