Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called 
The idea has been around for awhile but it is still cool, in a geeky sort of way. Scientists at UCLA have translated the amino acid sequence of various proteins into music:
The building blocks of proteins are linear sequences of 20 different amino acids. Assigning one note for each amino acid therefore results in a 20-note scale."A 20-note scale is too large a range," Takahashi said. "You need a reduced scale, so we paired similar amino acids together and used chords and chord variations for each amino acid. We used each component of the music to indicate a specific characteristic of the protein. We are faithful in the conversion from the sequence to the music. The rhythm is dictated by the protein sequence."
Ever wonder what cytochrome c would sound like?
More examples can be found here.
Geek cool at its finest!
Comments
That's pretty cool, kind of like they did for pi as well (http://www.avoision.com/experiments/pi10k/pi10k.html).
Posted by: Anatoly | May 17, 2007 9:42 PM
Twenty notes in a scale is too many? Shesh, Virgil Partch used to work with a 100 note scale. Pikers. :p
Posted by: Alan Kellogg | May 18, 2007 3:34 AM