Synthetic DNA on
the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms
by Rick Weiss, Washington Post
It has been 50
years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching
ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life's most
extraordinary molecule. Until recently, however, even the most
sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA --
an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example,
to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought.
Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation
of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.
Scientists in Maryland have already built the world's first entirely
handcrafted chromosome -- a large looping strand of DNA made from
scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe
needs to live and reproduce.
In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it
is expected to "boot itself up," like software downloaded from the
Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while
the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural
one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before
are already under construction...
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Baffling Cosmic
Explosion Comes Out of Nowhere
by
Andrea Thompson, Space.com
A cosmic
explosion that seems to have come out of nowhere thousands of
light-years from the nearest collection of stars has left
astronomers baffled.
The blast, one
of the brightest this year, was detected by spacecraft from the
Inter-Planetary Network on Jan. 25 and satellites were used to
pinpoint its location to a region
of the sky in the constellation Gemini.
The explosion
was a type called a long-duration
gamma-ray burst (GRB), which are
thought to be powered by the death of a massive star. But images
taken after the glow of the burst, dubbed GRB 070125, had faded away
showed no galaxy at the location.
"Here we have
this very bright burst, yet it's surrounded by darkness on all
sides," said team member Brad Cenko of
the California Institute of Technology. "The nearest galaxy is more
than 88,000 light-years away, and there's almost no gas lying
between the burst and Earth..."
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New Efficient Bulb
Sees the Light
BBC News
A new type of super-efficient
household light bulb is being developed which could spell the end of
regular bulbs.
Experts have found a way to make Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs)
brighter and use less power than energy efficient light bulbs
currently on the market.
The technology, used in gadgets such as mobile phones and computers,
had previously not been powerful enough to be used for lighting.
But Glasgow University scientists said they had resolved the
problem...
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New Method Enables
Scientists to See Smells
PhysOrg
Animals and insects communicate
through an invisible world of scents. By exploiting infrared
technology, researchers at Rockefeller University just made that
world visible. With the ability to see smells, these scientists now
show that when fly larvae detect smells with both olfactory organs
they find their way toward a scented target more accurately than
when they detect them with one.
“Having two eyes allows us to have depth perception and two ears
allows us to pinpoint a noise precisely,” says Leslie Vosshall, head
of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior. “Sensing odors in
stereo is equally important.”
In research to be published in the December 23 online issue of
Nature Neuroscience, Vosshall and her colleagues show that odor
information is easier to perceive when it is smelled with both
olfactory organs. By genetically manipulating flies to express
odorant receptors in one olfactory organ or both, they show that the
brains of Drosophila melanogaster larvae not only make use of stereo
cues to locate odors but also to navigate toward them — a behavior
called chemotaxis...
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