Biology Versus Microsoft, Round 1

The human body has a lot of genes. Thousands and thousands of them. HER2, BRCA1, BRAF, and so on, you get the idea. They're usually some combination of letters and numbers, sometimes forming coherent words, sometimes not. More relevant to today's topic, some have names like MARCH1 -- short for Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1. Also relevant to the topic, many biologists use Microsoft Excel to keep track of research and whatnot. 

Excel was not designed to be used for high-level medical research. It was designed to be user-friendly, and so, if you're a biologist and you input MARCH1 into Excel, the program not so helpfully "corrects" that into a date. Which is incorrect. According to a 2016 study, about one-fifth of genetics-related papers had been affected by Excel errors. There's no way to turn off the autocorrect in Excel either, you have to manually correct it every time, and it's easy to lose that correction if another person loads up the file.

And so, after many years of battle, science has finally capitulated to almighty Microsoft. A total of 27 genes have been renamed in 2020, with MARCH 1 becoming MARCHF1 and SEPT1 becoming SEPTIN1, just to give a couple examples. While this does sound extreme, gene renaming isn't exactly unusual. Genes such as CARS have been renamed to avoid confusion, but this is the first time a software problem caused a rename. And before you ask, Microsoft wasn't interested in changing Excel, since this was such a niche issue. Apparently having correct science isn't important for a company in the technology business.

Are Octopi Actually Aliens?

No, they're not. See you next week.

Okay, hang on, I'm not quite finished yet.

Pictured: Not an alien

The octopus. They're very strange creatures, and there's nothing on Earth quite like them. That's part of the reason they're so captivating to people. So is it possible that the cause of the octopuses otherworldliness is that they're from another world? That's what a group of scientists are claiming, and while you might want to dismiss them as being crazy, they have credentials. These are legitimate scientists, and they've published a legitimate study.

Things start off fine, they note the dramatic differences in the octopus, compared with squid and cuttlefish, their closest relatives, and the nautilus, the cephalopod common ancestor. And that's fine, octopi do have many features that sort of just appeared, evolutionarily speaking. That sort of thing is unusual in biology. But where things go south is when they claim that the reason for this is extraterrestrial influence during the Cambrian explosion, either from alien viruses that modified squid DNA, or from full-on fertilized octopus eggs, suspended in deep freeze for millions of years on an alien comet, landing on Earth and suddenly coming to life. It's a wild theory, and if you ignore the fact that we know the octopus genome, and the split between octopus and squid happened 135 million years ago instead of 500 million years ago, and if you squint, it almost makes sense.

Okay, it really doesn't make any sense. But this wild, off-the-wall theory does serve a point. There's still a lot of science we don't know, and sometimes, you need wild theories to push the boundaries of traditional thinking. Oh sure, most will be wildly wrong (see: octopuses are aliens), but occasionally, they'll be right, or at least point us in the right direction.