Category Archives: Transhuman News

Love them or hate them, auctions are an unavoidable reality of the new Top-Level Domain (TLD) Program.

By their very nature, they create winners and losers. All that is in doubt is where the money goes to the losing parties under a private auction model or to ICANN under their auction of last resort.

There are pros and cons for both models. But what if there was another way?

Instead of the two current options, what if the proceeds from auctions could be reinvested into the wider domain name industry to be used exclusively for the promotion of domains and fund efforts to support their uptake and use?

This is exactly what the Domain Name Association (DNA) is proposing as part of a new auction of last resort service for the resolution of new TLD contention sets in an effort to provide applicants with greater control and certainty within the auction process.

Following strong support from our members, we are excited to launch the DNA private auction model which will segregate and earmark auction funds to go directly to the promotion of domain names and TLDs.

How will it work?

The DNA private auction model is available to applicants deciding whether to resolve string contention via a private auction or ICANN's auction of last resort.

In the case of the DNA's private auction, the auction proceeds will go directly to promoting TLDs. Furthermore, auction participants receive a credit to join the DNA and have a say on how those funds are used.

The proceeds will be distributed as follows:

Original post:
DNA Auction Plan to Reinvest Money Into Industry

The divers called her Naia, for water nymph, because they discovered her teenage remains in a dark, underwater cave in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

She had been hidden there for more than 12,000 years along with the bones of dozens of extinct Ice Age beasts and divers quickly spotted her skull as they swept the chamber with flashlights.

It was a small cranium laying upside-down with a perfect set of teeth and dark eye sockets looking back at us, recalled diver Alberto Nava of Bay Area Underwater Explorers, a nonprofit conservation organization based in Berkeley.

On Thursday, researchers published a formal analysis of Naia's skeletal remains in the journal Science, calling it the oldest, most complete specimen ever discovered in the Americas.

The study authors say the buck-toothed 15- or 16-year-old girl did not resemble todays Native Americans her cheeks were narrow and her forehead very high but that her mitochondrial DNA reveals she is related to 11% of living American Indians, and links them genetically to a population of early humans who inhabited a land now submerged beneath the Bering Sea.

The researchers say the girl was probably very slight and stood just 4 feet, 10 inches tall. Her eyes were wide-set and low, and her nose was broad.

Carbon-dating of her teeth and isotope data from crystals that formed on her bones helped study authors determine that the girl lived 12,000 to 13,000 years ago in what would have been a very parched environment. They believe she was probably searching for water when she entered a dark, underground cave and then plummeted 100 feet into the massive chamber now called Hoyo Negro, or black hole.

Unable to escape her hip bone shattered from the fall she died amid a menagerie of similarly doomed megafauna, including saber-toothed cats, elephant-like gomphotheres and giant sloths. As the Ice Age ended and glaciers melted, sea levels rose and slowly filled the chamber with water, sealing it off from humanity.

Or at least it did until 2007, when scuba divers first explored the natural ossuary and discovered a time capsule of Central American life at the end of the Ice Age, according to study leader James Chatters, a paleoarchaeologist at Applied Paleoscience, a private research company in Bothell, Wash.

Its in many ways like a mini La Brea Tar Pits, but without the tar and considerably better preservation, Chatters said of the Hoyo Negro site.

Continued here:
DNA from skull links Ice Age girl to Native Americans alive today

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 Utah) - Genealogy is popular everywhere and especially here in Utah. The paper and computer trail of ancestors can go back hundreds of years and pinpoint where your great, great, grandparents were born. But if you want to really want to know where you are from - some say you need to check your DNA.

"My reaction was, where did my indian go?" Babette Nelson recently had her DNA analyzed to learn about her heritage. "I was totally surprised, but it is kind of neat." For starters she learned her roots were not as deep in France as she originally believed. Something she was able to joke about. "I took 4 years of French for nothing."

The Ogden woman - who was adopted as a child - has always wondered about her true genealogy. "Through the years I have wanted to know, who am I really?" The DNA answer is 93.3% European 6.6% Middle Eastern. She says she is fine with what she has learned about herself and her family tree, but says if you want to get your DNA analyzed you have to open to whatever you learn. "You have to be prepared about what you might find because that's who you are."

The man who told her who she is Bennett Greenspan. "Were doing between two and three hundred kits a day. And that's a standard day." Greenspan started 'Family Tree DNA' a decade ago. And it wasn't just about making money - he loved genealogy and was running into some dead ends with his own genealogy. "When I was working on the genealogy of my mother's mother's family, I found a family with the same last name, but we ran into a paper trail road block we couldn't get beyond. The only way to solve the problem was to use molecular biology and use that instead a lacking or missing piece of paper."

From that necessity - 'Family Tree DNA' became the first American company to offer the public DNA genetic testing for genealogy. "Between National Geographic and ourselves we have tested one point one million people from around the world in the last 14 years."

We met Greenspan during the RootsTech convention in Salt Lake City in March. His 'Family Tree DNA' booth was one of the popular ones. We had a chance to talk to him about DNA testing. He did the explaining and we tried to keep up. He is one part of our conversation. "There's the Y chromosome that looks at a man's father's father's father." "You can look at our mother's mother's mother's line by looking at the Mitochondrial." "There's a third type called Autosomal DNA."

Greenspan invited me find out what my DNA said about me and my ancestors. A one minute swab of the inside of my mouth was all it took. A month later I had the results. There were Y chromosome DNA matches across Europe - from Turkey to Ukraine to Spain. And then Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Ireland. (see photos/watch video) A 'Family Tree DNA' expert told me I had almost every European possibility one can have. 43 percent European Coastal Islands, 28 percent European Northlands and 10 percent Mediterranean Basin. (see photos/watch video). I also learned more about my ancestral line from thousands and thousands of years ago.(see photos/watch video)

"Think of it as DNA that re-combines like two decks of cards. This is one deck. This deck. Provided by dad and provided by mom and you shuffle once and that becomes you. You don't look exactly like your brother because those decks got shuffled again, but in a different order. Therefore you look similar to your brother, but you don't look identical to your brother." By the way, if my brother doesn't look like me - he's fortunate. But you can be the judge. (see photos)

Unlike Babette - I wasn't really surprised by anything I learned about my ancestors. But just like her - finding out about my ancestors was an incredible revelation. "It grounds you and tells you where you are from."

Family Tree DNA has nearly 700 thousand records. The company says its the largest ancestry DNA database in the world. A DNA test for your father's line is $169. A DNA test for your mother's line is $199. And the Autosomal test is $99.

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DNA Genealogy tells you about your real roots

A scientific breakthrough has expanded the way genetic information can be stored.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(CNN) -- All of life as we know it on Earth -- pigs, pandas, fish, bacteria and everything else -- has genetic information encoded in the same way, with the same biological alphabet.

Now, for the first time, scientists have shown it is possible to alter that alphabet and still have a living organism that passes on the genetic information. They reported their findings in the journal Nature.

"This is the first experimental demonstration that life can exist with information that's not coded the way nature does (it)," said Floyd Romesberg, associate professor of chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

Medicine can greatly benefit from this discovery, Romesberg said. There's potential for better antibiotics and treatments for a slew of diseases for which drug development has been challenging, including cancers.

The findings also suggest that DNA as we know it on Earth may not be the only solution to coding for life, Romesberg said. There may be other organisms elsewhere in space that use genetic letters we have never seen -- or that don't use DNA at all.

"Is this alien life? No," he said. "Does it suggest that there could be other ways of storing information? Yes."

How they did it

For their genetic experiments, Romesberg and colleagues used molecules, called X and Y, that are completely different from the four building blocks of DNA.

More:
New life from artificial DNA