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Tai Chi gets cautious thumbs up for psychological healthTai Chi, a low impact martial art, has been associated with reduced stress, anxiety and depression, and enhanced mood, in both healthy people and those with chronic conditions. A systematic review of the subject found that although Tai Chi does appear to have positive psychological effects, more high quality, randomized trials are needed.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 May 2010 | 3:00 pm Better ways to inhibit blood clots revealed by new studyA new study reveals factors that improve the performance of synthetic fibrin "knobs", which bind to "holes" on fibrinogen molecules to prevent blood clot formation. The study also identifies a novel synthetic knob that displays a 10-fold higher affinity for holes than current synthetic knobs.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 May 2010 | 3:00 pm What makes music sound so sweet (or not)Ever since ancient times, scholars have puzzled over the reasons that some musical note combinations sound so sweet while others are just downright dreadful. The Greeks believed that simple ratios in the string lengths of musical instruments were the key, maintaining that the precise mathematical relationships endowed certain chords with a special, even divine, quality. Now, researchers think they may have gotten closer to the truth by studying the preferences of more than 250 college students from Minnesota to a variety of musical and nonmusical sounds.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 May 2010 | 3:00 pm New breakthrough in fight against lethal CCHF virusCrimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF) virus is a rare but serious human infection that causes internal bleeding, organ failure and ultimately death. Scientists have developed a new model to study CCHF which should enhance the development of vaccines and antivirals against this deadly disease.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 May 2010 | 3:00 pm Arsenic in playgrounds nothing to worry about, study suggestsPressure-treated wooden playground structures do not live up to the bad reputation they have earned as being harmful to children, according to the findings of a new study.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 May 2010 | 3:00 pm Personality of geese determines their foraging behaviourWhen searching for food, slow, shy barnacle geese follow information given by their flock mates. On the other hand, fast, bold geese ignore this type of information and go off in search for food on their own. Whether barnacle geese make use of social information (from other individuals) depends on their personality.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 May 2010 | 3:00 pm Experimental vaccine protects monkeys from new Ebola virusNew research has found that an experimental Ebola vaccine developed by researchers at the National Institutes of Health protects monkeys against not only the two most lethal Ebola virus species for which it was originally designed, both recognized in 1976, but also against a newer Ebola virus species that was identified in 2007.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 May 2010 | 12:00 pm Probing the dark side of the universe: In search of primordial gravitational wavesMuch like ripples moving across a pond, gravitational waves waves stretch the fabric of space itself as they pass by. If detected, these elusive waves could provide an unprecedented view of the earliest moments of our universe. Researchers are exploring the most likely detection method of these waves.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 May 2010 | 12:00 pm Study finds Alzheimer's disease link in eyes of children with Down syndromeA team of researchers has discovered that the protein that forms plaques in the brain in Alzheimer's disease also accumulates in the eyes of people with Down syndrome. The new findings in Down syndrome show that the toxic protein, known as amyloid-beta, that causes Alzheimer's pathology in the brain also leads to distinctive cataracts in the eyes. The discovery is leading the researchers to develop an innovative eye test for early detection of Alzheimer's pathology in both disorders.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 May 2010 | 12:00 pm Reducing niacin intake can prevent obesity, study suggestsA research team from China explored the mechanism underlying niacin's action on glucose metabolism, and the association between the US per capita niacin consumption and the obesity prevalence in the US. They found there is a close correlation between the niacin consumption and the obesity prevalence in the US population. The increased obesity prevalence in the US children in the past three decades may be to a large extent of a niacin fortification-related event.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 May 2010 | 12:00 pm Scientists make 'artificial life'Scientists in the US succeed in developing the first living bacterial cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 May 2010 | 4:08 am Ask AP: Immigration bills, sucking up spilled oil (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 May 2010 | 4:06 am US presses Beijing on clean-energy market access (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 May 2010 | 3:52 am Craig Venter: A life in picturesVenter's future career could hardly have been predicted from the reluctant student and Vietnam serviceman of his early years Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 May 2010 | 3:22 am Ports 'fail on illegal fishing'Current systems are too weak to halt illegal fishing, researchers warn, with some ports turning a blind eye to the issue.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 May 2010 | 3:12 am Expanded hospital opens at Calif. aquarium (AP)AP - They don't cry, cough or run a fever, so how can you tell when a fish is sick?Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 May 2010 | 3:12 am Atlantis Astronauts Gear Up for Third and Final Spacewalk (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - The spacewalking crew of NASA's space shuttle Atlantis will take one final spacewalk of their mission to wrap up a battery upgrade service call on the solar arrays outside the International Space Station.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 May 2010 | 3:00 am Ancient octopus mystery resolvedTrapped air in the shells of rare octopuses is the key to their survival in the deep sea, say scientists.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 May 2010 | 2:54 am Shuttle, Station Pass By The SunFrench astrophotographer Thierry Legault caught a stunning view of shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station (ISS) passing in front of the sun about 50 minutes before docking.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 May 2010 | 2:53 am Earthworms are 'seed predators'Earthworms eat live rather than just dead plants, scientists discover, forcing us to rethink their role in the soil.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 May 2010 | 2:53 am The nation's weather (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 May 2010 | 2:45 am Astronauts gear up for 3rd and final spacewalk (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 May 2010 | 2:44 am Bovine TB found in wild boar for first time in UKScientists discover TB in wild boar, raising fears among farmers that boars and badgers could be contributing to disease in cattle Scientists have found bovine TB in a feral wild boar for the first time in the UK. The discovery may raise fears among farmers that boars, along with badgers, could be contributing to bovine TB in cattle – but the researchers say the porcine species poses a low risk of spreading the disease to livestock or humans. Tests on a 60kg female boar believed to be 7-9 months old revealed tissue lesions consistent with the disease. The wild boar joins the growing list of wildlife hosts for TB. The threat from badgers is now judged so great that the new coalition government is preparing for England to follow Wales in culling the animals, despite conflicting scientific advice on whether the measure would be effective. The boar died while under anaesthesia as part of an ongoing study of the animals in Herefordshire, an area where there is a high prevalence of TB on farms. The study is being conducted for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) by the Food and Environment Research Agency. Boar in the wild probably became extinct in England about 300 years ago but a series of escapes and deliberate releases from farms since the 1980s have meant small feral populations have become re-established. A letter in today's Veterinary Record says any potential role wild boar may have in spreading bovine TB in the UK remains unclear, although the disease has been found in farmed wild boar twice. In parts of Spain and Portugal the disease in boar is already at a level that is self-sustaining but in Italy they are "spillover" hosts. The government already encourages landowners to increase routine culling of wild deer when there are high levels of TB and confirmation of the disease in cats, dogs, pigs and camelids, although still very low, appears to be increasing. Fewer than 1% of human TB cases are thought to be linked to bovine TB infections. Defra said last night: "'This finding does not change our risk assessment of the roles of other wildlife at present and we continue to monitor confirmed cases of TB in all animals, including wildlife, as part of our ongoing TB surveillance." The spokesman added: "The main risk of human M. bovis [bovine TB] infection arising from wild boar is probably occupational, for those handling live infected animals or their carcasses in the field. "We continue to advise basic personal hygiene practices, including wearing protective equipment to prevent cuts in the skin and to prevent exposure to infectious aerosols." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 May 2010 | 2:40 am Oil fouls Louisiana as BP scrambles to contain spill (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 May 2010 | 2:14 am Louisiana marshes hit by Gulf oil slick (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 May 2010 | 1:19 am Japan despatches probe to VenusJapan sends a sophisticated probe - Akatsuki - to Venus to study its atmosphere in unprecedented detail.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 May 2010 | 12:59 am Scot protests EU plans to eliminate rat poisonA Scottish MEP raises concerns about the potential impact of EU proposals to ban the most widely used rat poisons.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 May 2010 | 11:59 pm Death toll from Sri Lanka's flooding hits 20 (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 May 2010 | 10:59 pm What Are the Best MacGyver Stunts? (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - "MacGruber," which will bring the "Saturday Night Live" sketch featuring Will Forte and Kristen Wiig to movie screens this month, is a parody of the TV series "MacGyver" that ran during the 1980s and '90s.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 May 2010 | 10:25 pm Turtle Uses Tongue to Breathe UnderwaterThe common musk turtle's tongue has been discovered to serve an unusual purpose: breathing underwater.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 May 2010 | 9:48 pm The Whaling Deal: It's All in the NumbersA proposed "deal" to lower catch limits for whaling countries rings hollow upon close inspection.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 May 2010 | 8:58 pm NIH to tighten rules on conflictsNew regulations would increase oversight of payments to researchers.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/1DyOBTGPRqw" height="1" width="1"/>Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 20 May 2010 | 8:17 pm Car Absorbs CO2; Spews OxygenOne reason treehuggers like myself love trees is that the leaves scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, use it for energy and emit life-giving oxygen, the process of photosynthesis. Wouldn't it be great if cars -- notorious for CO2 emissions -- ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 May 2010 | 5:58 pm Synthetic Bacterial CellsScientists constructed the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides, then transplanted genome into a M. capricolum cell that had been emptied of its own genome making it function just like naturally occurring M. mycoides.Source: Livescience.com | 20 May 2010 | 5:38 pm Artificial life? Synthetic genes 'boot up' cellWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists working to make a synthetic life form reported a major step forward Thursday, saying they had created an artificial genome and used it to bring a hollowed-out bacterium back to life.Source: Reuters: Science News | 20 May 2010 | 5:26 pm Sharks Remember Where to Get a Good MealScientists discover that sharks remember the best spots to find meals.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 May 2010 | 4:50 pm Quantum crack in cryptographic armourA commercial quantum encryption system has been fully hacked for the first time.Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 20 May 2010 | 4:27 pm BP 'failing over oil leak data'BP has "fallen short" in providing information about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the US government says.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 May 2010 | 4:18 pm Synthetic life breakthrough could be worth trillions of dollarsUS geneticist Craig Venter's ambition is to create organisms that are not only new, but lucrative It was a dream that began nearly 15 years ago, when Craig Venter, a Vietnam veteran turned geneticist, resolved one day to create a genome from scratch – and with it, make the first ever synthetic life form. Last night, in a dramatic announcement that led some to accuse him of playing God, Venter said the dream had come true, saying he had created an organism with manmade DNA. The feat, hailed as an epochal scientific breakthrough by some but an alarming development by others, was achieved by scientists at the J Craig Venter Insititute in Rockville, Maryland using little more than a computer, some common microbes, a DNA synthesizer and four bottles of chemicals. The result – after $40m (£28m) and more than a decade – is the first microbe that thrives and replicates with only a synthetic genome to guide it. Every "letter" of its genetic code was made in the laboratory and stitched together, forming an artificial chromosome 1m characters long. Despite the scale of the achievement, the organism in question could scarcely be more lowly – it is based on a bacterium that causes mastitis in goats. While scientists and philosophers have already begun to debate the potential consequences and moral implications of the work, the motivating force for Venter is commercial. His team has an even more ambitious dream: to create organisms that are not only new, but also lucrative. Venter has secured a deal with the oil giant ExxonMobil to create algae that can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into fuel — an innovation he believes could be worth more than a trillion dollars. The new bacterium, Venter said, is "the proof of the concept that we can make, in theory, changes across the entire genome of an organism, that we can add entirely new functions, eliminate those we don't want, and create a new range of industrial organisms that put all of their effort into doing what we want them to do. Until this experiment worked, the whole field was theoretical. Now it is real." To create the organism, Venter's team began with a computer reconstruction of the genome of a common bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides. The information was fed into a DNA synthesizer, which produced short strands of the bug's DNA. These strands were then stitched together by inserting them first into yeast and then into E coli bacteria. The bugs' natural repair mechanisms saw the strands as broken fragments and reassembled them. After several rounds, the scientists had pieced together all 1m letters of the bacterium's genome. To mark the genome as synthetic, they spliced in fresh strands of DNA, each a biological "watermark" that would do nothing in the final organism except carry coded messages, including a line from James Joyce: "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life." The crucial step came next. The scientists took the synthetic genome and transferred it into another kind of common bug. As this bug multiplied, some of its progeny ditched their own DNA and began using the synthetic genome. Then the transformation began. "It's pretty stunning when you just replace the DNA software in the cell. The cell instantly starts reading that new software, starts making a whole different set of proteins, and in a short while, all the characteristics of the first species disappear and a new species emerges," Venter said. Venter calls the organism a "synthetic cell" because it survives thanks to a manmade genome, but apart from the watermarking woven into its DNA, it behaves like any other M. mycoides. Some scientists argue it is not a new kind of life, but others say that does not detract from the feat. "This is a remarkable advance," said Paul Freemont, a synthetic biologist at Imperial College London. "The applications of this enabling technology are enormous." But the work drew immediate criticism from others who fear it could trigger an environmental disaster or hand a gift to terrorists bent of developing weaponised microbes. "This is a step towards something much more controversial: creation of living beings with capacities and natures that could never have naturally evolved," said Julian Savulsescu, an ethicist at Oxford University. "The potential is in the far future, but real and significant: dealing with pollution, new energy sources, new forms of communication. But the risks are also unparalleled. These could be used in the future to make the most powerful bioweapons imaginable." Pat Mooney, of the ETC group, which opposes synthetic biology, said: "This is a Pandora's box moment. Like the splitting of the atom or the cloning of Dolly, we will all have to deal with the fallout from this alarming experiment." Venter agrees that stringent regulations are needed to ensure synthetic organisms do not escape and cause damage. "It's clearly a dual-use technology and that requires immense responsibility for whoever's using it," he said. "We are entering an exciting new era where we're limited mostly by our imaginations." And if the microbe were, somehow, to escape the tight security of Venter's lab? "It will not grow outside the lab unless it is deliberately injected or sprayed into a goat. And we don't work with goats." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 May 2010 | 4:09 pm Colonizers give up sequence secretsFirst results from human microbiome project yield nearly 30,000 new genes.Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 20 May 2010 | 4:00 pm EPA Orders BP to Use Less-Toxic Oil Dispersant
The Environmental Protection Agency ordered British Petroleum to change the type of dispersant the company is using to keep oil from reaching American shores. The EPA gave the company 72 hours to switch to a less toxic chemical for use in breaking up oil slicks. Persistent questions about the toxicity of Corexit 9500 have plagued BP over the last several weeks. But the company continued to purchase and use the chemical. On May 5, Wired Science reported on EPA data showing that a competitive product, U.S. Polychemical’s Dispersit, appeared to be less toxic and perform better. Corexit is manufactured by Nalco, which has senior management from the major oil companies. “The reality is, we blow them out of the water. But Corexit is the Exxon product, the 800-pound gorilla,” U.S. Polychemical’s Bruce Gebhardt told Wired Science two days later. “We’ve never been able to move off the shelves. We were never successful in getting them to switch stockpiles. The Coast Guard expressed interest, but it’s a big expense, and you don’t do it unless you’re in pain. Now they’re in pain.” Now, while BP has not announced how it will comply with the EPA order, U.S. Polychemical told The New York Times it had “received a large order from BP” for Dispersit and could ramp up production to 60,000 gallons a day. Image: A Coast Guard plane spraying dispersant./ U.S. Coast Guard. See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and forthcoming book on the history of green technology; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 20 May 2010 | 3:32 pm What Are the Best MacGyver Stunts?"MacGruber," which will bring the Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Will Forte and Kristen Wiig to movie screens this month, is a parody of the '80s TV series MacGyver.Source: Livescience.com | 20 May 2010 | 3:09 pm Researchers start up cell with synthetic genomeA fully synthesized genome transforms one species of bacterium into another.Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 20 May 2010 | 2:58 pm Sizing up the 'synthetic cell'asked eight experts about the implications of the J. Craig Venter Institute's latest creation.Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 20 May 2010 | 2:56 pm Lightning May Cause Hallucinations
Talk about a flash of insight. Lightning strokes could stimulate people’s brains and cause them to hallucinate bright blobs of light the same way a medical procedure that applies magnetic fields to the brain does, two physicists propose. The findings could help explain some reports of “ball lightning,” mysterious floating orbs that have been reported for centuries but are poorly understood. A paper describing the idea will appear in Physics Letters A.
Lightning forms when electrical charges become physically separated in a storm cloud and build up electrical potential between them, which is then discharged in the sudden bolt. Strokes typically come in clusters. In some cases, Kendl says, they can come extremely rapidly: something like 20 to 60 lightning strokes, each on the order of 100 milliseconds long, raining down over the course of several seconds. These rare repetitive strokes, Kendl’s team found, generate magnetic fields that are very similar — in strength and in how they rise and decay over time — to those used in a brain-stimulation technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS.
TMS applies magnetic fields to the brain to treat neurological and psychiatric conditions like stroke and depression. While the stimulation is being applied to the visual cortex, some patients report seeing blobs of light in their field of vision. Such experiences, of seeing light when light is not actually entering the eye, are known as phosphenes. (The patterns of light you see when you rub your closed eyes hard are another type of phosphene.) Working with Innsbruck graduate student Josef Peer, Kendl calculated that repetitive lightning strokes would trigger phosphenes “astonishingly well.” A person would need to be within about 200 meters of the lightning to experience the effect. But Thomas Kammer, a TMS expert at the University of Ulm in Germany, isn’t convinced. Patients report seeing many different kinds of TMS-induced phosphenes, but they don’t generally mesh with descriptions of ball lightning. “I cannot imagine that long-lasting visual phenomena as described with ball lightning might be based on induced phosphenes,” Kammer wrote in an e-mail. Scientists have proposed before that ball lightning reports could be ascribed to visual hallucinations, but the new study is the first to quantify the phenomenon in such detail and relate it to a known phenomenon. In 2008, researchers in Sweden proposed that magnetic fields associated with lightning could affect neurons in the part of the brain known as the occipital lobe, setting off epileptic seizures and inducing visions later described as ball lightning. “Evidence is mounting that most, if not all, of ball lightning observations are created by the interaction of lightning-generated magnetic fields with the human brain,” says a co-author of that study, electricity expert Vernon Cooray of Uppsala University in Sweden. Scientists have struggled for centuries to explain ball lightning, in part because reports of it are so varied. It is often described as a yellowish ball that hovers around eye height for a couple of seconds before vanishing. But other reports describe ball lightning of various colors moving rapidly, fizzling or even exploding; some say it is accompanied by a sharp smell or sound. The diversity of descriptions, Kendl says, suggests ball lightning may be a catchall term describing many different types of experience. Image: Ball Lightning, 1886./G. Hartwig, NOAA Photo Library collection. See Also:
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 20 May 2010 | 2:05 pm Another Trick for Your Cell Phone: SmellingThe U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is hoping that soon your cell phone will sniff out poisonous gases.Source: Livescience.com | 20 May 2010 | 1:29 pm Magnesium: Super Material of the FutureMagnesium can be a revolutionary material for everything from cars and mobile electronics.Source: Livescience.com | 20 May 2010 | 1:22 pm Huge, Colorful Monitor Lizard Species Hid in Plain SightThree new monitor lizards have been discovered in the Philippines.Source: Livescience.com | 20 May 2010 | 1:05 pm Human gene catalog shows it's mostly a mysteryWASHINGTON (Reuters) - They live in us and on us, helping digest food and keeping acne at bay, and researchers said on Thursday that most of these germs are turning out to be new to science.Source: Reuters: Science News | 20 May 2010 | 12:55 pm Artificial Butterfly Takes FlightThe life-sized, robotic butterfly in the video below has proven an aerodynamic principle that could have big implications in the field. Scientists Hiroto Tanaka of Harvard University and Isao Shimoyama of the University of Tokyo, Japan, mimicked the flight of ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 May 2010 | 12:49 pm Hubble Watches as Star Slowly Devours Planet
Six hundred light-years from Earth, a huge exoplanet circling close to its home star is slowly, inexorably being devoured. WASP 12B orbits just 2 million miles from its star, which means the surface of the planet reaches temperatures over 2,800 Fahrenheit. The sun’s gravitational pull is stronger on the front surface of the planet than on the back, so the planet has been pulled into a football shape. If you were floating on the gaseous planet, and looking heavenward, the sun would take up nearly the entire sky. And in the next 10 million years, the star that so dominates the planet will destroy it, according to a paper published in May in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. It’s not exactly the kind of solar system that human beings anticipated finding in the great beyond. “All sorts of things that we She and her team used the Hubble Space Telescope’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to investigate the planet by looking in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. “The near ultraviolet is a very sensitive probe to the presence of stuff and that allows you to deduce an effective radius for the planet,” she said. WASP 12B has a puffed up atmosphere that its star is siphoning off. That observation happily matches theoretical predictions made just a few months ago by astronomer Shu-lin Li at Peking University, Beijing. The confirmation shows yet again that exoplanetology, particularly the study of other solar systems not just individual planets, is advancing at a breakneck pace. “It is a really nice example of theorists predicting something and we’d already observed something close to what they predicted,” Haswell said. To date, 455 exoplanets have been discovered. See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and forthcoming book on the history of green technology; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 20 May 2010 | 12:39 pm Scientists Create First Self-Replicating Synthetic Life
Man-made DNA has booted up a cell for the first time. In a feat that is the culmination of two and a half years of tests and adjustments, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute inserted artificial genetic material — chemically printed, synthesized and assembled — into cells that were then able to grow naturally. “We all had a very good feeling that it was going to work this time,” said Venter Institute synthetic biologist Daniel Gibson, co-author of the study published May 20 in Science. “But we were cautiously optimistic because we had so many letdowns following the previous experiments.” On a Friday in March, scientists inserted over 1 million base pairs of synthetic DNA into Mycoplasma capricolum cells before leaving for the weekend. When they returned on Monday, their cells had bloomed into colonies.
“When we look at life forms, we see fixed entities,” said J. Craig Venter, president of the Institute, in a recent podcast. “But this shows in fact how dynamic they are. They change from second to second. And that life is basically the result of an information process. Our genetic code is our software.” Coaxing the software to power a cell proved harder than expected.
“We had to deal with the fact that M. genitalium had an extremely slow growth rate,” Gibson said. “For every experiment that was done, it took more than a month to get results.” Moreover, transplanting the code into recipient cells was failing. So researchers cut their losses and called in a substitute, opting for the larger, speedier and less finicky Mycoplasma mycoides. The choice was a good one. “Over the last five years the field has seen a 100-fold increase in the length of genetic material wholly constructed from raw chemicals,” said synthetic biologist Drew Endy of Stanford University. “This is over six doublings in the max length of a genome that can be constructed.” Plunging costs of synthesis allowed a leap past the 1 million base-pair mark, from code to assembly. “Imagine doubling the diameter of a silicon wafer that can be manufactured that much, going from 1 cm to 1 meter [fabrications] in just five years,” Endy said. “That would have been an incredible achievement.” “They rebuilt a natural sequence and they put in some poetry,” said University of California at San Francisco synthetic biologist Chris Voigt. “They recreated some quotes in the genome sequence as watermarks.” It’s an impressive trick, no doubt, but replicating a natural genome with a little panache is also the limit of our present design capabilities. Researchers, for instance, figure yeast can handle the assembly of 2 million base pairs, but they’re not sure about more. And an energy-producing cyanobacteria that sequesters carbon, Gibson says, is still several years off. The ultimate goal, of course, is a brand-new genome from the ground up. Now, Voigt said, “what do you do with all that design capacity?” Images: 1) Schematic demonstrating the assembly of a synthetic M. mycoides genome in yeast./Science/AAAS. 2) Images of the phenotype of the JCVI-syn1.0 and WT strains./Science/AAAS. See Also:
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Source: Wired: Wired Science | 20 May 2010 | 12:32 pm Sharkskin Paint Reduces Drag on Airplanes, Ships and Wind TurbinesSharks are intriguing, phenomenal creatures. Not only do they come in 440 species, they have they been around for more than 420 million years -- before the dinosaurs! One thing that surprised me about sharks is that their skin is ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 May 2010 | 12:26 pm First Live Organism with Synthetic Genome CreatedScientists say they have created the first living organism with a completely synthetic genome.Source: Livescience.com | 20 May 2010 | 12:06 pm Has Venter made us gods?Does Craig Venter's creation of life in the laboratory finally squeeze God right out of the scientific universe? Craig Venter's production of an entirely artificial bacterium marks another triumph of the only major scientific programme driven from the beginning by explicit atheism. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was a militant atheist, who refused to accept a job at a newly founded Cambridge college if it had a chapel, and who invented molecular biology partly to prove there was nothing special or mystical about life: it was just the behaviour of complex chemicals acting in accordance with the normal laws of nature. Now Venter says he has built a living bacterium from nothing but chemicals and code: "Our cell has been totally derived from four bottles of chemicals", he says. In fact, it was grown using yeast as an intermediary, but to the molecular biologist, organisms are just another kind of apparatus. It looks like the complete triumph of the materialist programme. Atheists of the Dawkins type will take it as practical proof that there is no need to hypothesise God at all: we can make life without any miracles, and there's no need to imagine a creator; Christians will retort that they don't think that God exists the way that things exist, and that God is no longer a man in the clouds with a long white beard; still less is he a man with a short white beard, like Ventner. Both sides will continue to shout past one another, feeling entirely vindicated by events. But at this moment of complete victory for materialism something odd has happened: the chemical and material world turns out to be entirely shaped by something called "information". "Life is basically the result of an information process – a software process" says Venter, and "Starting with the information in a computer, we put it into a recipient cell, and convert it into a news species". But though this information clearly exists in some sense, it's impossible to say what kind of thing it is, because it isn't a thing at all. Whatever this may be, it isn't material, and it isn't bound by physical laws. Information turns out to be as elusive and as omnipresent as God once was. I don't mean that they are both the same because clearly they are not. What's important is that neither fits into any kind of common sense category; in orthodox theology, the idea of existence without God is senseless: not meaningless, but self-contradictory. Something similar is true of information in the sense that Venter uses it. It isn't the things that people tell each other: it is the fundamental regularities of nature that scientists discover. A universe without information could not exist and certainly couldn't contain scientists. Descending from these rarefied speculations, there's a much lower and more urgent sense in which Venter will disturb theologians and atheists alike. The man who can make life can also give humans apparently godlike powers. "We are as gods and might as well get good at it" said the Californian visionary Stewart Brand 40 years ago; and Venter's techniques should make it possible to engineer bacteria to do almost anything we can imagine, from cleaning up the oceans to supplying us with energy. The bacteria found in nature can work like the philosophers" stone, transforming almost any substance into anything. If we can design them to turn pollution into energy, that would be wonderful; but the same techniques could produce weapons of unparalleled cruelty and efficiency. "We are limited mostly by our imaginations" Venter says. The worry is whether our imaginations will prove up to the task. The trouble with gods, as the Greek philosophers observed, is that they were not any morally better than humans, just more powerful. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 May 2010 | 12:05 pm Picasso, Matisse Paintings Stolen in Paris Art HeistA thief stole five paintings from the Paris Museum of Modern Art worth more than half a billion dollars.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 May 2010 | 12:01 pm Building Organs with 'Biological Legos'If you were like me growing up, you spent countless hours building all types of structures out of wood blocks and plastic Legos. Researchers at MIT-Harvard Division of Health Sciences and Technology want to make building a human organ out ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 May 2010 | 11:33 am Tree Frogs Say "I Hate You" By Shaking ViolentlyMale red-eyed treefrogs defend their turf by violently "tremulating" their bodies; and other males respond. Scientists created a robotic frog to test out whether males responded to the vibrations or the visual body-shaking.Source: Livescience.com | 20 May 2010 | 11:13 am The research paper in ScienceThis is the article published in Science today describing how Craig Venter and his colleagues synthesised an entire bacterial genome from scratch and incorporated it into a cell. The new genome took over the cell, which was capable of continual self-replication guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 May 2010 | 11:10 am UK 'will push EU on CO2 targets'The UK government will push the EU to move to a higher target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 May 2010 | 10:53 am Craig Venter creates world's first synthetic life formCraig Venter and his team have built the genome of a bacterium from scratch and incorporated it into a cell to make what they call the world's first synthetic life form Scientists have created the world's first synthetic life form in a landmark experiment that paves the way for designer organisms that are built rather than evolved. The controversial feat, which has occupied 20 scientists for more than 10 years at an estimated cost of $40m, was described by one researcher as "a defining moment in biology". Craig Venter, the pioneering US geneticist behind the experiment, said the achievement heralds the dawn of a new era in which new life is made to benefit humanity, starting with bacteria that churn out biofuels, soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and even manufacture vaccines. However critics, including some religious groups, condemned the work, with one organisation warning that artificial organisms could escape into the wild and cause environmental havoc or be turned into biological weapons. Others said Venter was playing God. The new organism is based on an existing bacterium that causes mastitis in goats, but at its core is an entirely synthetic genome that was constructed from chemicals in the laboratory. The single-celled organism has four "watermarks" written into its DNA to identify it as synthetic and help trace its descendants back to their creator, should they go astray. "We were ecstatic when the cells booted up with all the watermarks in place," Dr Venter told the Guardian. "It's a living species now, part of our planet's inventory of life." Dr Venter's team developed a new code based on the four letters of the genetic code, G, T, C and A, that allowed them to draw on the whole alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks to write the watermarks. Anyone who cracks the code is invited to email an address written into the DNA. The research is reported online today in the journal Science. "This is an important step both scientifically and philosophically," Dr Venter told the journal. "It has certainly changed my views of definitions of life and how life works." The team now plans to use the synthetic organism to work out the minimum number of genes needed for life to exist. From this, new microorganisms could be made by bolting on additional genes to produce useful chemicals, break down pollutants, or produce proteins for use in vaccines. Julian Savulescu, professor of practical ethics at Oxford University, said: "Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity's history, potentially peeking into its destiny. He is not merely copying life artificially ... or modifying it radically by genetic engineering. He is going towards the role of a god: creating artificial life that could never have existed naturally." This is "a defining moment in the history of biology and biotechnology", Mark Bedau, a philosopher at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, told Science. Dr Venter became a controversial figure in the 1990s when he pitted his former company, Celera Genomics, against the publicly funded effort to sequence the human genome, the Human Genome Project. Venter had already applied for patents on more than 300 genes, raising concerns that the company might claim intellectual rights to the building blocks of life. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 May 2010 | 10:42 am It's Alive! Artificial Life Springs From Manmade DNAA team of scientists create the first real-life "Frankenstein" by injecting man-made DNA into a previously lifeless cell.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 May 2010 | 10:42 am Sunlight Glints Off Surface of Oil SlickSunlight seen glinting off surface of Gulf oil spill.Source: Livescience.com | 20 May 2010 | 10:22 am Gulf recipeOil spill's impact on Mississippi seafood sellersSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 May 2010 | 10:11 am Frog Shakes Its Booty to Deter Other MalesMale red-eyed treefrogs shake their bodies violently to send vibrations to another male, letting him know who's boss.Source: Livescience.com | 20 May 2010 | 10:04 am Big Mystery: Jupiter Loses a StripeIn a surprising development that has transformed the appearance of the solar system's largest planet, one of Jupiter's two main cloud belts has completely disappeared.Source: Science@NASA Headline News | 20 May 2010 | 9:52 am Artificial Butterfly Reveals Secrets of Swallowtail FlightResearchers have built and flown a replica of a swallowtail butterfly to see how it flies.Source: Livescience.com | 20 May 2010 | 8:30 am Waterlily saved from extinctionA scientist based at the UK's Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew prevents the world's smallest waterlily from becoming extinct.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 May 2010 | 6:55 am Is aging a disease?It's clear that the simple fact of growing older -- chronological aging -- is relentless and unstoppable. But experts studying the science of aging say it's time for a fresh look at the biological process -- one which recognizes it as a condition that can be manipulated, treated and delayed.Source: Reuters: Science News | 20 May 2010 | 3:30 am
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![Figure 5 [Converted]](http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2010/05/artificial-cell.jpg "Figure 5 [Converted]")
After the Venter Institute announced in early 2008 that it had assembled a synthetic Mycoplasma genitalium genome, the assumption was that it would be running cells in no time. But this particular cell type, despite its minimal size, was not an ideal research partner. One problem was speed.