GeoCities, 1994-2009
How people count cash
I was reading about Drew Carey yesterday… well not about him so much as about how he just bid 100,000 dollars for the @Drew twitter. His online identity is so important that he is willing to pay 100,000 dollars for @Drew, forgoing his @DrewFromTV. Drew Carey ownes DrewCarey.com, which currently only hosts a picture of his glasses. There’s no way he paid more than the 9.99 Yahoo charges to register a domain, yet he’s willing to spend more than the average American’s salary on a twitter name.
It’s crazy to think that a website.com/name could drum up that much cash. You don’t hear about people spending tons of money for facebook.com/name, or name.blogspot.com. But is this possible $100,000 for @Drew a sign that things are changing?
Recently we’ve seen website names grow from one word to a few words to phrases. No one even thinks to visit Funny.com but you’d go to CollegeHumor.com in a heartbeat. Some movies end up with the longest names, often placing the entirety of the title into the dotcom. So why is @Drew so much different from @DrewFromTV?
I don’t have an answer. But could it be that the internet is in some sort of regression. Where as people used to spread out in their own corners of the internet, now they’re moving into shared social spaces. You don’t need your own website when you can have a tumblr a twitter and a facebook. And since you’re relying on other social services perhaps it’s worth spending them money to get what you want.
THEY might be bald and ugly, but naked mole rats never get cancer. If their trick can be copied it could help humans resist cancer too.
It’s almost impossible to culture naked mole rat cells in the lab, which made Andrei Seluanov and Vera Gorbunova from Rochester University, New York, wonder if this might be linked to their ability to resist cancer.
They found that a dilute solution of naked mole rat skin cells did start to proliferate, but stopped once the cells reached a certain, relatively low density. Such “contact inhibition” is also used by human cells to inhibit growth, but cancer bypasses this mechanism so cells keep growing.
The researchers also found that contact inhibition in naked mole rats is controlled by two genes, p16 and p27, while in humans it is primarily controlled by p27. “Naked mole rats have an additional barrier in the way of tumour progression,” says Seluanov, who presented the results at the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence meeting in Cambridge, UK, last week.
If this check could be stimulated in humans, it could halt the growth of cancerous tumours.