This week in science is absolutely blowing my mind.
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.
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.
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.
