The head of the One Laptop Per Child effort says Intel could still contribute to the program for developing nations

(24hoursnews)The best innitiative considered for 2007 is The One Laptop Per Child .

The One Laptop Per Child Project would welcome Intel back if the chip maker returned to the group, the head of OLPC said last week.
The statement came just days after Intel quit the group's board of directors over what it said was OLPC's insistence that it abandon a rival low-cost laptop developed by Intel, the Classmate PC. OLPC has said it asked no such thing of Intel, and that it welcomes the Classmate PC because the more low-cost laptops there are available, the more likely they'll get into the hands of children in the developing world.
"It was very unfortunate what happened with Intel and I hope there's a way of rebuilding it in the future because there's no interest in OLPC pushing Intel out. It just is not in our interest. Our goal is to get this to as many children as possible," said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC, in an interview.
He called it unfortunate that Intel made statements that OLPC asked the chip maker to stop working on the Classmate PC. "The picture that painted was one of OLPC being anti-competition, which is ridiculous. We'd like to see as many laptops out there as possible and kids have the widest choice possible," he said.
Intel would be willing to talk with OLPC, said Agnes Kwan, an Intel manager. But she added that the organizational break-up came about because of differences that the groups have been so far unable to resolve.
The OLPC Project started as an attempt to build a US$100 laptop aimed at kids in poor nations, but the laptop from the group, the XO, will likely end up costing nearly double that amount, initially. The organizers of the effort, led by academics and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), hope heavy volume sales of the laptops will drive down costs.
The goal of OLPC is to make sure nobody misses out on the benefits of computing. The fear is that the price of a PC is keeping too many people in developing countries from learning how the software, Internet and communications benefits of computing can improve their economies, job prospects and lives, or that poor countries will fall further and further behind the modern world due to their inability to access computers, a conundrum commonly referred to as the digital divide.

MIT reports new twist in microRNA biology

Computational biology group identifies new mechanism of gene regulation,
MIT scientists have found a new way that DNA can carry out its work that is about as surprising as discovering that a mold used to cast a metal tool can also serve as a tool itself, with two complementary shapes each showing distinct functional roles.

Professor Manolis Kellis and postdoctoral research fellow Alexander Stark report in the Jan. 1 issue of the journal Genes & Development that in certain DNA sequences, both strands of a DNA segment can perform useful functions, each encoding a distinct molecule that helps control cell functions.

DNA works by complementarity: paired DNA strands serve as a template for each other during DNA replication, and ordinarily only a single DNA strand serves as a template to produce RNA strands, which then go on to produce proteins. The process is similar to the way each bump or dent in a mold is paired with a corresponding dent or bump in the resulting molded object.

While many RNAs are eventually translated into proteins with specific functions, some RNA molecules instead act directly, carrying out roles inside the cell. Certain RNA genes, known as microRNAs, have been shown to play important regulatory roles in the cell, often coordinating important events during the development of the embryo. These microRNAs fold into relatively simple hairpin structures, with two stretches of near-perfect complementary sequence folding back onto each other. One of the two "arms" of a hairpin is then processed into a mature microRNA.

The surprising discovery is that for some microRNA genes, both DNA strands, instead of just one, encode RNA, and both resulting microRNAs fold into hairpins that are processed into mature microRNAs. In other words, both the tool and its mold appear to be functional. Kellis and Stark found two such microRNA pairs in the fruit fly, and eight more such pairs in the mouse.

The idea that there could be such dual-function strands, where both DNA strands encode functional RNA products, "had never even been hypothesized," Kellis says. But follow-up work confirmed that they did indeed function in this way. The work suggests that other such unexpected pairings, with both DNA strands encoding important functions, may also exist in a variety of species.

This discovery builds on a similar, earlier surprising finding about microRNA regulation. In December, Stark and Kellis reported that both arms of a single microRNA hairpin can also produce distinct, functional microRNAs, with distinct targets. Together, these two findings suggest that a single gene can encode as many as four different functions--one hairpin from each of the two DNA strands, and then one microRNA from each of the two arms of each hairpin.

These recent papers are the latest example of the power of using computational tools to investigate the genomes of multiple species, known as comparative genomics. The Kellis group has used this approach to discover protein-coding genes, RNAs, microRNAs, regulatory motifs, and targets of individual regulators in diverse organisms ranging from yeast and fruit flies to mice and humans.

"This represents a new phase in genomics-making biological discoveries sitting not at the lab bench, but at the computer terminal," Kellis says.

Kellis is the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an associate member of the Broad Institute. He grew up in Greece and France, earned his B.S., M.Eng. and Ph.D. from MIT, and was appointed to the faculty in 2004. At 30, he has already earned numerous awards and accolades, including a place on the list of the 35 top innovators under 35 by Technology Review magazine in 2006.

Kellis' work is supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Alexander Stark is supported by a Human Frontier Science Program fellowship.