July 11, 2006
When humans transcend biology
With everything else that's happening in the world today, debates about whether humanity should embrace as yet nonexistent technologies that could enhance our physical and intellectual abilities and someday make us ``more than human" may seem frivolous. Nonetheless, a debate on ``transhumanism" has been going on for the past few years, with naysayers and doomsayers on one side, optimistic futurists on the other, and too little in between.
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Home >> EvolutionJune 19, 2006
Reprogramming Biology
Biology is now in the early stages of an historic transition to an information science, while also gaining the tools to reprogram the ancient information systems of life. Few of us go more than a few months without changing the software programs we use in our electronic devices, yet the 23,000 software programs inside our cells called genes have not changed appreciably in thousands of years (although recent research suggests that a few have changed as recently as a few hundred years ago).
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Home >> EvolutionJune 08, 2006
Tiny Robots Control Cockroaches
Scientists have created miniature, insect-like robots that can change the behavior of cockroaches.
The devices work by at first fooling the bugs into believing the devices are fellow roaches and then leading the insects away from darkness into light, according to a recent announcement made by the European Union Information Society Technologies Program.
The thumbnail-sized devices, called "insbots," are among the first to manipulate insect and animal behavior.
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Home >> EvolutionMay 28, 2006
The real 'cloaking device'
Physicists have drawn up blueprints for a cloaking device that could, in theory, render objects invisible.
Light normally bounces off an object's surface making it visible to the human eye. But John Pendry and colleagues at Imperial College London, UK, have calculated that materials engineered to have abnormal optical properties, known as metamaterials, could make light pass around an object as so it appears as if it were not there at all.
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Home >> EvolutionMay 07, 2006
Changing Constant
Cosmologists claim to have found evidence that yet another fundamental constant of nature, called mu, may have changed over the last 12 billion years. If confirmed, the result could force some physicists to radically rethink their theories. It would also provide support for string theory, which predicts extra spatial dimensions.
This is not the first time fundamental constants have been accused of changing over the lifetime of the universe. Most famously, there was controversy over the fine structure constant, alpha (α), which governs how light and electrons interact. Some physicists claimed it is changing while others said it was not.
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Home >> EvolutionApril 22, 2006
Invention Machine
As a high-school student in the 1950s, John Koza yearned for a personal computer. That was a tall order back then, as mass-produced data processors such as the IBM 704 were mainframes several times the size of his bedroom. So the cocksure young man went rummaging for broken jukeboxes and pinball machines, repurposing relays and switches and lightbulbs to make a computer of his own design.
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Home >> EvolutionMarch 15, 2006
Nanodevices That Assemble Themselves
Imagine unrolling an electronic newspaper that's automatically updated via the Internet. Or cheap roof shingles that double as solar panels. These are just two technologies that could become possible with the advent of plastic electronics made from tiny components that assemble themselves. UC Berkeley chemical engineer Rachel Segalman is conducting the fundamental research that could help make this nanoscale dream a reality. In December, Segalman's efforts earned her a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
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Home >> EvolutionMarch 11, 2006
Unintelligent Design
Few things on Earth are spookier than viruses. The very name virus, from the Latin word for "poisonous slime," speaks to our lowly regard for them. Their anatomy is equally dubious: loose, tiny envelopes of molecules—protein-coated DNA or RNA—that inhabit some netherworld between life and nonlife. Viruses do not have cell membranes, as bacteria do; they are not even cells. They seem most lifelike only when they invade and co-opt the machinery of living cells in order to make more of themselves, often killing their hosts in the process. Their efficiency at doing so ranks them among the most fearsome killers: Ebola virus, HIV, smallpox, flu. Yet they go untouched by antibiotics, having nothing really biotic about them.
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Home >> EvolutionFebruary 28, 2006
Decoherence- quantum mechanics
Entanglement is one of the most mysterious and fundamental properties of quantum mechanics and allows particles to have a much closer relationship than is possible in classical physics. If two particles are entangled, we can know the state of one particle by measuring the state of the other. However, entangled states are thought to vanish above a certain temperature because of thermal effects that make the system classical in a phenomenon known as "decoherence"
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Home >> EvolutionFebruary 25, 2006
Secrets of Longevity Genes
You can assume quite a bit about the state of a used car just from its mileage and model year. The wear and tear of heavy driving and the passage of time will have taken an inevitable toll. The same appears to be true of aging in people, but the analogy is flawed because of a crucial difference between inanimate machines and living creatures: deterioration is not inexorable in biological systems, which can respond to their environments and use their own energy to defend and repair themselves.
At one time, scientists believed aging to be not just deterioration but an active continuation of an organism's genetically programmed development. Once an individual achieved maturity, "aging genes" began to direct its progress toward the grave. This idea has been discredited, and conventional wisdom now holds that aging really is just wearing out over time because the body's normal maintenance and repair mechanisms simply wane. Evolutionary natural selection, the logic goes, has no reason to keep them working once an organism has passed its reproductive age.
Complete Article by David A. Sinclair and Lenny Guarente at Scientific American
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Home >> EvolutionNovember 16, 2005
Einstein is back - as a robot
Busan, South Korea - Robots that smile and blink. A "ubiquitous" Internet that envelops people in an always-wired world. Radio ID tags on every product and person, letting you check whether the wine you're thinking of buying will go with that steak or if your children have arrived safely at school.
These visions of the future were among innovations exhibited on Tuesday on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) summit, in Busan, South Korea.
World leaders and other delegates at Apec are getting the chance to participate in the first-ever trial of wireless high-speed Internet access called WiBro. The technology allows users to surf the Web at speeds almost as fast as wired connections while moving, also enabling voice and video calling via the Internet.
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Home >> EvolutionNovember 11, 2005
MIT closes in on bionic speed
Robots, both large and micro, can potentially go wherever it's too hot, cold, dangerous, small or remote for people to perform any number of important tasks, from repairing leaking water mains to stitching blood vessels together.
Now MIT researchers, led by Professor Sidney Yip, have proposed a new theory that might eliminate one obstacle to those goals - the limited speed and control of the "artificial muscles" that perform such tasks. Currently, robotic muscles move 100 times slower than ours. But engineers using the Yip lab's new theory could boost those speeds - making robotic muscles 1,000 times faster than human muscles - with virtually no extra energy demands and the added bonus of a simpler design. This study appears in the Nov. 4 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
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Home >> EvolutionNovember 02, 2005
Beating the sub-wavelength limit
Classical particles can only pass though an aperture if they are smaller than the aperture. Quantum particles like atoms can only pass through an opening if their de Broglie wavelength is smaller than the opening. If the de Broglie wavelength is larger than the aperture, the atoms cannot pass through, even if their physical size is smaller than the aperture. Similarly, light can only pass through a slit if its wavelength is smaller than the width of the slit.
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Home >> EvolutionOctober 29, 2005
Time Machine
Everything about this clock is deeply unusual. For example, while nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth's axis.
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Home >> EvolutionOctober 25, 2005
Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines
Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines, the most comprehensive review of the field, co-authored by Robert A. Freitas Jr. and Ralph C. Merkle, is now freeky available online.
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Home >> EvolutionOctober 20, 2005
Engineers turn to biology for inspiration
If we have Batman and Spider-Man, why don't we have any mussel superheroes?" asks biochemist of the , Santa Barbara. Mussels may not be the biggest or the flashiest of sea creatures. But they do one thing exceedingly well. They make a glue that lets them anchor themselves firmly to a rock and remain there—drenched by water, buffeted by the ocean's waves. "I don't know any other adhesive that can do that," says Waite.
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Home >> EvolutionSeptember 01, 2005
Intra-segment evolution
The concept of user interfaces with evolving levels of complexity has come up in several recent conversations I've had with companies involved in this space. The basic premise is this: a user's needs change constantly throughout the ownership lifetime of their mobile device, therefore the interface should be capable of evolving to match those needs. The interface platform needs to teach itself to respond better to the needs of the user.
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Home >> EvolutionAugust 20, 2005
Digital answers to life on Earth
Scientists have unveiled plans to create a digital library of all life on Earth. They say that the Digital Automated Identification System (Daisy), which harnesses the latest advances in artificial intelligence and computer vision, will have an enormous impact on research into biodiversity and evolution.
Daisy will also give Britain's army of amateur naturalists unprecedented access to the world's taxonomic expertise: send Daisy a camera-phone picture of a plant or animal and, within seconds, you will get detailed information about what you are looking at.
Norman MacLeod, the Natural History Museum's keeper of palaeontology, has spent several years developing the new technology.
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Home >> EvolutionAugust 06, 2005
A step toward the $1,000 personal genome
The theoretical price of having one's personal genome sequenced just fell from the prohibitive $20 million dollars to about $2.2 million, and the goal is to reduce the amount further--to about $1,000--to make individualized prevention and treatment realistic.
The sharp drop is due to a new DNA sequencing technology developed by Harvard Medical School (HMS) researchers Jay Shendure, Gregory Porreca, George Church, and their colleagues, reported on August 4 in the online edition of Science. The team sequenced the E. coli bacterial genome at a fraction of the cost of conventional sequencing using off-the-shelf instruments and chemical reagents. Their technology appears to be even more accurate and less costly than a commercial DNA decoding technology reported earlier this week.
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Home >> EvolutionJuly 18, 2005
Virtual Culture
Virtual computer characters more accustomed to battling deranged alien monsters are about to take part in a unique social experiment.
A society of virtual "agents” - each with a remarkably realistic personality and the ability to learn and communicate - is being crafted by scientists from five European research institutes who hope to gain insights into the way human societies evolve.
The project, known as – or – brings together experts in artificial intelligence, linguistics, computer science and sociology. It is backed by a consortium consisting of the and in the UK, Tilberg and Universities in the Netherlands and in Hungary.
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Home >> EvolutionJuly 09, 2005
Neanderthal Genome May Be Reconstructed
German and U.S. scientists have launched a project to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome, the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said Wednesday.
The project, which involves isolating genetic fragments from fossils of the prehistoric beings who originally inhabited Europe, is being carried out at the Leipzig-based institute.
"The project is very new and is just at its beginning," said Sandra Jacob, a spokeswoman for the institute.
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Home >> EvolutionJune 21, 2005
Further steps towards artificial eggs and sperm
Human embryonic stem cells have been coaxed in the lab to develop into the early forms of cells which eventually become eggs or sperm, UK researchers have revealed.
Work by several groups has shown that a tiny proportion of human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) spontaneously develop into primordial germ cells when allowed to differentiate in a dish. In this latest study, Behrouz Aflatoonian and colleagues at the University of Sheffield, produced primordial germ cells which began to express the proteins characteristic of sperm cells, while others resembled eggs.
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Home >> EvolutionJune 18, 2005
Mind Science Foundation
Einstein once walked these hallways as did the bongo-drum beating physicist Richard Feynman. Both offered theories that turned the scientific doctrine of their time on its head.
Next week at the famed California Institute of Technology some of the world's leading researchers in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, neurology, artificial intelligence, philosophy and physics will gather to ponder one of the top questions in modern science -- an enigma that has eluded brilliant minds for centuries: how does consciousness arise in human beings?
"How does the pulsating gray matter in our brains give rise to the sensorial richness of the world around us and the intricate complexities of our own self-perception?" asks Joseph Dial, Executive Director of the Mind Science Foundation, which is the lead sponsor of this year's Cal-Tech conference.
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Home >> EvolutionJune 09, 2005
Intelligent Design
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Home >> EvolutionJune 07, 2005
The machine that can copy anything
A revolutionary machine that can copy itself and manufacture everyday objects quickly and cheaply could transform industry in the developing world, according to its creator.
The "self-replicating rapid prototyper," or "RepRap" is the brainchild of Dr. Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Bath in the UK.
It is based on rapid prototyping technology commonly used to manufacturer plastic components in industry from computer-generated blueprints -- effectively a form of 3D printer.
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Home >> EvolutionJune 06, 2005
IBM Aims To Simulate A Brain
IBM has embarked on a quest for the holy grail of neuroscience--the far-off goal of creating a computer simulation of the human brain.
When the first mammals evolved from reptiles 200 million years ago, one of the biggest changes was inside their heads. Their brain cells were structured together into columns, an innovation that could be repeated like a computer chip to make larger and more powerful minds-- from mice to cats and dogs to humans.
"This was the jump from reptiles to mammals," says Henry Markram, founder of the Brain/Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland. "It was like discovering a G5 processor or Pentium 4 and just copying it."
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Home >> EvolutionJune 05, 2005
Aging Universe May Still Be Spawning Massive Galaxies
NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer has spotted what appear to be massive "baby" galaxies in our corner of the universe. Previously, astronomers thought the universe's birth rate had dramatically declined and only small galaxies were forming.
"We knew there were really massive young galaxies eons ago, but we thought they had all matured into older ones more like our Milky Way. If these galaxies are indeed newly formed, then this implies parts of the universe are still hotbeds of galaxy birth," said Dr. Chris Martin. He is principal investigator for the Galaxy Evolution Explorer at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., and co-author of the study.
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Home >> EvolutionJune 03, 2005
Transhumanist Values
Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades. It promotes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the opportunities for enhancing the human condition and the human organism opened up by the advancement of technology. Attention is given to both present technologies, like genetic engineering and information technology, and anticipated future ones, such as molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.
The enhancement options being discussed include radical extension of human health-span, eradication of disease, elimination of unnecessary suffering, and augmentation of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities. Other transhumanist themes include space colonization and the possibility of creating superintelligent machines, along with other potential developments that could profoundly alter the human condition. The ambit is not limited to gadgets and medicine, but encompasses also economic, social, institutional designs, cultural development, and psychological skills and techniques.
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Home >> EvolutionMay 12, 2005
Dinosaur 'missing link' unearthed in Utah
Birdlike dinosaurs newly unearthed in Utah may be a missing link between primitive meat-eating creatures and more evolved vegetarians, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.
The 125-million-year-old fossils show features of two-legged carnivorous dinosaurs called maniraptorans, from which birds are believed to have evolved, they said.
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Home >> EvolutionMay 07, 2005
Animals that are part-human
On a farm about six miles outside this gambling town, Jason Chamberlain looks over a flock of about 50 smelly sheep, many of them possessing partially human livers, hearts, brains and other organs.
The University of Nevada-Reno researcher talks matter-of-factly about his plans to euthanize one of the pregnant sheep in a nearby lab. He can’t wait to examine the effects of the human cells he had injected into the fetus’ brain about two months ago.
Read Also: The New Ethics Guidelines
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Home >> EvolutionMay 02, 2005
The Genographic Project
The National Geographic Society, IBM, geneticist Spencer Wells, and the Waitt Family Foundation have launched the Genographic Project, a five-year effort to understand the human journey—where we came from and how we got to where we live today. This unprecedented effort will map humanity's genetic journey through the ages.
The fossil record fixes human origins in Africa, but little is known about the great journey that took Homo sapiens to the far reaches of the Earth. How did we, each of us, end up where we are? Why do we appear in such a wide array of different colors and features?
Such questions are even more amazing in light of genetic evidence that we are all related—descended from a common African ancestor who lived only 60,000 years ago
Read more about The Genographic Project @ The National Geographic
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Home >> EvolutionApril 15, 2005
Touching Molecules With Your Bare Hands
A group of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has developed a new way of looking at and interacting with molecules so small that they cannot be seen even with the world’s most powerful microscopes.
The new technology, which combines hand-held objects with sophisticated computer displays, is called Tangible Interfaces for Structural Molecular Biology, and its creators envision it as a technology useful for both educational and scientific research.
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Home >> EvolutionApril 09, 2005
Cockroaches Inspire Robot
To most of us, cockroaches are a nasty nuisance. But to a team of engineers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, the pesky critters are excellent role models.
So when the scientists set out to build an antenna for a robot, they turned to cockroach biology.
The sensor-laden antenna they built resembles a cockroach's navigational appendage. The antenna sends signals to the robot's electronic brain, enabling the machine to scurry along walls, turn corners, and avoid obstacles, just like a cockroach.
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Home >> EvolutionApril 04, 2005
Do black holes really exist?
Black holes. Superdense collapsed stars that helped make Steven Hawking famous, and introduced a legion of little kids to Maximillian Schell. Conventional wisdom has it that when a star reaches the end of its lifespan, it may collapse in on itself, becoming a singularity of such great density that nothing can escape its gravitational pull, including light. Obviously, this would make observing one difficult, to say the least. More recently, astrophysicists have postulated that supermassive black holes lie at the hearts of galaxies, including our own.
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Home >> EvolutionMarch 27, 2005
Robo-pessimism: Hubble's last frontier
We are entering an age of introspection that requires all scientists to ponder, "Am I tomorrow's scrap metal? Will I be replaced by my creations? Is my university degree in quantum theory pointless?"
The technological philosophy of Karl Marx deserves some reconsideration, as it relates directly to the conflict America is currently facing regarding robo-pessimism. Marx warned that Capitalists would increasingly invest more in new technologies and less in labor. The human race is on the verge of toppling into the chasm of human-humanoid separation, and the ridge on which we stand today may provide the last vista of human dominance.
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Home >> EvolutionMarch 24, 2005
Bird: How far is the journey of faith?
As we are in the middle of the Lenten season, it is appropriate to reflect on matters of spiritual magnitude. What does it mean to us to have faith in God and have we begun that journey of faith? What is required to have a personal relationship with the creator of the universe? How far or what is the size of the distance from where we are to where God is?
Scientists have long been seeking to understand the size of the created world, from its smallest extent to its largest extent, from some portion of the atom to the full scope of the universe. How far is the journey inward to the smallest speck and how far is the journey outward to the remotest place in the universe?
In studying the universe, it is found that the observable universe (using the Hubble space telescope) is estimated at about 58,700,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles. This is arrived at by multiplying how old we think the universe is by the speed of light, since we can only see out to that distance from which light can have reached us since the universe began.
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Home >> EvolutionMarch 20, 2005
A Dialectical-Materialist View of the Big Bang
The big bang, widely accepted in a variety of forms by most physical scientists today, was first put forward in rudimentary form by a Belgian priest-astronomer, Georges LeMaître, in 1927. LeMaître’s concept of an expanding universe (not yet as a consequence of a "big bang") was stimulated by the earlier discoveries of American astronomer Edwin Hubble and others that galaxies were in motion at high speeds and the work of the Soviet mathematician Alexander Friedmann, who showed that an expanding universe was a possible mathematical consequence of Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity. Astronomical observations established that the properties of the universe were essentially the same everywhere, independent of the position in the universe. Further work by Hubble showed that galaxies were moving away from each other at speeds related to the distance.
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Home >> EvolutionMarch 17, 2005
How to Talk to Aliens
There are currently various efforts going on around the world to receive signals from alien intelligences. These go by the general name of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). The basic idea is that sensitive radio telescopes are pointed at likely sources and record any radio signals they receive. These signals are then analysed to see if there is any indication that they might be artificially generated.
Unfortunately, there are many natural sources of radio waves in space, so it may be hard to pick out a message from the background noise. One of the main problems in SETI is the amount of computing power required to analyse the vast amount of data recorded by the radio telescopes. One ingenious solution is the SETI@home project. This involves installing a small program which runs in the background on your computer. When your computer has some idle time, it downloads some data from the Internet and starts analysing it, uploading the results when it has finished. By distributing the work amongst many computers (over five million people have joined the SETI@home project) everything proceeds a lot faster.
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Home >> EvolutionMarch 14, 2005
'Millipede' small scale MEMS
Given the rapidly increasing data volumes that are downloaded onto mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs, there is a growing demand for suitable storage media with more and more capacity. At CeBIT, IBM for the first time shows the prototype of the MEMS*- assembly of a nanomechanical storage system known internally as the "millipede" project. Using revolutionary nanotechnology, scientists at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland, have made it to the millionths of a millimeter range, achieving data storage densities of more than one terabit (1000 gigabit) per square inch, equivalent to storing the content of 25 DVDs on an area the size of a postage stamp.
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Home >> EvolutionMarch 03, 2005
DNA Wires
Researchers at Purdue University have attached magnetic "nanoparticles" to DNA and then cut these "DNA wires" into pieces, offering the promise of creating low-cost, self-assembling devices for future computers.
Findings are detailed in a paper published online in February in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The paper was written by Purdue graduate student Joseph M. Kinsella and Albena Ivanisevic, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and chemistry at Purdue.
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Home >> EvolutionFebruary 16, 2005
Immortality Through Google
Artists participating in a group show being held at the Big Easy's charmingly bizarre Barrister's Gallery through March 27 are getting a little taste of what their lives might be like after they are dead.
"What are memorials to the dead but touchstones for the great post-mortem popularity contest? He whose gravestone draws the biggest crowds wins," said gallery owner Andy Antippas, who is curating Hydriotaphia: New Orleans Artists Design Their Own Funeral Urns with artist Dan Teague.
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Home >> EvolutionFebruary 09, 2005
Tech Solves Hope Diamond Mystery
Researchers using computer analysis have traced the origin of the famed Hope Diamond, concluding that it was cut from a larger stone that was once part of the crown jewels of France.
A French connection had been suspected for the Hope, but the new study shows just how it would have fit inside the larger French Blue Diamond and how that gem was cut, Smithsonian gem curator Jeffrey Post explained.
The deep blue Hope Diamond is the centerpiece of the gem collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, famed for its claimed history of bad luck for its owners. It's been good fortune for the museum, though, drawing millions of visitors.
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Home >> EvolutionFebruary 08, 2005
What Exactly Is Under the Sea?
The nuclear-powered submarine USS San Francisco was heading toward Australia on Jan. 8 when it hit an underwater mountain not marked on naval charts. The impact brought the sub to an almost instantaneous stop, killing one crew member and seriously injuring 23 others.
The accident raises the question of why a state-of-the-art vessel in the world's most powerful military was effectively operating blind. The inner hull of the submarine was not breached, but one death resulted. Why, with sonar and satellite scanning, is so little known about the topography of the seabed?
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Home >> EvolutionFebruary 04, 2005
Machines that grow smarter with use
Among the handiest villains in science fiction are Computers That Know Too Much.
Think of the dream-weaving despots of The Matrix or murderous HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But in reality, even the most super supercomputer lacks the reasoning capacity of a child engrossed in a textbook.
Computers can't read the way we do.
They can't learn or reason like us.
Narrowing that cognitive gap between humans and machines - creating a computer that can read and learn at a sophisticated level - is a big goal of artificial intelligence researchers.
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Home >> EvolutionFebruary 02, 2005
Robots acquire a sex drive
Scientists have made them walk and talk. There are even robots that can run. But a South Korean professor is poised to take their development several steps further, giving cybersex new meaning.
Kim Jong-hwan, a leading authority on technology and ethics of robotics and the director of the ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Centre, has developed artificial chromosomes that he says will allow robots to feel lusty, and may even lead to them reproducing.
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Home >> EvolutionJanuary 29, 2005
A Century of Einstein
If you think it's sometimes hard to understand how a teenager's mind works, have some sympathy for Albert Einstein's mother. When he was just a teenager, Einstein was pondering what a light wave would look like if he could observe it while moving at light speed.
That's just the sort of gee-whiz anecdote that can distance normal people from Einstein's achievements (and from physics in general). But what Einstein did 100 years ago this year is neither irrelevant to everyday life nor merely arcane scientific lore. Without the revolutionary papers he wrote in 1905, we would barely recognize the world around us. Where would we be without him?
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Home >> EvolutionJanuary 17, 2005
Life, Reinvented
One of Endy's friends at MSI, Rob Carlson, charted the rates at which various biotechnologies were improving. The DNA-reading machines used by the Human Genome Project were doubling in efficiency every 18 months. DNA synthesis was accelerating even more quickly. If reality kept up with these "Carlson curves," then by 2010 a single lab worker would be able to synthesize a couple of human genomes from scratch every day. No more need for DNA bashing - just write out the sequence you want and synthesize it straightaway.
The Carlson curves also showed that the price of DNA synthesis was falling rapidly. That trend has only continued. In 2000, the cost of assembling sequences to order was roughly $10 to $12 per base pair. Today, it's down to $2. Some scientists foresee DNA synthesis dropping to 1 cent per base pair within a couple of years. That's a gene for 10 bucks, a bacterial genome for the price of a car.
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Home >> EvolutionJanuary 04, 2005
How Water Molecules are Connected
Water may be the most important molecule on Earth, but our understanding of its properties is embarrassingly limited. In solid ice form, water takes on numerous phases and structures that can be studied by means of diffraction techniques. As a liquid, however, water poses a frustrating structural puzzle because of the complex hydrogen bonding that forms a disordered network. Recently, researchers from the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, the BESSY Laboratory, Stockholm University, Linköping University, and Utrecht University have used the APS to obtain detailed information about the nearest neighbor coordination geometry in liquid water.
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Home >> EvolutionDecember 06, 2004
Military Minds Turn to Evolution's Arms Race
Inspiration for a new defence analysis program has come from the Cambrian, a period in geological time some 500 million years ago. Running in parallel with current systems, the new "Cambrian program" will take perhaps the broadest overview of our global social and defence systems of all, drawing inspiration from the events of evolution's Big Bang.
The threat to global security through time can be compared with the evolution of life, or at least that is a possibility being seriously explored. The arms race has periods of activity when a new type of threat emerges, and stasis when the next is in the making.
Evolution proceeds in a similar manner that was described by the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould as "punctuated equilibrium". Explosive events in evolutionary activity or natural catastrophes are recorded in the fossil record, such as the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but then there is always ralm in between.
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Home >> EvolutionNovember 25, 2004
'Swarm-bots' offer sniff of the future
Andy Russell does not object to sniffer dogs. "They find leaks in oil pipelines, they find people, they detect drugs and explosives. Obviously they're very important," he says. But they do have weaknesses. They get hungry. They get bored. And if sent into a room filled with poisonous gas, they die. Clearly, there is room for improvement.
On Russell's desk in the engineering department at Monash university, Melbourne, Australia, is a prototype of what he hopes will one day provide a less vulnerable alternative. It doesn't look much. Its body is a 10cm diameter disc and instead of legs, it has small wheels. But this robot can lay scent trails, and can follow them.
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Home >> EvolutionNovember 22, 2004
Nanomechanical memory demoed
A bit -- the basic unit of computer information -- can be made from anything that can be switched between two states, which represent 1 and 0.
Computer chips use the presence and absence of electric current to represent 1 and 0; disk drives use positive and negative magnetic poles. The 19th- and early 20th-century precursors to today's computers used mechanical rather than electrical elements to store and process data.
The rise of nanotechnology has led many researchers to revisit mechanical computing. Nanotechnology has yielded microscopic materials that range from microns, or thousandths of a millimeter -- around cell size -- to nanometers, or millionths of a millimeter -- the realm of molecules. "It turns out that... nanomechanical memory cells, due to their size and speed, could outperform their counterparts in magnetoelectric systems," said Pritiraj Mohanty, an assistant professor of physics at Boston University.
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Home >> EvolutionNovember 09, 2004
Molecules form nano containers
Researchers from the University of Minnesota and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel have found a way to coax the self-assembly of minuscule multicompartment structures.
The structures could eventually be used in drug delivery systems, according to the researchers. They would be especially appropriate for applications that require different chemicals to be delivered to the same place at the same time in precise proportions.
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Home >> EvolutionOctober 29, 2004
Scientists zero in on why time flows in one direction
The big bang could be a normal event in the natural evolution of the universe that will happen repeatedly over incredibly vast time scales as the universe expands, empties out and cools off, according to two University of Chicago physicists.
“We like to say that the big bang is nothing special in the history of our universe,” said Sean Carroll, an Assistant Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago. Carroll and University of Chicago graduate student Jennifer Chen will electronically publish a paper describing their ideas at http://arxiv.org/.
Carroll and Chen’s research addresses two ambitious questions: why does time flow in only one direction, and could the big bang have arisen from an energy fluctuation in empty space that conforms to the known laws of physics?
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Home >> EvolutionSeptember 07, 2004
The Evolution Will Be Mechanized
The rate of technological change is dizzying, and it's only getting faster. In September at Stanford, the Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change is acknowledging the trend with its second annual Accelerating Change conference. The 2003 confab was billed as "the first in the world to focus on the multidisciplinary implications of accelerating change and the multidisciplinary implications of accelerating change and the consequences of a technological singularity." What is a technological singularity? A moment when runaway ad-vances outstrip human comprehension and all our knowledge and experience becomes useless as a guidepost to the future.
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