Gizmo

Science.Ars returns with the week's science news. In this week, Fred Locklear looks at junk DNA — we've got it and puffer fish don't.
Several species of puffer fish have drawn the attention of scientists because they seem to have a relatively compact genome which contain little junk DNA. The genome of Tetraodon nigroviridis is interesting because it only has one-sixth the amount of DNA even though it contains about the same number of genes as humans. Structural and evolutionary genomists will have a field day trying to explain why the genome is so compact. Is it because the pufferfish is at an evolutionary dead end?
There is also promising news from the world of vaccines, including promising developments in the search for a vaccine for Malaria, a disease that kills between 1 million and 3 million people each year. All this in more in this week's edition of Science.Ars.

http://arstechnica.com/columns/scien...e-20041024.ars