Last month Rob Crowther wrote about a news article in Nature that opposed junk-DNA thinking. According to a new Nature News story, “The code within the code: Computational biologists grapple with RNA’s complexity,” scientists are just beginning to understand the complexity of the processes that create proteins in our cells. The article reports that the distinction we normally see in human technology between hardware and software breaks down in biology, where molecules like RNA can both carry messages and help process those messages — a “second genetic code,” or the “splicing code”: One of the most beautiful aspects of the genetic code is its simplicity: three letters of DNA combine in 64 different ways, easily spelled out in a handy Read More ›