Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Another Day, Another Dollar General: The Architectural, Environmental, and Economic Impacts of Dollar Stores

In 2022, one in three new retail openings in America is a dollar store. Dollar General Corporation, the country’s largest “small-box” retailer, owns and operates the majority of these stores, with nearly 18,000 locations nationwide. By strategically expanding into sites where Walmart and other “big-box” grocers won’t, Dollar General justifies their aggressive expansion as providing at least one food and retail option in areas considered to be food deserts. This significant retail shift is one of the outcomes of – and in turn, a cause of - the well-told story of American food culture where at least 70% of the food Americans eat is processed and manufactured, rather than consumed fresh. Dollar General’s impact on the American landscape, society, and culture is profound and growing exponentially into issues of land use, food culture, economic health, agricultural practices, and supply infrastructures, as well as exacerbating divides among Americans along lines of race, class, religion, politics, and geography. As the dollar-store empire continues its expansion in both rural and urban communities, “small-box” stores are becoming increasingly critical to the function of daily life. Nevertheless, this building typology and the larger ecosystems it operates within are under-explored in architectural discourse. The research seeks to uncover the covert and overt relationships between Dollar General and the communities it serves locally and globally, looking at production processes, marketing strategies, real estate tactics, and fresh food distribution. The research is working to position Dollar General in a more proactive role in terms of how it might work to mitigate its own contributions to catastrophic climate change. By inventorying DG’s products – many of which satisfy basic human needs – the goal is to facilitate a relationship between Dollar General and local community non-profits who collect and distribute essential goods in the aftermath of climate-related disasters

Wasteland Salon

Wasteland Salon, MOOCH Series, and the Pleasure Palace are three projects that explore designed situations and collaborations from a position invested in finding and foregrounding value systems that exist outside of the status quo. These leveraged opportunities emerged from the margins of the Enlightenment ideals that have historically defined architecture’s aesthetic categories and forms of subjectivity. As research assistants, we were tasked with finding holes in bureaucratic systems to create cultural events and objects that deinstitutionalize the rhetoric of architecture by flattening hierarchies, removing barriers, and challenging existing value systems. Both Wasteland Salon and The Pleasure Palace positioned the COVID-19 global pandemic and the question of invasive species not as disasters, but as displays of the majesty of nature and life. These malevolent conditions have always been a part of nature, and these projects used them to a benevolent end. Prototypes of these projects yielded a series of wear-able machines that operated as parameters for social distancing, a dress made from living grass, and an inflatable costume. These prototypes explored how humans can relate to one another, the built world, and nature despite the hostile and unpredictable circumstances that humanity and the environment produce. For MOOCH Series, we sleuthed and mooched information from cultural institutions across the nation and compiled our findings into an interactive spreadsheet which was disseminated widely; by consolidating free lectures and content from universities and galleries, we made knowledge acquisition accessible, inclusive, and just. These studies questioned traditional design strategies and cultivated new guidelines for understanding architecture and the built environment in relation to human interactions, especially in the digital age that COVID-19 has demanded. This challenged both us as designers and the public to interact with these built machines and online databases to rethink how physical barriers reimage the accessibility of knowledge and exchange

False Walls

With new methods of production and innovative design processes, architecture has been enabled by processes that promise efficiency but that also complicate the agency of designers through the use of contemporary technology. False Walls examines the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand and further agitate this new era of the design process. While iterating between machine learning, digital design, and model making; for example, novel design opportunities arise from misappropriations of various technologies. In machine learning this is called unsupervised learning in which machine learning models articulate patterns in data that humans do not detect, either by virtue of the complexity of this data or its vast quantity. Allowing algorithms to assist, favors new methods of analysis in the design process. Through the introduction of standard construction methods, the machine discovers frictions in framing techniques that yield interesting design opportunities. These mistakes and transgressions of typical wall-framing tectonics reveal the proclivities of the algorithm and generates new design opportunities in doing so. The new design alternatives discovered through this process will be exhibited in a built frame. This full scale model will be on display in the gallery at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning on April 17th with an accompanying lecture on the discovered design opportunities. In a world of growing technology we have entered a time where we have grown past how technology is used to increase the efficiency of making, and is instead a site that can be mined for design potentials

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7