The Un-Junk Industry

"Junk DNA" is so 1972. Why is it hard to shed worn-out phrases? One bad stain can wear out dozens of wipes. Fortunately, we don't have to do all the wiping. Science reporters are getting better at helping clean up this genomic blemish.

A recent example is a paper in PNAS summarized on EurekAlert. The paper doesn't refer to junk DNA, but the news item does. "Punctuating messages encoded in human genome with transposable elements" is the title:

The vast majority of the human genome (~98% of th...