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Without a shared language convention between Paul Revere and his friend, that simple communication effort would mean nothing. Revere asks a friend to put one light in the window of the North Church if the British came by land, and two lights if they came by sea. A simple binary example of information theory is the "Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." In that famous story, Mr. This is modern information theory at its core. Like any language, letters and words mean nothing outside the language convention used to give those letters and words meaning.
Double helix dna code#
The cell is very complicated, using vast numbers of phenomenally precise DNA instructions to control its every function.Īlthough DNA code is remarkably complex, it's the information translation system connected to that code that really baffles science. Through recent technologies like x-ray crystallography, we now know that the cell is not a "blob of protoplasm", but rather a microscopic marvel that is more complex than the space shuttle. However, it's the sequencing and functioning of that code that's enormously complex. The DNA code, like a floppy disk of binary code, is quite simple in its basic paired structure.
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Double helix dna software#
Like software to a computer, the DNA code is a genetic language that communicates information to the organic cell. Maybe even more appropriately, the A, T, C and G in the genetic code of the DNA molecule can be compared to the "0" and "1" in the binary code of computer software. These stairs act as the "letters" in the genetic alphabet, combining into complex sequences to form the words, sentences and paragraphs that act as instructions to guide the formation and functioning of the host cell. The four bases that make up the stairs in the spiraling staircase are adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G). Each strand is comprised of a sugar-phosphate backbone and numerous base chemicals attached in pairs. coli, contains enough information to fill all the books in any of the world's largest libraries.ĭNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is a double-stranded molecule that is twisted into a helix like a spiral staircase. Even the DNA molecule for the single-celled bacterium, E. We now understand that each human DNA molecule is comprised of chemical bases arranged in approximately 3 billion precise sequences. It wasn't until mid-2001, that the Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics jointly presented the true nature and complexity of the digital code inherent in DNA.
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First described by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, DNA is the famous molecule of genetics that establishes each organism's physical characteristics. The DNA Double Helix is one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. DNA Double Helix: A Recent Discovery of Enormous Complexity
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