Simple twists of fate

"Death is Different" and Other Twists of Fate

Genetics Twists of Fate Stanley Fields and Mark Johnston, MIT Press, 2011

We are now, apparently, in an age of “personal genomics” brought about by new capabilities for cost-effective whole genome sequencing. There has been a concomitant rise in Direct-toConsumer (DTC) testing through companies such as 23andMe, Knome (pronounced `know me’), deCODE Genetics, and Navigenetics to name but a few. Each of these offers to provide insights into our genetic fate. There also ...

Twists of Elliptic Curves

If E is an elliptic curve over Q, then let E(D) denote the D−quadratic twist of E. It is conjectured that there are infinitely many primes p for which E(p) has rank 0, and that there are infinitely many primes ` for which E(`) has positive rank. For some special curves E we show that there is a set S of primes p with density 1 3 for which if D = Q pj is a squarefree integer where pj ∈ S, then E...

Cocycle Twists of Algebras

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Direct conversion in the heart: a simple twist of fate.

In a recent issue of Nature, Qian et al (2012) show that by injecting adult mouse hearts with a few transcription factors on a retroviral vector, they can switch cardiac fibroblasts—the workhorse supporting cells of the heart—into cardiomyocytes, the beating muscle cells driving the contractile forces that pump blood. When injected into the hearts of mice with induced myocardial infarctions, th...