Daily Archives: May 16, 2019

Internet Meme Pioneer YTMND Shuts Down

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You’re the Man Now Dog, a pioneer in the internet meme space, has shut down.

The online community at YTMND.com allowed users to upload an image or a GIF and pair it with audio for hilarious results. Traffic to the website, however, dried up years ago with the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In 2016, site creator Max Goldberg said YTMND would likely shut down soon due to declining ad revenue and his ill health.

“It seems like the internet has moved on,” Goldberg told Gizmodo at the time.

The site dates back to 2001 when Goldberg paired a looping audio clip of Sean Connery uttering the line “You’re the man now, dog!” with some text and placed it all on a webpage, Yourethemannowdog.com.

In 2004, Goldberg expanded on that with a site that let users pair images with audio, so they could create clips and post them online. The end result was YTMND, which by 2006 was reportedly amassing 4 million visitors a month and 120,000 contributors. By 2012, it had almost a million pages devoted to user-created memes. But it couldn’t compete with the rise of social media and the smartphone.

What prompted Goldberg to finally pull the plug on the site in recent days isn’t clear. He and the site didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. However, all the pages have been saved on the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine. So you’ll still be able to enjoy all the site’s content for nostalgia’s sake.

Source: Internet Meme Pioneer YTMND Shuts Down | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

A real real shame

Cambridge scientists create world’s first living organism with fully redesigned DNA

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The lab-made microbe, a strain of bacteria that is normally found in soil and the human gut, is similar to its natural cousins but survives on a smaller set of genetic instructions.

The bug’s existence proves life can exist with a restricted genetic code and paves the way for organisms whose biological machinery is commandeered to make drugs and useful materials, or to add new features such as virus resistance.

In a two-year effort, researchers at the laboratory of molecular biology, at Cambridge University, read and redesigned the DNA of the bacterium Escherichia coli (E coli), before creating cells with a synthetic version of the altered genome.

[…]

The Cambridge team set out to redesign the E coli genome by removing some of its superfluous codons. Working on a computer, the scientists went through the bug’s DNA. Whenever they came across TCG, a codon that makes an amino acid called serine, they rewrote it as AGC, which does the same job. They replaced two more codons in a similar way.

More than 18,000 edits later, the scientists had removed every occurrence of the three codons from the bug’s genome. The redesigned genetic code was then chemically synthesised and, piece by piece, added to E coli where it replaced the organism’s natural genome. The result, reported in Nature, is a microbe with a completely synthetic and radically altered DNA code. Known as Syn61, the bug is a little longer than normal, and grows more slowly, but survives nonetheless.

Source: Cambridge scientists create world’s first living organism with fully redesigned DNA | Science | The Guardian

22 EU Member States sign new military mobility programme

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In the margins of today’s EDA Steering Board, 22 Member States (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden) and EDA signed a new programme that will facilitate the granting of cross-border surface and air movement permissions. The programme is developed in the framework of EDA’s work on military mobility. It implements an important part of the ‘Action Plan on Military Mobility’ which was presented by the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR) and the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council in March 2018. Military mobility is also highlighted in the EU-NATO Joint Declaration signed in Warsaw in 2016.

The purpose of the programme signed today is to harmonise different national regulations of the participating Member States. It should allow Member States to reduce the administrative burden associated with different permission procedures and thus significantly shorten the timelines for granting surface and air cross border movement permissions. The programme provides the basis for important activities at technical and procedural level to develop the necessary arrangements for cross border movement per transport mode during crises, preparations for crises, training and day-to-day business. The arrangements cover surface (road, rail and inland waterways) and air movements (Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems, fighter aircraft or helicopters). They are expected to be finalised in 2020.

Source: 22 Member States sign new military mobility programme