Disturbing Verbing and Pre-verbing

Humorous commentary on the English language trend of creating verbs out of nouns which he calls verbing.

Deflationary Language

In the following recessionary story, numbers and letters deflate instead of inflate, and any word that has a comparative element is changed to its lower or lesser counterpart

A Chantant Ant Anthology

Of the trillions of insects that crawl over this earth, the lowly ants are the most ubiquitous, conspicuous, and universally recognized. They have also been in the news lately. A Harvard professor recently won a Pulitzer prize for his book about ants and their societal behavior. Not long ago, a Science magazine article revealed that a species of leaf-cutter ants has been gardening fungi for 23 million years. So they\u27re not only everywhere, they\u27ve been there forever

Verbo(c)ity

There are two kinds of cities in this country

Football Wusses

An essay comparing football and baseball inspired by George Carlin and Tom Boswell

Bird Ways

An essay on birds and language related to them

WA - Wordaholics Anonymous

An essay on how the English language is being butchered and a fictional recovery organization to combat it

Evaluation of DNA Methylation Episignatures for Diagnosis and Phenotype Correlations in 42 Mendelian Neurodevelopmental Disorders.

Genetic syndromes frequently present with overlapping clinical features and inconclusive or ambiguous genetic findings which can confound accurate diagnosis and clinical management. An expanding number of genetic syndromes have been shown to have unique genomic DNA methylation patterns (called episignatures ). Peripheral blood episignatures can be used for diagnostic testing as well as for the interpretation of ambiguous genetic test results. We present here an approach to episignature mapping in 42 genetic syndromes, which has allowed the identification of 34 robust disease-specific episignatures. We examine emerging patterns of overlap, as well as similarities and hierarchical relationships across these episignatures, to highlight their key features as they are related to genetic heterogeneity, dosage effect, unaffected carrier status, and incomplete penetrance. We demonstrate the necessity of multiclass modeling for accurate genetic variant classification and show how disease classification using a single episignature at a time can sometimes lead to classification errors in closely related episignatures. We demonstrate the utility of this tool in resolving ambiguous clinical cases and identification of previously undiagnosed cases through mass screening of a large cohort of subjects with developmental delays and congenital anomalies. This study more than doubles the number of published syndromes with DNA methylation episignatures and, most significantly, opens new avenues for accurate diagnosis and clinical assessment in individuals affected by these disorders

A Sadistic Tic Tickler

According to Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and The Third Wave, human history can be viewed in terms of waves. First there was the Agrarian Age, then came the Industrial Revolution, and now we are riding the crest of the third wave--the Information Age

NMR STUDIES OF AROMATIC NITROGEN HETEROCYCLIC COMPOUNDS: BENZOTRIAZOLES

Author Institution: Air Force Materials Laboratory (MAYH)The chemical shifts and coupling constants of benzotriazole, its 1-methyl and 2-methyl derivative and its anion and cation have been measured. LAOCOON III was used to iteratively refine the reported parameters. H\""{u}ckel Molecular Orbital calculations were performed in the hope of facilitating the choice of input parameters for the computation of the complex ABCD spectrum of the 1-methylbenzotriazole. No useful correlation was found between $\pi$-electron densities and chemical shifts of the aromatic protons. A deuteration scheme was therefore resorted to in order to unambiguously assign the resonance frequencies of these four protons. Protonation and deprotonation experiments were also performed with benzotriazole to determine the effect of charge on the AA' BB' spectra recorded at room temperature. The NMR and MO data are compiled and compared