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.
Craig’s parts list

But if it is a stunt, it is a well conceived one. It demonstrates more forcefully than anything else to date that life’s essence is information. Heretofore that information has been passed from one living thing to another. Now it does not have to be. Non-living matter can be brought to life with no need for lightning, a vital essence or a god. And this new power will allow the large-scale manipulation of living organisms. Hitherto, genetic modification has been the work of apprentices and journeymen. This new step is, in the true and original sense of the word, a masterpiece. It is the demonstration that the practitioner has mastered his art.

The journey to mastery has been a long one. Originally, not wishing to set himself a more difficult task than necessary, Dr Venter found the smallest living thing he could and set about making it smaller still. His chosen bug was Mycoplasma genitalium, a creature that lives in genital tracts. With just 485 genes, it is the tiniest known free-living bacterium. He then knocked out the bacterium’s genes one by one to see which it could live without, in the hope of making a yet smaller organism he could then use as a model for synthesis.

This was something of a dead-end. Though there turned out to be 100 genes M. genitalium can do without, at least in the cushy conditions of a laboratory, it could not do without all of them at once. And finding which smaller genomes worked best took a lot of time, because M. genitalium grows rather slowly.

On top of that, the reason for wanting a very small genome started to fade away. DNA synthesis techniques were getting better and better, a fact reflected in their ever decreasing price (see chart). So Dr Venter changed tack, and decided to go with a lightly modified version of the entire M. genitalium genome.

Around the same time, in 2003, he synthesised the genome of a virus, Phi-X174, which has a mere 11 genes. It was not the first artificial virus; a team at the State University of New York, in Stony Brook, had made a copy of the polio virus the previous year. But theirs was a feeble thing, only just capable of reproducing. Dr Venter’s was the real McCoy: when he put the viral DNA into host cells they started to spit out new viruses just as self-destructively as cells infected with the natural Phi-X174.

The idea behind the efforts to make an artificial bacterium was, in essence, to treat a large synthetic genome as a giant version of Phi-X174 and use it to hijack a cell which had had all its DNA removed. The difference was that this time the result would not be a cell that produced more viruses, but a cell that produced more cells. By the time the hijacked cell had undergone a few divisions, all trace of its previous self would have been erased; its several-times-great-granddaughters would have transformed themselves into the new species.

Synthesising the genome proved reasonably easy. It was divided in “cassettes” about 1,000 base pairs long (a base pair being one of the genetic “letters” of which DNA is composed). These were put together by normal chemistry. The team then enlisted the help of yeast cells to link the cassettes in the correct order to produce the finished genomes.

At this point it was necessary to prepare the cadavers, which proved rather trickier. It wasn’t just a matter of taking a bacterium closely related to M. genitalium and scooping out its DNA. Bacteria have defences against viruses in the form of chemicals called restriction enzymes, which chop up foreign DNA. These enzymes (discovered in the 1970s by Dr Smith, in work that won him a Nobel prize) would lurk in the DNA-free cadaver and cut up the synthetic genome before it was able to do its stuff. So the last step on the winding road was the creation of a bacterial strain without any restriction-enzyme genes, and thus without restriction enzymes, so that the team could have a purified reaction vessel in which the new genome could do its thing.

Or almost the last step. M. genitalium still had a slow-growth problem, so the team swapped bugs, lighting on its cousin, Mycoplasma mycoides. This has twice as much DNA, but that no longer mattered. To make the new bacterium recognisably different Dr Venter and his colleagues deleted 14 genes they thought unnecessary from M. mycoides, and added some DNA designed from scratch in a process Dr Venter refers to as “watermarking”.

This was an opportunity for some fun. The watermark, Dr Venter says, includes a cipher which contains the URL of a website and three quotations, if you can work out how to decode it. The plaintext part of the watermark brands the bug as Dr Venter’s own, encoding its serial number as JCVI-syn1.0. (A plan to refer to the result as Mycoplasma laboratorium and have it recognised as a completely new species seems to have been abandoned for the moment.)

The watermarking is not just a fancy signature. It means that if, despite precautions, the Frankenbug does get out, its entirely harmless presence would be detectible in any given sample by straightforward DNA amplification technology of the sort used in genetic fingerprinting. It might also trap thieves. Dr Venter has offered his invention for patenting—an action that is sure to be controversial—and the watermark will thus stake out what he hopes will become the property of his firm, Synthetic Genomics.

Once the finished genome was inserted into the genome-free bacteria, the work regressed to the sort of microbiology that would have been familiar to the science’s 19th-century pioneers. The fluid with the bacteria in it was dotted on to agar plates. Spots showed up on the agar as individual bacteria grew and multiplied. As a check, the researchers sequenced the DNA from some of the flourishing spots (a Mycoplasma genome is the sort of thing a modern sequencing set-up can knock off before its morning coffee). The colonies did, indeed, have the synthetic genomes. The masterpiece was alive.
Radicalism and ribosomes

Other journeymen, though, are hot on Dr Venter’s heels. And some have different ideas on how to go about the problem of making life, concentrating on things which Dr Venter’s hack-a-cadaver approach allows him to gloss over.

A minimal genome is one thing. At Harvard Medical School, Jack Szostak is working on a minimal cell, the components of which might be quite unlike those of any modern life form. Dr Szostak is interested in the origin of life, and wants to develop something analogous to what he imagines life’s earliest days were like: a reaction vessel in which a self-sustaining cycle of chemical reactions can reproduce itself.

In a modern cell, such as a bacterium, instructions from the DNA are transcribed into a related molecule called RNA. The RNA messenger molecules relay them to structures known as ribosomes that read them and make proteins accordingly. The whole process also involves a lot of proteins called enzymes to act as catalysts to the reactions.

Many biologists—and Dr Szostak is one of them—think that life had a simpler early stage in which the varied tasks now carried out by DNA, RNA and proteins were all achieved by RNA alone. Even today, RNA molecules are not only messengers; they are also fetchers and carriers of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. And they can catalyse reactions, as proteins do, too. In principle, then, RNA could act as both a cell’s genetic material and its self-assembly mechanism.

If this idea is true, it should be possible to make a cell using just a membrane to hold things in place, some RNA, ingredients for more RNA, and an energy source. This comes in the form of an energy-rich molecule, ATP, which is what modern cells use to move energy from where it is generated to where it is used. Dr Szostak has already made a range of “ribozymes”, as catalytic pieces of RNA are known in the trade, and some of them are ATP-powered. He does not, yet, have a system that is capable of replicating itself. But that is his goal.

Dr Szostak’s cell, if it does come to pass, will be quite different from the protein- and DNA-based life familiar to biologists. It would in some ways be a greater achievement than Dr Venter’s, in that it would create something truly from scratch; but it would be of less practical importance, since that something would be very primitive compared even with a bacterium.

George Church, a colleague of Dr Szostak’s at Harvard, dreams instead of making something intensely practical that Dr Venter has left out: a ribosome. The Venter shortcut—booting up a bacterial cadaver—means that the new-minted bug has to rely on ribosomes from its dead host to make the proteins its genome describes. It has the genes with which to make its own ribosomes, though, and as time goes by it will do so, diluting out the legacy that got it started. Dr Venter calculates that once JCVI-syn1.0 has undergone 30 divisions, all trace of the original cell will have disappeared. But that does not address the point that the new cells have relied on the output of genes from the old one to get going in the first place.

Dr Church is working on making ribosomes—complex contraptions with dozens of protein and RNA components—from scratch. He has managed to synthesise all the RNA components in such a way that, when they are mixed with natural ribosome proteins, they form working ribosomes. Making the proteins from scratch is more difficult, because their shape is crucial to their function, so it is not clear whether he will bother to do so.

Although he is interested in chalking up firsts, Dr Church focuses mainly on making tools. Artificial ribosomes, he thinks, could be specially crafted to add new capabilities to biotechnology—higher-than-natural protein productivity, for example. And that, for all the brouhaha which rightly accompanies the passage from journeyman to master, is the ultimate point: practical control over what life can be made to do.

Another avowedly practical approach is that taken by Drew Endy, a researcher at Stanford University. Dr Endy wants to make the way that cells process genetic information more like the way that familiar computers do. Just as computers are built from electronic components that (at least in the days before integrated circuits and silicon chips) could be ordered from a catalogue by engineers and enthusiasts alike, so Dr Endy is trying to build up a catalogue of components he calls biobricks that, when linked together, will form useful biological “circuits”. Synthetic biologists will be able to order stretches of DNA that encode biobricks and link them together to do their bidding.

Dr Endy’s approach is intriguing. His plan to “reimplement” life shows an engineer’s desire to replace biology’s unruly heritage—kludge built on kludge for billions of years—with something designed to be fit for a physicist’s practical purpose. Whether it will work remains to be seen. But a less thoroughgoing approach to modular design underlies the next stage of Dr Venter’s plans, too.
The constant gardener

Biotechnology can sometimes resemble that rather older interaction with nature, gardening. It relies quite heavily on pruning and grafting. Gene-by-gene biotechnology constantly comes up against the problem that living organisms like to plough their own furrow, regardless of what their human “masters” might desire. The pruning part of biotechnology involves eliminating proclivities that might be useful to a wild organism, but drain its energy and metabolic effort away from the task at hand. The grafting part is adding new characteristics from elsewhere to the well-trained root stock.

Dr Venter wants to get back to his original idea of creating a minimal genome in a peculiarly complete and rational act of pruning in order to be able to do a much more thorough job than has been previously possible of grafting in new stock. It is this ambition that makes his work something more than just a breathtaking novelty, positioning it as a milestone on the road from the craft of biotechnology, which manipulates genes one at a time, to the industry of synthetic biology, which aims to make wholesale changes to living things.

In this, Dr Venter seems to be going with the grain of nature, as wise gardeners do. Over the past decade it has become clear that bacteria are already well disposed to the idea of interchangeable parts. Each member of a bacterial species, or group of species, has a subset of genes (numbering hundreds, or a few thousand) drawn from a pool containing many thousands. Comparing lots of different but related bacteria can thus reveal a “core competence” similar in concept to a minimal genome. In seeking to build useful bacteria (ones that can, say, produce particular drugs in quantity) Dr Venter’s thoroughgoing root-and-graft approach may be tidying up a strategy that has been used for 4 billion years, perhaps even returning it to its basics.

He does not plan to stick to bacteria, though. The other challenge, besides the minimal genome, is to repeat the trick with single-celled algae.

The step from single-celled bacteria to single-celled algae may sound like a short one. But algae are on the other side of the great dividing line of life, that between creatures with a simple, single genome which is just a big loop of DNA sitting in the cell and those with genomes that are for the most part sequestered in a nucleus set aside for them, and cut up into multiple chromosomes. This second group includes animals, plants, fungi and algae. With no disrespect towards bacteria, which are remarkably innovative and spectacularly durable, the creatures that have taken the nuclear route are much more interesting—not least because Homo sapiens is himself one of them.

Algae, though, are interesting for other reasons. Many people—including Dr Venter—want to use them to produce biofuels. They would turn carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (or, better, from power-station exhaust) into petrol or diesel by photosynthesis. At the moment, the microbes which make biofuels almost all do so through fermentation. The photosynthesis is done by plants such as sugar cane and the sugar is transformed into fuel by engineered bugs of one sort or another. Using algae would cut out the middleman.
The life to come

All of this activity, however, relies on one thing: that the price of synthesising DNA continues to fall. In a way analogous to Gordon Moore’s famous law about the improvement of computers, both the price of sequencing DNA and the price of making it have plummeted over the past decade. The former means that the world’s databases are filling up with genes from every part of the tree of life. The latter means those genes can be cut and pasted together with greater and greater ease.

If synthetic biology is to take off as a technology, that is not merely good, it is essential. There will be a lot of trial and error in the process of creating new, useful organisms. Evolution by artificial selection is likely to prove almost as wasteful as the kind by natural selection. But there are those that worry about the proliferation of gene synthesis. Noting the propensity of computer-hackers to turn out what have been dubbed, by analogy, software viruses, they worry that hackers of the future may turn to synthetic biology and turn out real viruses.

It is a risk, no doubt. But almost all technologies can be used for ill as well as good. Approaches that can create pathogens to order can create vaccines, too—and it is not too rose-tinted to think that the will to do good, often harnessed to the desire to make money, will attract many more people than the dark side will. They could create new crops, new fuels, new ways of investigating diseases and new drugs to treat them. They might do other, wilder things as well.

A more recent piece of science fiction than Shelley’s, Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park”, conceived of the resurrection of dinosaurs. No DNA survives that would allow that to be done directly. But the ability to make genomes, coupled to a far greater understanding of how they lead to the structures of complex organisms, could one day allow simulacra of such creatures to be made by synthetic biology.

In any case, though dinosaurs have left no usable DNA, other more recently departed creatures have been more generous. Imagine, say, allying synthetic biology with the genome of Neanderthal man that was described earlier this year. There is much excitement at the idea of comparing this with the DNA of modern humans, in the hope of finding the essential differences between the two. How much more exciting, instead, to create a Neanderthal and ask him.

And if that seems too morally fraught, may we interest you in a mammoth?

“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).

But at each end of the fibre, optical signals must be converted to and from the electrical signals that computers use to process information. The components that do such conversion are expensive. This does not matter in a network, where costs can be spread among many users. But this expense has kept optical data-links from being used inside personal computers and servers. That is now changing because computer systems are outrunning their electrical wiring. Peripheral devices like printers, hard drives and screens are getting more demanding; networks are running faster and, most importantly, the power of processors continues to increase exponentially. The so-called “interconnects” between all these components are struggling to keep up. It is in this area where a number of new optical alternatives are emerging from some of the biggest firms in the business.
Data in a flash

One of these new interconnects, called Light Peak, has been developed by Intel. It is being used to give ordinary PCs the ability to connect with other devices using high-speed optical cables at ten gigabits per second—20 times faster than a standard USB cable. This means the cable could drive a high-definition display or transfer a movie in seconds. Light Peak, predicts Mario Paniccia, the head of Intel’s photonics lab, will make optical connections as pervasive as wireless ones—and drive demand for more powerful processors, which explains Intel’s interest.

Intel did not have to invent anything new, but it did have to work out how to make small, cheap versions of the converters that turn electrical signals into light and vice versa. Having developed a simplified, low-cost chip to do the job, Intel also devised ways to assemble and test the components quickly, and signed up a group of suppliers to churn them out by the million, starting next year.

Hewlett-Packard’s concern is keeping its servers competitive: their cabling is getting bulkier, and data centres are becoming much harder to cool and increasingly energy hungry. So it is developing an optical replacement for the interconnects in server “racks”. Instead of optical fibre, HP is using waveguides—small strips of plastic with grooves on their highly reflective metallic walls. Again, using this technology to transmit light is not a new thing, but HP’s researchers have managed to cut costs by making waveguides with an injection-moulding system similar to that used to mass-produce CDs.

Over at IBM, researchers are using optical interconnects to make supercomputers run faster. To speed up the flow of data, electrons need to be turned into photons “as close as possible to where the signal is processed”, explains Bert Offrein of IBM Research. For this reason, it is mounting fibre-optic cables straight onto the chips that direct the traffic between a supercomputer’s multiple processors.

The idea of using similar optical interconnects between a computer’s various components is, based on existing technology, not something that is about to appear in humble home or office PCs any time soon. It is hard to make such components small and cheap enough to compete with copper wiring. But one technology that does show promise in making such connections is called “silicon photonics”. It uses similar methods to those employed to manufacture processors and other types of integrated circuits.

Conveniently, silicon is not a bad material for making optical devices. Researchers at HP Labs recently managed to etch a pattern into a flat piece of silicon so that it could focus light “like a spoon”, says Raymond Beausoleil of HP Labs. This effect, he says, could be used to improve lasers and replace expensive lenses in DVD players and other consumer products.

For its part, IBM has used silicon to develop a fast and extremely thin photodetector to convert optical signals into electrical ones. And Intel has come up with an entire kit of tiny optical devices made of silicon, which it hopes one day to combine on optical chips, such as waveguides and lasers. But one vital building block is missing from Intel’s kit: an optical equivalent of the transistors that perform the logical operations at the heart of a computer.

This missing bit does not surprise David Miller of the Photonics Research Centre at Stanford University. Optical transistors, he says, will have a hard time competing with electrical ones, not least because there is no agreement over the best way to build them. Various techniques for making optical transistors regularly appear in laboratories. But using light to process information is tricky, requires exotic materials and lasers that demand more power than conventional transistors. Moreover, miniaturisation is not straightforward, not least because lasers cannot be made as small as transistors. So mass-produced optical processors remain far off. But at least the other bits are on the way.

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.”

Whilst Mr Jobs admitted that Apple also had “many proprietary products”, he said that Apple believed “all standards pertaining to the web should be open”.

Amongst other criticisms, he also said Flash performed poorly when used on touchscreen smartphones and handheld devices.

Adobe co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock have now hit back.

“We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs,” the letter reads.

“No company – no matter how big or how creative – should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.”

‘Smokescreen’

Adobe’s campaign is the latest move in a high-profile war of words between the two companies, which began with Apple’s decision not to allow Flash technology to run on some of its popular gadgets such as the iPhone and iPad.

But Flash is commonly used to build smartphone apps. As a result, developers commonly used automatic translation tools – some built by Adobe – to convert Flash code to run on Apple gadgets.

These allowed developers to make applications once and then distribute them for use on various phones and operating systems, including Apple’s iPhone.

But in April, Apple changed the terms and conditions of the licence that software developers must sign, banning them from using these tools.

Mr Jobs justified the decision in his letter by saying that experience had shown that the tools resulted in “sub-standard apps”.

The change effectively forced developers to build two separate applications – one for Apple products and one for everything else.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen described Mr Job’s letter as a “smokescreen” and said the decision had made it “cumbersome” for developers who were forced to have “two workflows”.
Tongue-in-cheek

The new letter from the co-founders of Adobe attacks Mr Jobs’ assertion that Flash is a closed system.

“As the founders of Adobe, we believe open markets are in the best interest of developers, content owners, and consumers.”

“If the web fragments into closed systems, if companies put content and applications behind walls, some indeed may thrive – but their success will come at the expense of the very creativity and innovation that has made the internet a revolutionary force.

The company claims that its software- and particularly Flash – is open.

“We publish the specifications for Flash — meaning anyone can make their own Flash player,” it reads.

“We believe that Apple, by taking the opposite approach, has taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the web – the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time.

“In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the world wide web? And we believe the answer is: nobody — and everybody, but certainly not a single company.”

In response to the letter, an Apple spokesperson said that the firm also believes in “open web standards” such as HTML5, the latest version of a programming language used to build web pages.

“Flash is not an open web standard like HTML. It is a proprietary Adobe product. Just ask the W3 consortium that controls web standards – they have chosen HTML5 as the open web standard to move forward with.”

Adobe’s letter has been published on its website as part of a global advertising campaign.

The adverts list a series of technologies that Adobe says it “loves”.

It ends: “What we don’t love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the web.”

The adverts have been bought in the New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle as well as the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal. Online, they appear on Wired, Techcrunch and Engadget.

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.

Geoengineering is an umbrella term for large-scale actions intended to combat the climate-changing effects of greenhouse-gas emissions without actually curbing those emissions. Like genetic engineering was in the 1970s, the very idea of geoengineering is controversial. Most of those who fear climate change would prefer to stop it by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Geoengineers argue that this may prove insufficient and that ways of tinkering directly with the atmosphere and the oceans need to be studied. Some would like to carry out preliminary experiments, and wish to do so in a clear regulatory framework so that they know what is allowed and what is not.
Ruled in or ruled out?

Like the biotechnology of the 1970s, geoengineering cannot be treated just as science-as-usual. There are, however, important differences between the subjects. One is that in the 1970s it was clear that the ability to move genes between creatures was going to bring about a huge change in the practice of science itself, and biologists were eager for that to happen. Modern climate scientists, by contrast, usually see geoengineering research as niche, if not fringe, stuff. Many wish it would go away completely. Another difference is that in the 1970s there was a worry that DNA experiments could in themselves present dangers. With geoengineering the dangers are more likely to be caused by large-scale deployment than by any individual scientific experiment.

There are two broad approaches to geoengineering. One is to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight that the planet absorbs. The other is to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and put it somewhere else. The second of these approaches is not particularly in need of new regulation. Whether the carbon dioxide is captured by real trees, as some would like, or by artificial devices, environmental problems caused by the process would be local ones at the site of the sucking. Underground storage of the captured carbon would be regulated in the same way that carbon dioxide sequestered from power stations might be—again, for the most part, a local matter. Even the most potentially disturbing suggestion, which involves fertilising the oceans with iron in order to promote the growth of planktonic algae (in the hope that they would sink to the seabed, taking their carbon with them), can be covered by the London Convention on marine pollution, which regulates dumping at sea, and has already addressed itself to research in the area.

Reducing incoming sunlight, by contrast, is fraught with danger. While it is possible to imagine doing so in a way that cancels out the change in average temperature caused by an increase in carbon dioxide, such a reduction would not simply restore the status quo. Local temperatures would still change in some places, as would ocean currents, rainfall patterns, soil moisture and photosynthesis. Sunshine reduction, then, clearly needs to be regulated. (It also needs to be renamed: these techniques are currently referred to as “Solar Radiation Management”, a term invented half in jest that has somehow stuck.)

One set of small-scale sunshine-reduction experiments discussed in Asilomar would send plumes of various sulphurous fluids in the stratosphere to find out which would best produce a haze of small particles similar to those that cool the planet after a large volcanic eruption. Another would attempt to whiten clouds over the oceans by wafting tiny salt particles up into them. Thus enriched, the clouds would, in theory, tend to have more, smaller droplets in them. More droplets mean more reflection and less sunshine down below. A team of scientists and engineers that calls itself Silver Lining is working on this idea, with some of its research paid for with money from Bill Gates.

In both cases, the experiments would be tiny compared with what people are already doing. In the week of the Asilomar meeting Science published evidence that more pollutants than previously appreciated, including oxides of sulphur, are getting into the lower stratosphere. Exhaust gases from shipping already brighten clouds over various bits of the ocean, and in so doing are thought to cool the Earth appreciably. As new regulations clean up shipping fuels in order to improve air quality in coastal regions, that brightening effect will be reduced, adding to the world’s warming in a sort of inadvertent reverse geoengineering.

Researchers in the field fear, though, that despite being much smaller than existing, inadvertent changes, their experiments will nevertheless become a focus for strident opposition unless there is a clear and respectable system of regulation. Without that, each experiment, however harmless, would be forced to serve as a proxy for the whole approach—a recipe for strangulation by protest and bureaucracy.

In retrospect, the Asilomar meeting may come to be seen as a step towards that respectable system, but probably only a small one. The participants did not produce clear recommendations, but they generally endorsed a set of five overarching principles for the regulation of the field that were presented recently to the British Parliament by Steve Rayner, a professor at the Saïd Business School, in Oxford.

The “Oxford principles”, as they are known, hold that geoengineering should be regulated as a public good, in that, since people cannot opt out, the whole proceeding has to be in a well-defined public interest; that decisions defining the extent of that interest should be made with public participation; that all attempts at geoengineering research should be made public and their results disseminated openly; that there should be an independent assessment of the impacts of any geoengineering research proposal; and that governing arrangements be made clear prior to any actual use of the technologies.

The conference’s organising committee is now working on a further statement of principles, to be released later. Meanwhile Britain’s main scientific academy, the Royal Society, and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, which has members from around 90 countries, are planning further discussions that will culminate at a meeting to be held this November.

Producing plausible policies and ways for the public to have a say on them will be hard—harder, perhaps, than the practical problem of coming up with ways to suck up a bit of carbon or reduce incoming sunshine. As Andrew Mathews, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, puts it, it is not just a matter of constructing a switch, it is a matter of constructing a hand you trust to flip it.

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.

The comparison between South Korea and the United States is not perfectly instructive, especially since “we probably won’t ever be South Korea,” said Robert Faris, research director at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

“The whole political and social climate is so different, the geography is different, the history is so different,” he said. “It’s all pretty different.”

With those caveats in mind, here are the five potential reasons U.S. Internet speeds are slower and more expensive than those in South Korea. This list was gleaned from interviews with broadband experts and from policy papers:

Korean competition

Countries with fast, cheap Internet connections tend to have more competition.

In the U.S., competition among companies that provide broadband connections is relatively slim. Most people choose between a cable company and a telephone company when they sign up for Internet service.

In other countries, including South Korea, the choices are more varied.

While there isn’t good data on how many broadband carriers the average consumer has access to, “I think we can infer that South Korea has more [competition in broadband] than the United States,” Faris said. “In fact, most countries have more than the United States.”

Some academics, including Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center, have criticized the U.S. government’s broadband plan as not doing enough to create the kind of competition that is present in other countries.

In a New York Times editorial, Benkler says competition will reduce costs for broadband consumers.

“Without a major policy shift to increase competition, broadband service in the United States will continue to lag far behind the rest of the developed world,” he writes.

Culture and politics

There are stark cultural differences between hyper-connected Korea, where more than 94 percent of people have high-speed connections, according to the OECD, and the United States, where only about 65 percent of people are plugged into broadband, according to an FCC survey.

The South Korean government has encouraged its citizens to get computers and to hook up to high-speed Internet connections by subsidizing the price of connections for low-income and traditionally unconnected people.

One program, for example, hooked up housewives with broadband and taught them how to make use of the Web in their everyday lives.

Parents in Korea, who tend to place high value on education, see such connections as necessities for their children’s educations, said Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.

These cultural differences mean Korea has a more insatiable demand for fast Internet connections, he said. That demand, in turn, encourages telecommunications companies to provide those connections.

Faris, of the Berkman Center, said no one society has a stronger appetite for Internet connectivity than another. Korea’s government simply has whetted that appetite, and provided the incentives to make high-speed connections accessible to a large segment of society.

Political culture has more to do with it, he said.

“The United States is a more litigious culture than others, and the power of the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to regulate is not as strong here as it is in other countries,” which means its less likely that the U.S. will pass policies to promote the growth of ultra-fast broadband.

Open versus closed networks

There is vigorous debate in the telecommunications world about the role “open networks” have in creating fast, cheap Internet connections.

The idea behind an “open” system is essentially that, for a fee, broadband providers must share the cables that carry Internet signals into people’s homes.

Companies that build those lines typically oppose this sharing. A number of governments, including South Korea and Japan and several European countries, have experimented with or embraced infrastructure-sharing as a way to get new companies to compete in the broadband market.

The U.S. does not require broadband providers to share their lines, and some experts cite Korea’s relative openness as one reason the Internet there is so much faster and cheaper than it is here.

The most important thing is that countries create a way for companies to enter the broadband market without having to pay for huge amounts of infrastructure, said Faris.

Population density

South Korea, with more than 1,200 people per square mile, is a lot denser than the United States, where 88 people live in the same amount of space, and where rural areas and suburbs are large.

The result for broadband? It costs less to set up Internet infrastructure in a tightly populated place filled with high-rise-apartments, such as South Korea, than it does in the United States, where rural homes can be great distances apart.

In both countries, copper wires tend to carry broadband signals from fiber optic cables and into the home. Data can travel fast on copper wire, but it slows down the farther it goes.

In South Korea, that’s usually just from the base of an apartment building to a particular unit. In the U.S., copper wire may have to link a home with a fiber optic cable that’s a mile away.

Korea had a plan … a decade ago

In the 1990s, South Korea set a priority that it would be a highly connected country with a high degree of Internet literacy.

“They made this a priority 10 years ago and they’ve really executed on it,” said Atkinson, from ITIF, the Internet policy think tank.

The country is still four to five years ahead of the U.S. when it comes to broadband policy, even as the United States tries to catch up, said Taylor Reynolds, an economist at OECD.

“Korea has long been a leader in broadband and in very fast broadband,” he said. “And, in fact, the technology that Korea has used for probably the past four to five years is VDSL, and that’s a technology that’s now being put in by AT&T” in the United States.

Meanwhile, Korea is abandoning that technology in favor of the next big thing, Reynolds said. That likely involves bringing super-fast fiber optic cables straight into homes. And, according to a recent report by the Berkman Center, that could make South Korean Internet 10 times faster than it is now.

Faris said Korea’s clear-cut plan helped lead to its faster broadband speeds.

“A big difference is that Korea made a decisive move to expand Internet in the country,” he said. “They said we want to be very good at connecting to the Internet. A lot of government money was thrown at it …

“The U.S. has taken a fairly hands-off approach to the sector. They’ve left it to the private sector. There’s been some money put into it, but not that much, on a per capita basis. We just haven’t taken it that seriously.”

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.

“All they had to go by was either their own intention to move or a reaction to their opponent – just like in the gunslingers legend.”

Those who reacted to their opponent were on average 21 milliseconds faster than those who initiated the movement.

“I wasn’t expecting that we would find such a clear difference,” said Dr Welchman.

“In our everyday lives we have this constant battle between things we decide to do and things we have to do to avoid a negative consequence.”

“If you’re making a cup of tea that would be an intentional decision. If we then knock the cup of tea off the table, the reactive comes into play as we try to catch the cup as fast as possible.”

No consolation

The implications for gunslingers though are not straightforward, and the outcome of a Hollywood shoot-out, it seems, is based more on myth than science.

Dr Welchman explained that it took around 200 milliseconds to respond to what an opponent was doing, so, in a gunfight, the 21 millisecond reactionary advantage would be unlikely to save you.

“The person who draws second is going to die. They’ll die happy that they are the faster person to move but it’s not much consolation in this context,” said Dr Welchman.

The scientists want to find out if there are two different brain processes underlying the two different types of action. They think there could be evidence for this in people with Parkinson’s disease.

Dr Welchman says there is evidence that Parkinson’s patients are more impaired in intentional movement than in reactive ones.

“If you’re someone who’s going to develop Parkinson’s disease, this difference might get exaggerated,” he said. “[So] you might be able to get an earlier idea that there could be problems with movement.”

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.

Instead, the mission team is concentrating on trying to get the rover tilted in a manner that will maximise the amount of sunlight falling on its solar panels during the approaching winter months. Engineers have a plan to rock the vehicle back and forth to acquire a more favourable posture.

Even so, it is likely Spirit will maintain so little energy in its batteries that it will go into hibernation, perhaps as soon as April. It will not emerge from that state until August or September, when the Sun gets high enough in the Martian sky to power up the rover’s systems.

“The rover will be like a polar bear, hibernating; and it could be for many months – of the order of six months,” explained John Callas, Spirit’s project manager at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“We have to be prepared to go through a period where we are not hearing from the rover for an extended length of time.”

Far from being downbeat, Professor Steve Squyres, the rover’s principal investigator, expressed some excitement at the scientific possibilities of a static vehicle.

He said the signal from a stationary Spirit could be tracked very accurately, to measure how much Mars wobbles on its axis. This could establish definitively whether the planet had a solid or a liquid core – information that scientists could use to better understand the planet’s magnetic history.

This was, he said, “totally new science, never been done before – really fundamental stuff”.

“This is something that I didn’t really think very much about when we put a rover on the surface of Mars because we were thinking about the geology on the surface. But when you delve deeply into what this vehicle is capable of, you find new tricks; and it’s something we’re really excited about.”

Watery past

Spirit was one of two rovers that Nasa landed on the planet in the January of 2004. The second vehicle, Opportunity, continues to roll freely on the surface.

Spirit was targeted at the 170km-wide Gusev Crater, a near-equatorial location in the southern hemisphere that orbital images had suggested might once have held a giant lake.

The investigation of this watery history got off to a slow start. Spirit initially found rocks that had undergone very limited alteration by exposure to moisture.

It was only after a 2.5km drive to nearby hills that the instrumented robot discovered rocks and soils that had experienced extensive exposure to water.

Nasa has spent more than $900m (£560m) on its Mars Exploration Rover programme, from design through to current operations. At the moment, the agency is spending about $20m a year.

The data acquired by the vehicles has generated about 100 scholarly papers, including special editions of the leading international journals Science and Nature.

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).

Statistics are hard to come by, and many publishers are reluctant to discuss the subject for fear of encouraging more illegal downloads. But digital theft may pose a big headache in 2010 for the slumping publishing industry, which relies increasingly on electronic reading devices and e-books to stimulate sales.

“Piracy is a serious issue for publishers,” said Hachette Book Group in a statement. The company that publishes Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular “Twilight” teen-vampire series says it “considers copyright protection to be of paramount importance.”

“I’d be really worried if I were Stephen King or James Patterson or a really big bestseller that when their books become completely digitized, how easy it’s going to be to pirate them,” said novelist and poet Sherman Alexie on Stephen Colbert’s show last month.

“With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership — of artistic ownership — goes away,” Alexie added. “It terrifies me.”

And it’s not just bestsellers that are targeted by thieves.

“Textbooks are frequently pirated, but so are many other categories,” said Ed McCoyd, director of digital policy at AAP. “We see piracy of professional content, such as medical books and technical guides; we see a lot of general fiction and non-fiction. So it really runs the gamut.”

Piracy of digital music, thanks to Napster and other file-sharing sites, has been a threat to recording companies for more than a decade. Over the years, the record companies tried different approaches to combat illegal downloading, from shutting down Web sites to encrypting songs with digital-rights management software to suing individual file-sharers.

Although illegal file-sharing of music persists, Apple’s online iTunes store is now the world’s biggest seller of music.

To some industry observers, this may be where the future of the book industry is heading as well. But talk to publishers and authors about what can be done to combat e-book piracy, and you’ll get a wide range of opinions.

Some publishers may try to minimize theft by delaying releases of e-books for several weeks after physical copies go on sale. Simon & Schuster recently did just that with Stephen King’s novel, “Under the Dome,” although the publisher says the decision was made to prevent cheaper e-versions from cannibalizing hardcover sales.

Some authors have even gone as far as to shrug off e-book technology altogether. J.K Rowling has thus far refused to make any of her Harry Potter books available digitally because of piracy fears and a desire to see readers experience her books in print.

However, some evidence suggests that authors’ and publishers’ claims of damage from illegal piracy may be overstated.

Recent statistics have shown that consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers.

Ana Maria Allessi, publisher for Harper Media at HarperCollins, told CNN, “we have to be vigilant in our punishment … but much more attractive is to simply make the technology better, legally.”

E-book technology offers so many positives for both the author and the consumer that any revenue lost to piracy may just be a necessary evil, she said.

“Consumers who invest in one of these dedicated e-book readers tend to load it up and read more,” said Allessi. “And what’s wrong with that?”
Authors are concerned as well.

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.

“It’s great to see beams circulating in the LHC again,” said Cern’s director-general Rolf Heuer.

“We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”

Engineers sent their first beam all the way round the LHC’s circumference after 1930 GMT on Friday.

The beams themselves are made up of “packets” – each about a metre long – containing billions of protons. But they would disperse if left to their own devices.

Electrical forces had to be used to “capture” the protons. This keeps them tightly huddled in packets, for a stable, circulating beam.

Engineers had not been expected to try for a circulating beam before 0600 GMT on Saturday.

James Gillies, Cern’s director of communications, told BBC News: “It happened faster than anyone could have dreamed of.”

“Everything went very smoothly.”

Record attempt

Dr Gillies said that if everything continued to go well, Cern might try to reach a record-breaking beam energy of 1.2 trillion electron volts this weekend.

Only the Tevatron particle accelerator in Chicago, US, has approached this energy, operating at just under one trillion electron volts.

But other team members want to keep the beam circulating at low energy and try for the machine’s first proton beam collisions.

“The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago,” said Steve Myers, Cern’s director for accelerators.

“We’ve learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. That’s how progress is made.”

There are some 1,200 superconducting magnets which form the LHC’s main “ring”.

These magnets bend proton beams in opposite directions around the tunnel at close to the speed of light.

At allotted points around the tunnel, the proton beams cross paths, smashing into one another with enormous energy. Large “detector” machines located at the crossing points will scour the wreckage of these collisions for discoveries that should extend our knowledge of physics.

Engineers first circulated a beam all the way around the LHC on 10 September 2008.

But just nine days later, an electrical fault in one of the connections between superconducting magnets caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel.

Liquid helium is used to cool the LHC to its operating temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F).

The machine has been shut down ever since the accident, to allow repairs to take place.

Professor Norman McCubbin, from the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, added: “I’m sure every particle physicist has been feeling just a little bit impatient as the ‘re-start’ of the LHC has drawn nearer. It’s great to see beams circulating again.”

The damage caused to the collider meant 53 superconducting magnets had to be replaced and about 200 electrical connections repaired.

Engineers have also been installing a new early warning system which could prevent incidents of the kind which shut down the experiment.

Cern has spent some 40m Swiss Francs (£24m) on repairs to the collider.

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.

New lease of life

The university’s Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering has already made a hip transplant that should last for life, rather than the 20 years maximum expected from current artificial hips.

The combination of a durable cobalt-chrome metal alloy socket and a ceramic ball or “head” means the joint should easily withstand the 100 million steps that a 50-year-old can be expected to take by their 100th birthday, says investigator Professor John Fisher.

Meanwhile, colleague Professor Eileen Ingham and her team have developed a unique way to allow the body to enhance itself.

The concept is to make transplantable tissues, and eventually organs, that the body can make its own, getting round the problem of rejection.

So far they have managed to make fully functioning heart valves using the technique.

It involves taking a healthy donor heart valve – from a human or a suitable animal, such as a pig – and gently stripping away its cells using a cocktail of enzymes and detergents.

The inert scaffold left can be transplanted into the patient without any fear of rejection – the main reason why normal transplants wear out and fail.

Proof of concept

Once the scaffold has been transplanted, the body takes over and repopulates it with cells.

Trials in animals and on 40 patients in Brazil have shown promising results, says Prof Ingham.

They have licensed the technology to the NHS National Blood and Transplant Tissue Services so it can be used on any UK donated human tissue in the future.

The NHS is already looking into using the method on donor skin for burns patients.

Professor Christina Doyle of Xeno Medical, the medical device company that is developing the technologies, said the holy grail was to remove the heavy reliance on donor organs.

“That’s where the technology will lead us eventually.”

But she said: “To replace all donor tissue using this technology will take 30 to 50 years. Each single product will need to be designed and tested individually.”

Prof Doyle said experts elsewhere were also working on similar regenerative therapies, but grown entirely outside of the body, to ensure that people can continue being as active during their second half-century as they were in their first.