So as I understand it telomeres shorten as you age. Working under that assumption..  let's say you were investigating a crime and there was some DNA evidence that had been left behind. Could you determine the age of the DNA owner by looking at the telomere length?
Several companies are commercializing tests for telomere length such as this one . I understand the basic mechanism for why telomeres shorten during DNA replication, but how good is the evidence that telomere length is a reliable indicator of healthspan/lifespan?
Format number to always show 2 decimal places What is the correct position of the word 'also'?     I would like to also talk about ...      I would also like to talk about ... Constructing a continuous function whose graph seems 'special' I've been reading through Zorich's "Analysis I" book recently, and I came across this nice little exercise.  Let $f: [0,1]\to \mathbb R$ be a continuous function such that $f(0)=f(1)$. Show that    for any $n\in \mathbb N$ there exists a horizontal closed interval of length $\frac 1n$ with endpoints on the graph of this function; if the number $\ell$ is not of the form $\frac 1n$ there exists a function of this form on whose graph one cannot inscribe a horizontal chord of length $\ell$.   The first part can be proven like this: Consider $g: [0,(n-1)/n] \to \mathbb R$ given by $g(x) = f(x) - f(x+1/n)$. Then   $$\sum_{k=0}^{n-1} g(k/n) = 0$$  and therefore either all of these points are zero or there exists both a point where $g$ is positive and a point where $g$ is negative. By continuity, there must then also be a point where $g = 0$. So we are done.  Now, the second statement seemed rather counterintuitive, and I have given it some time now, but don't see a counterexample for $\ell &lt; 1/2$.  (For $\ell &gt; 1/2$ the function $f(x) = \sin(2\pi x)$ will do.)  Can anyone help me out?  Cheers, MyClass[] array; List&lt;MyClass&gt; list;   What are the scenarios when one is preferable over the other? And why? Finding the index of an item in a list Variable number of arguments in C++? How can I escape white space in a bash loop list? I have a bash shell script that loops through all child directories (but not files) of a certain directory.  The problem is that some of the directory names contain spaces.    Here are the contents of my test directory:  $ls -F test Baltimore/  Cherry Hill/  Edison/  New York City/  Philadelphia/  cities.txt   And the code that loops through the directories:  for f in `find test/* -type d`; do   echo $f done   Here's the output:   test/Baltimore test/Cherry Hill test/Edison  test/New York City test/Philadelphia   Cherry Hill and New York City are treated as 2 or 3 separate entries.  I tried quoting the filenames, like so:  for f in `find test/* -type d | sed -e 's/^/\"/' | sed -e 's/$/\"/'`; do   echo $f done   but to no avail.  There's got to be a simple way to do this.    The answers below are great.  But to make this more complicated - I don't always want to use the directories listed in my test directory.  Sometimes I want to pass in the directory names as command-line parameters instead.  I took Charles' suggestion of setting the IFS and came up with the following:  dirlist="${@}" (   [[ -z "$dirlist" ]] &amp;&amp; dirlist=`find test -mindepth 1 -type d` &amp;&amp; IFS=$'\n'   for d in $dirlist; do     echo $d   done )   and this works just fine unless there are spaces in the command line arguments (even if those arguments are quoted).  For example, calling the script like this: test.sh "Cherry Hill" "New York City" produces the following output:   Cherry Hill New York City Should I use 'was' or 'were' in this example?     I was always delighted when my brother or one of my sisters was/were asked to do them. (p.236)  has a proof that the equation $e^z-z=0$ has infinitely many complex solutions:    I'm curious if there are any particularly elegant ways to see this, other than that given in the text. Error on \usepackage {geometry} text property What's the difference when using GET or POST method? Which one is more secure? What are (dis)advantages of each of them?  () Is there a way to set my current location manually on Windows 8? Is there a way to set my current location manually on Windows 8? I don't have a GPS module, but the device is always located at the same place. The automatic detection via network sets a place 200 kilometers from here.  I searched for a setting that allows me to set the location by hand, but I didn't find one. For symmetric stable distributions, why is $\alpha \le 2$? My setup  I have a linux server running in my basement. I currently have my router looking to that server for DNS lookup, so I can use named to spoof a bunch of domain names to point to my local server's local address, 192.168.0.111. This works great.  I also am running Apache and PHP on this server, and have forwarded port 80 on my router to this machine, so my public IP xx.xxx.x.xx is sent to the basement server.  This is a great development set up for me, because I can develop websites in my local network and pull them up on numerous devices with a *.mylocal.net address. I can also quickly share a website on my public IP with others that are outside of my network.  I have a static IP, so that makes this even easier.  The problem  Some applications need to have an absolute URL. My spoofed DNS doesn't work outside my network, and neither does my internal IP address.  I need to be able to access the sites at the same IP that they are accessed publicly, which is my public IP: xx.xxx.x.xx    For some reason, I can't access my own public IP address from within my own network.  My router's public IP is xx.xxx.x.xx, and when I hit xx.xxx.x.xx from outside my network I see exactly what I want -- my development website. But, when I hit xx.xxx.x.xx from inside my network, the connection times out.    I assume my ISP has a firewall that blocks requests from xx.xxx.x.xx to xx.xxx.x.xx where the origin and the destination are the same IP (or maybe this is impossible on any network?)  So how can I set up my network to forward the internal request to my public IP to the local IP of my basement server?   I would like to do this within the local DNS server I set up, or in my router, so the change can be applied to all devices in my network, and not just the basement server or the windows tablet/laptop, etc individually. How to read value of variable, where the name of variable is the value of another variable I think an example is in order. Consider I have these two environment variables setup (by a Continuous Delivery tool): PACKAGE_VER=1.2.3 and USE_VERSION_FROM=PACKAGE_VER.  What I want now is a script that can't predict the name of the variable pointing out 1.2.3, only USE_VERSION_FROM. And so, I'm looking for a way to get my script to know the version to use (1.2.3) without knowing anything other than that USE_VERSION_FROM points out the name of the variable that holds the version number.  My naïve non-working first attempt:  #!/bin/bash VERSION_TO_USE="${${USE_VERSION_FROM}}" Is there any difference between Present Perfect and Present Perfect Continuous? I have studied "present perfect" and "present perfect continuous" for a week. I know forms, verb and helping verb I should use when I write them.  For me, they have nearly same definition because I can use them interchangeably in Thai language. (My native language)  For example, the sentences        I have learned English language in the past few weeks.    I have been learning English language in the past few weeks.       have no difference in meaning to me. They both mean "I began learning the English language in the past and I am still learning it"  Can I use them interchangeably in English? Or is there any difference between them? For example, when should I use present perfect but not present perfect continuous? Difference between the i386 download and the amd64? What is the difference between standard i386 download and the amd64 download of Ubuntu 11.04? I am currently running the i386 on an amd machine, would my system work better with the amd64 download instead? (my machine was running Windows 7 64bit, but I neglected to look at that prior to installing Ubuntu). Best way to strip punctuation from a string Why Listen to Music, why not Listening Music How close would you have to be to the merger of two black holes, for the effects of gravitational waves to be detected without instruments?