Genesis redux

A new form of life has been created in a laboratory, and the era of synthetic biology is dawning

IN THE end there was no castle, no thunderstorm and definitely no hunchbacked cackling lab assistant. Nevertheless, Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith and their colleagues have done for real what Mary Shelley merely imagined. On May 20th, in the pages of Science, they announced that they had created a living creature.

Like Shelley’s protagonist, Dr Venter and Dr Smith needed some spare parts from dead bodies to make their creature work. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, though, they needed no extra spark of Promethean lightning to give the creature its living essence. Instead they made that essence, a piece of DNA that carries about 1,000 genes, from off-the-shelf laboratory chemicals. The result is the first creature since the beginning of creatures that has no ancestor. What it is, and how it lives, depends entirely on a design put together by scientists of the J. Craig Venter Institute and held on the institute’s computers in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California. When the first of these artificial creatures showed that it could reproduce on its own, the age of artificial life began.

The announcement is momentous. It is not unexpected. Dr Venter’s ambition to create a living organism from close to scratch began 15 years ago, and it has been public knowledge for a decade. After so much time, there is a temptation for those in the field to say “show us something we didn’t know.” Synthetic DNA is, after all, routinely incorporated into living things by academics, by biotech companies, even by schoolchildren. Dr Venter—a consummate showman—and the self-effacing Dr Smith (uncharacteristically in the foreground in the picture of the two above) have merely done it on a grand scale. … Continue Reading

Light without logic

Optical devices are finally going inside computers, but only in parts

“GOD is light”, says the Bible. Light is also a source of inspiration in computing. Ever since the first optical transistors were developed in the late 1980s, researchers have dreamed of building a light-powered computer, radiating with knowledge. Yet this breakthrough has proved elusive. Now, however, new developments mean that optical technologies are starting to appear inside computers. The all-optical computer remains a dream, but selected components that can work with light will make their way into computers ever more deeply.

It is easy to see the attraction of replacing electrons, which travel along copper wires and make today’s computers tick, with photons. These particles of light are the fastest things in the universe, so an optical computer could theoretically process information at speeds that make even a supercomputer look glacial. So far, however, optical technology has been confined mostly to telecoms networks and some of the cabling in data centres. Photons are ideal for piping information over long distances. They whizz through optical fibres, rarely getting lost or interfering with one another (which is why different coloured signals can be sent down a single fibre, to multiply its capacity).
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Adobe’s row with Apple over Flash technology escalates

Adobe has launched its latest salvo in an ongoing dispute with Apple.

The co-founders of Adobe have published an open letter in which they say that Apple threatens to “undermine the next chapter of the web”.

The software firm has also started an adverting blitz in newspapers and on popular technology news sites.

Some of the online adverts contain the tongue-in-cheek slogan “We heart Apple”.

It follows a letter from Apple boss Steve Jobs in which he defended his firm’s decision not to allow Adobe’s Flash technology on many of its popular products.

Mr Jobs described Adobe’s software – used on many websites for video and animations – as a “closed system” and “100% proprietary”.

“While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe.”
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We all want to change the world

Dealing with climate change might mean tinkering with the oceans and the atmosphere. Those who could do so would like the regulations to be clear

IN 1975 scientists expert in a new and potentially world-changing technology, genetic engineering, gathered at Asilomar, on the Monterey peninsula in California, to ponder the ethics and safety of the course they were embarking on. The year before, they had imposed on themselves a voluntary moratorium on experiments which involved the transfer of genes from one species to another, amid concerns about the risk to human health and to the environment which such “transgenic” creations might pose. That decision gave the wider world confidence that the emerging field of biotechnology was taking its responsibilities seriously, which meant that the Asilomar conference was able to help shape a safety regime that allowed the moratorium to be lifted. That, in turn, paved the way for the subsequent boom in molecular biology and biotechnology.

Another bunch of researchers, accompanied by policy experts, social scientists and journalists, gathered in Asilomar between March 22nd and 26th, hoped for a similar outcome to their deliberations. This time the topic under discussion was not genetic engineering but geoengineering—deliberately rather than accidentally changing the world’s environment.
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Why Internet connections are fastest in South Korea

(CNN) — People in the United States basically invented the Internet. So U.S. connections must be the fastest and cheapest in the world, right?

Not so much.

Broadband Internet speeds in the United States are only about one-fourth as fast as those in South Korea, the world leader, according to the Internet monitoring firm Akamai.

And, as if to add insult to injury, U.S. Internet connections are more expensive than those in South Korea, too.

The slower connection here in the U.S. costs about $45.50 per month on average, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In South Korea, the much-faster hookup costs $17 per month less. An average broadband bill there runs about $28.50.

So why is U.S. Internet so much slower and pricier than broadband connections in South Korea? The question is timely, as the U.S. government pushes forward with a “broadband plan” that aims to speed up connections, reduce costs and increase access to the Internet, especially in rural areas.
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People are quicker when reacting that when initiating

Inspired by Hollywood cowboy films, researchers have delved into the science of gun fights.

Scientists discovered that people move faster when reacting to something than when they perform “planned actions”.

In a gun-free experiment, described in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they studied the speed of these two types of movement.

The work aims to answer why the first to draw his gun in a shoot-out was often the one to get shot.

But, as well as unpicking some of the mythology of the American West, the scientists say their results may be useful for diagnosing and helping people with Parkinson’s disease.

Pairs of participants were put in a button-pressing competition with each other. Each was secretly given instructions of how long to wait before pushing a row of buttons.

“There was no ‘go’ signal,” said Dr Andrew Welchman from the University of Birmingham, who led the research.
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Nasa accepts Spirit Mars rover ‘stuck for good’

The US space agency (Nasa) has conceded defeat in its battle to free the Spirit rover from its Martian sand trap.

The vehicle became stuck in soft soil back in May last year and all the efforts to extricate it have failed.

Nasa says Spirit, which landed on the Red Planet just over six years ago, will now live out its remaining days as a static science station.

The robot geologist has taken thousands of images and found evidence in Mars’ rocks of a wetter, warmer past.

“Spirit has encountered a golfer’s worst nightmare – the sand trap that no matter how many strokes you take, you can’t get out of it,” said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars exploration programme at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC.

“But this is not a day to mourn Spirit; this is not a day of loss at this point. Spirit will continue to make contributions to science.”

Like a ‘polar bear’

The robot’s predicament has been exacerbated by the failure of two of its six wheels. Without the additional traction, the agency now accepts that further efforts to try to escape the soft soil will be fruitless.
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Digital piracy hits the e-book industry

(CNN) — When Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel “The Lost Symbol” hit stores in September, it may have offered a peek at the future of bookselling.

On Amazon.com, the book sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in its first few days than hardback editions. This was seen as something of a paradigm shift in the publishing industry, but it also may have come at a cost.

Less than 24 hours after its release, pirated digital copies of the novel were found on file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent. Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times.

Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books. And as electronic reading devices such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, smartphones and Apple’s much-anticipated “tablet” boost demand for e-books, experts say the problem may only get worse.

“It’s fair to say that piracy of e-books is exploding,” said Albert Greco, an industry expert and professor of marketing at Fordham University.

Sales for digital books in the second quarter of 2009 totaled almost $37 million. That’s more than three times the total for the same three months in 2008, according to the Association of American Publishers (AAP).
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Cern Large Hadron Collider machine restarts

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment has been re-started after a hiatus of 14 months.

Engineers have now made two stable proton beams circulate in opposite directions around the machine.

If all continues to go well, the team might even try to increase the collider’s energy to record-breaking levels this weekend.

The LHC is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel built about 100m beneath the French-Swiss border.

The experiment is designed to smash together beams of protons in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe.

Among other things, scientists will search for signs of the Higgs boson, a sub-atomic particle that is crucial to our current understanding of physics. Although it is predicted to exist, scientists have never found it.

Dozens of giant superconducting magnets that accelerate the particles at the speed of light have had to be replaced after faults developed just days after the collider was inaugurated last year.

Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), the LHC will create similar conditions to those which were present moments after the Big Bang.
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Science to ‘stop age clock at 50′

Science to ‘stop age clock at 50′

Half of babies now born in the UK will reach 100, thanks to higher living standards, but our bodies are wearing out at the same rate.

To achieve “50 active years after 50″, experts at Leeds University are spending £50m over five years looking at innovative solutions.

They plan to provide pensioners with own-grown tissues and durable implants.

New hips, knees and heart valves are the starting points, but eventually they envisage most of the body parts that flounder with age could be upgraded.
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