The advice got Wintermute thinking. What was the most valuable compound they could make with the toolkit of synthetic biology? Some research came up with a few candidates including a few very sophisticated cancer drugs. But another compound was up there in monetary terms: LSD. The value by weight was astronomical.
Wintermute and his colleagues had a good laugh about that. But the more they looked into it, the more interesting - and viable - the drug looked. Around 20 tonnes of lysergic acid, a precursor of LSD, are made each year and turned into real medicines, such as nicergoline, a treatment for dementia. The drug is purified from big vats of fungus (which make the compound naturally) using technology developed decades ago.
With the tools of synthetic biology, Wintermute thought they might do better. The ergot fungus takes lysergic acid and turns it into a huge variety of exotic molecules. They could mix and match biological pathways from different species of ergot fungus and make potentially new drug molecules. They might even come up with a next generation dementia drug.
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via guardian.co.uk
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The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is at Portrack House, near Dumfries in South West Scotland. It is a private garden created by Charles Jencks. The garden is inspired by science and mathematics, with sculptures and landscaping on these themes, such as Black Holes and Fractals.
The garden is private, however it is often open on one day each year through Scotland's Gardens Scheme.
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Meet Callicebus caquetensis: a new species of titi monkey that has been discovered in the Amazon.
The monkey was found in a region called Caquetá, in the south of Colombia, which had been inaccessible for many years due to a violent insurgence.
About the size of a cat, the Caquetá titi has grey-brown hair and makes an extremely complex call. Unusually for a primate, it forms lifelong monogamous pairs.
It is thought that there are less than 250 Caquetá titis in the wild, thanks to the destruction of their forest habitats, meaning they are critically endangered.
The discovery is described in the journal Primate Conservation.
(Image: Javier García / Conservation International)
See more: pictures of the day.via newscientist.com -
Thanks Science!
British researchers say the chicken must have come first as the formation of eggs is only possible thanks to a protein found in the chicken’s ovaries.
‘It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first,’ said Dr Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University, who worked with counterparts at Warwick University.
more at Metro.co.uk -
This week in science is absolutely blowing my mind.Earlier this week scientists announced that they had created the first living synthetic cell.
The researchers constructed a bacterium's "genetic software" and transplanted it into a host cell. The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species "dictated" by the synthetic DNA.
Image by woodleywonderworks via Flickr
We don't really know what all this means right now. There are some interesting hypotheticals on what can be achieved. But the ones forefront, it seems, are engineering awesome cancer-killing lifeforms, unique drugs, and cleaning up the crap we love dumping into the oceans and air.People are questioning the negative impact, but I agree with commenter dagfooyo over in the BoingBoing discussion:We humans are always so worried that we can doom the planet by creating some genetically anomalous creature. But we fail to consider that nature has been randomly creating new mutant creatures for billions of years - and the only ones alive today are the baddest of badasses. No way are we gonna accidentally create something in a lab that can beat out billions of years of evolution and take over the planet. I mean unless we somehow combined influenza, velociraptors and cockroaches to create a constantly reproducing and mutating vicious intelligent killing machine that is impossible to kill. THEN we'd be in trouble.
Then, in news from the quantum computing front, there is some fantastic news. Scientists were able to transfer information simultaneously across 10 miles of space.Quantum teleportation has achieved a new milestone or, should we say, a new ten-milestone: scientists have recently had success teleporting information between photons over a free space distance of nearly ten miles, an unprecedented length. The researchers who have accomplished this feat note that this brings us closer to communicating information without needing a traditional signal, and that the ten miles they have reached could span the distance between the surface of the earth and space.
Pairing this with the recent advancement in using lasers to prolong the life of quantum data, and we have a recipe for awesome. The life of the data, and the distance of travel for quantum information have long been the 2 main points of failure for quantum computing. Looks like we may be putting those stumbling blocks behind us.
(Thanks Technoccult) -
The findings, published in Nature, are probably best described as "mind blowing." Devices with this level of complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500 years, and the Antikythera mechanism's compactness actually bests the later designs. Probably built around 150 B.C., the Antikythera mechanism can perform a number of functions just by turning a crank on the side.
via io9.comBeen following the Antikythera phenomenon for most of my life...since I gained interest around age 11. It is so amazing that people overlook simple - yet mind-blowing - discoveries such as this.
Don't you understand? We had advanced computers and calculating mechanisms 1500 years before ANYTHING ELSE of its kind was seen. And this device was seemingly mass-produced. The encroaching hordes of religious warriors and dogmatic belief systems have set us back thousands of years. -
A chimp that deliberately fashions discs of concrete to later hurl at zoo visitors is being hailed as definitive proof that the apes plan for future events. Although similar claims have previously been made about chimps using tools to collect food, what sets Santino – a 30-year-old chimp from Furuvik zoo in Sweden – apart, is that his behaviour, and therefore his apparent state of mind, when collecting the ammunition seems markedly different from when he launches his attacks. "The chimp has without exception been calm during gathering or manufacture of the ammunition, in contrast to the typically aroused state [when he throws the rocks]," says Mathias Osvath of the University of Lund, also in Sweden.
So, we are not the only beings that create and stockpile weapons for battle. As Jane Goodall states in Ervin Laszlo's Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos, "Sadly, also like us, they [chimps] have a dark side: they are aggressively territorial, and may perform acts of extreme brutality and even wage a kind of primative war." Perhaps the chimpanzees will help us "tone down" the primate races so that another species may rise in our place.via New Scientist
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Researchers in Central America have discovered a spider that dines on plants. B. kiplingi evades dangerous ants to feast on the tips of the acacia plant.
In Mexico and Costa Rica, the researchers logged 72 hours of spider observation, noting more than 150 instances of vegetarian snacking. Beltian bodies made up more than 90% of the spiders' meals in Mexico. The Costa Rican spiders weren't as strict, dining 60% on Beltian bodies and the rest on acacia nectar, ant larvae, and other insects. In both places, the spiders were adept at evading the aggressive ants whose food they swiped. They're so agile that the ants "just can never catch them," Meehan says.
via ScienceMag -
The Yoshimoto Cube transforms into two stellated rhombic dodecahedrons. Awesome.Toys like this need to be in every school. Having your mind blown on a daily basis is probably really healthy.
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Studies on infants have shown that human children seem to have an innate connection with numbers. Story and discussion at PinkOnBrown.
