Category Archives: Transhuman News

Photo: Nicole Boliaux, The Chronicle

DNA Pizza and Codeword on Folsom and 5th Street, counterparts to DNA Lounge, are set to close in July as the owners redirect their resources to maintaining the DNA Pizza and Lounge locations on 11th Street.

DNA Pizza and Codeword on Folsom and 5th Street, counterparts to DNA Lounge, are set to close in July as the owners redirect their resources to maintaining the DNA Pizza and Lounge locations on 11th Street.

The owners of DNA Pizza and Codeword say that construction and other neighborhood issues have stymied their efforts to make the nightclub and its attached restaurant profitable.

The owners of DNA Pizza and Codeword say that construction and other neighborhood issues have stymied their efforts to make the nightclub and its attached restaurant profitable.

DNA Pizza and Codeword on Folsom and Fifth Street, counterparts to DNA Lounge, are set to close late next month as the owners try to save the lounge.

DNA Pizza and Codeword on Folsom and Fifth Street, counterparts to DNA Lounge, are set to close late next month as the owners try to save the lounge.

SFs Codeword club closes in bid to keep DNA Lounge afloat

When asked what a normal night at Codeword is like, co-owner Barry Synoground laughed: Were lucky enough to not be normal.

One night, he said, the all-ages South of Market nightclub could host a full-on rave; the next, a drag show, a burlesque event, a cocktail hour or a house music dance party, full of people embracing San Franciscos misfit scene until the wee hours.

But too often, the space on Folsom Street would just be empty, sucking up money that could instead be used to salvage DNA Lounge, a beloved San Francisco nightclub under the same ownership that has lately experienced financial hardship.

Thats why, Synoground said, at the end of next month, Codeword and its attached pizza joint needs to close.

We were feeling too spread thin, Synoground said.

Since Codeword and DNA Pizza opened about three years ago, they hardly ever attracted enough business to pay the rent. But the spurts of business they would get, Synoground said, were enough to keep the proprietors going and make them believe things would get better.

It only takes a couple of really cool events to make you want to continue, he said. But the pocketbook was not able sustain it. A second DNA Pizza location on Eleventh Street will stay open, however.

Codeword hosted a range of events and was often used as a space for new talent to perform before moving on to larger audiences at DNA Lounge. Codeword regulars like 21-year-old Ginger Paintstains, an employee of DNA Lounge, were heartbroken to hear of its closing, which was announced on its website this week.

Its kind of terrifying, said Paintstains, who helped host its Sunday night Noise Complaint event. Were losing spaces to have this community-building.

In San Francisco, where soaring housing prices have begun pushing younger people out of the city, Codeword and DNA co-owner Jamie Zawinski said they have struggled to capture the interests of people in their 20s.

Zawinski, a well-known figure in the nascent days of the World Wide Web, bought DNA Lounge in 1999 when he noticed the citys culture was shifting. Buying the nightclub was his way of trying to preserve the vibrant spirit he encountered when he came to the Bay Area.

But over the years, attendance kept dropping, and the nightclub struggled to turn a profit. Zawinski announced in December that DNA might have to shut its doors if something didnt change. Closing Codeword is a sacrifice the owners are making to try to direct more of their attention both financial and mental to saving DNA Lounge.

Its hard to quantify the brain drain in financial terms, Zawinski wrote in a blog post announcing the closure. Every hour that I and my managers spend trying to figure out how to improve Codeword is an hour that is not being spent thinking about how to improve DNA, where the potential benefits could be much larger.

And hopefully this closure is worth it, Synoground said, because in San Francisco, the loss of places like DNA Lounge and Codeword is starting to be the new normal.

Trisha Thadani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani

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SF's Codeword club closes in bid to keep DNA Lounge afloat - SFGate

A top state forensic science body is scheduled to meet Friday and possibly vote on whether to allow New York State police agencies to use the emerging and somewhat controversial DNA procedure of familial searching used in other states to solve crimes, officials said.

Since early February, the New York State Commission on Forensic Science has been mulling the use of familial searching and Friday may act on regulations that have been drafted.

Under the proposed measure, the state DNA lab would be able to carry out the special DNA searching at the request of local prosecutors and police in cases of homicide, rape, arson and danger to public safety. The measure requires that reasonable conventional methods be exhausted first.

The procedure gained traction in New York with the killing of Howard Beach jogger Karina Vetrano, 30, last August. Police found a DNA sample with no matches in databases. After months of frustration, the Vetrano family came out in support of familial testing, as did NYPD Commissioner James ONeill, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown and others.

In February, Chanel Lewis, 20, was arrested for Vetranos killing after old police stop reports were examined. But her family still supports familial testing, as do family and friends of other victims interviewed this week.

Familial testing, which is used in 10 states including California and Colorado, is a two-step process. Unmatched DNA found at a crime scene is analyzed for similarities with known samples in state databases and then subject to an analysis of the Y-chromosome to find family members of a possible suspect. Cops would then use conventional tactics such as interviews and regular DNA tests to find a suspect. In recent months, California officials announced they solved old homicides with the process.

Civil libertarians believe familial testing would unfairly target black and Hispanics who are believed to make up the majority of those convicted and whose DNA samples are required to be on file. But proponents of familial DNA say the testing is race neutral and police note that of the 11 unsolved homicides last year in New York with unmatched DNA samples, 10 involved people of color and one a white woman.

One of those victims was Mamadou Diallo, 46, a native of West Africa, who was found shot to death last Sept. 24 inside the Sunshine Deli in Jamaica. A police official said unmatched DNA was recovered.

Omar Hatem, manager of the deli, said that if familial searching helped find Diallos killer it would be a positive advance. Yes, it sure will, said Hatem, who said he felt victimized as well by the killing of his colleague.

Jennifer Cohen, 36, was found by a jogger bludgeoned to death inside Owls Head Park in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn last Sept. 29. A police official said unmatched DNA was found at the crime scene. I approve of whatever they have to do, said Cohens grandfather, Harry Lavin, about familial testing. I loved her very much.

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State forensic panel may vote on using familial DNA Friday - Newsday

2 Chainz is just days away from releasing his Pretty Girls Like Trap Music album, and he's just offered yet another piece of evidence that he's one of the best out. During a visit to the L.A. Leakers show on Power 106, the Atlanta rapper delivered a freestyle over Kendrick Lamar's "DNA" instrumental, produced by Mike WiLL Made-It.

2 Chainz imitates the Compton MC's rapid-fire flow. "Half a million for the restaurant, I have to renovate / Man, I got so many demons please don't make me demonstrate," he raps, before creating a hook out of the release date for his upcoming album. After tearing up the instrumental, 2 Chainz gave a shout out to the TDE rapper: Shout out to Kendrick. He the illest one doing it in the game.

Pretty Girls Like Trap Music is due out June 16 and boasts features from Gucci Mane, Drake, Nicki Minaj, Swae Lee, Migos, Pharrell and more. Watch 2 Chainz freestyle over "DNA" above.

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Watch 2 Chainz Freestyle Over Kendrick Lamar's DNA - The FADER

Ancient DNA revolutionized archaeology. Now, researchers think they can use it to create a GPS system for the remains of the long-dead.

Lets face it: Even with the modern conveniences of U-Hauls and cardboard boxes, moving is a pain. For Neolithic humans living in Europe 5,000 years ago, the obstaclesroaming predators, lack of transportation, unforgivingmust have seemed insurmountable. Deep in the past, a few humans could have moved hundreds of kilometers, certainly, but most people at that time would not have, says Chris Tyler-Smith, a human genetics researcher at England's Sanger Institute.

New research based on a novel mapping technique, however, suggests otherwise. By combining genetic data with archaeology, researchers analyzed the DNA of over 300 ancient Eurasians and Near-Eastern Europeans to find that these people may have roamed surprisingly far. They found that 50 percent of ancient skeletons were in graves more than 100 miles from their place of origin, 30 percent were up to 620 miles away, and the remaining people had roamed as far as 1,900 miles from their homes.

This is the first time anyone has ever been able to do anything like this, says Eran Elhaik, one of the pioneers of the new technique and a geneticist at the University of Sheffield. We were able to see the emergence of farming, and populations moving because they exhausted the land, and then irrigation systems. As the populations moved, they replaced all the hunter-gatherers. Elhaik and his team presented their preliminary findings last month at the European Society of Human Genetics Conference.

Archaeologists and geneticists alike have speculated about how and where humans migrated across Europe. Based on skeletal remains, they believe Europe was populated by modern humans around 45,000 years ago as hominins moved out of Africa and into other parts of the world. Europe was then largely depopulated when the most recent ice age took hold around 25,000 years ago, except for some stalwart holdouts who found survivable conditions in southern Europe.

Archaeologists have long hypothesized that Europe was colonized by successive waves of hunter-gatherers, based on clear differences in stone tools and bone and shell ornaments recovered from sites across Europe and the Middle East, writes Ewen Callaway for Nature.

But its only recently that archaeologists have been able to compare their material data to the story that genetics tells. With recent advances in analyzing ancient DNA, were beginning to get a much clearerand more complexpicture about these humans and their lives.

DNA is notoriously delicate. It can only survive intact under certain environmental conditions, and prefers cold places. In human samples, the best place to find it from is the petrous bone on the skull, near the ear. But even once youve gotten your hands on some usable DNA, mining it for useful information comes with a series of hurdles.

Extracting ancient DNA and sequencing it with next-generation techniques results in a hodgepodge of information. The DNA isnt just from the ancient humanits also from the surrounding environment, and maybe from contamination introduced by modern researchers. To sort through this tangle, researchers rely on computer assistance to identify a single mitochondrial DNA sequence (the presence of more than one indicates contamination) and pick out deterioration patterns that signal human DNA.

But once those snippets of human DNA have been plucked from the mess, they can open up a world of discoveries. We can learn about everything from what ancient humans like tzi the ice mummyate and wore, to how often Neanderthals and humans were procreating. I think its one of the most exciting developments in science in the last few decades, says Tyler-Smith. People have compared it to the development of radiocarbon dating in the middle of the 20th century in terms of its impact.

Elhaik has expanded on the information that can be extracted from ancient DNA using a technique he pioneered with living humans, called Geographic Population Structure, or GPS. This technique relies on datasets that compare single nucleotide polymorphismsdifferences in DNA nucleotides that act as biological markers among individuals. The GPS method uses the SNPs (pronounced snips) of populations that have been in one place for multiple generations, then contrasts it to groups that live farther away.

We didnt just hack a cool acronym, it really works like GPS navigation, Elhaik says. Instead of satellites were using populations that are very well localized to their regions.

In a 2014 study in Nature Communications, Elhaik and his colleagues applied the GPS method to more than 600 people around the world, and were able to correctly assign 83 percent of those individuals to their country of origin. When the same technique was applied to 200 Sardinian villagers, a quarter of them were placed in their villages and the majority of people were placed within 50 km of their homes.

The same technique is at play in their new research. We used ancient DNA extracted from skeleton remains from 12000 BC to 500 AD," saysElhaik."The DNA goes in and coordinates come outthough he adds that the sample size is far smaller for ancient individuals, so there are far more gaps across the continent. Think of it as GPS for the long-dead.

If you have perhaps 20 or 30 people who come from the same population, then theres extra information you can get, says Tyler-Smith, who is not involved in the GPS research. But, he adds, bigger numbers are always better.

But geneticists and archaeologists dont always agree on the finer points of prehistory. For Marc Vander Linden, a professor of archaeology at University College London, using such small sample sizes to draw large conclusions is problematic.

Geneticists have suggested wide-scale processes on the basis of limited, spatially clustered samples, and thenwronglygeneralized these results for the entire corresponding archaeological cultures, Linden said by email. Both archaeologists and geneticists need to fully realize and consider that genes and material culture do not operate in the same spheres of action, nor do they unfold upon the same spatial and temporal scales.

Linden does agree that geneticists work in ancient DNA has revolutionized the field and opened up new avenues of inquiry. Ancient DNA research, alongside other types of data, points to the fact that the population history of prehistoric Europe was in constant flux and marked by numerous episodes of both expansion and retraction.

If Elhaiks technique pans out, it could answer tantalizing questions about human migrationfor instance, how agriculture came to the region. Archaeologists have debated for decades whether it was transmitted by human migration, or by the movement of the idea itself. Part of the debate has recently been settled by genetics, with researchers seeing the movement of agricultural communities from the Near-East into the hunter-gatherer groups in Europe. Elhaik thinks his groups research will further elucidate that question and show more precise movements of multiple groups of people.

For Tyler-Smith, that type of increased resolution into the broad outlines of the past is the future of the field. Hed also like to see more samples from other parts of the worldthe hotter, dryer regions like Africa and southern Europe where its been harder to find ancient DNA still intact due to the environmental conditions. For now, though, unraveling European migration is itself helping us make sense of human ancestryand the fact that were all mutts.

Theres no such thing as a European population thats been around for 40,000 years, Tyler-Smith says. Mixing has been going on throughout prehistory and I think we will see that in every part of the world as we come to study it in this level of detail.

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Ancient DNA Could Unravel the Mystery of Prehistoric European Migration - Smithsonian