JAXA announced Saturday (Sept. 22) that two tiny hoppers had made it safely onto the surface of the asteroid Ryugu.
Read more
Only time will tell what new forms life will take.
Joyce seeks to understand life by trying to generate simple living systems in the lab. In doing so, he and other synthetic biologists bring new kinds of life into being. Every attempt to synthesize novel life forms points to the fact that there are still more, perhaps infinite, possibilities for how life could be. Synthetic biologists could change the way life evolves, or its capacity to evolve at all. Their work raises new questions about a definition of life based on evolution. How to categorize life that is redesigned, the product of a break in the chain of evolutionary descent?
An origin story for synthetic biology goes like this: in 1997, Drew Endy, one of the founders of synthetic biology and now a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University in California, was trying to create a computational model of the simplest life form he could find: the bacteriophage T7, a virus that infects E coli bacteria. A crystalline head atop spindly legs, it looks like a landing capsule touching down on the Moon as it grabs onto its bacterial host. The bacteriophage is so simple that by some definitions it is not even alive. (Like all viruses, it depends on the molecular machinery of its host cell to replicate.) Bacteriophage T7 has only 56 genes, and Endy thought it might be possible to create a model that accounted for every part of the phage and how those parts worked together: a perfect representation that would predict how the phage would change if any one of its genes were moved or deleted.
Endy built a series of bacteriophage T7 mutants, systematically knocking out genes or scrambling their location in the tiny T7 genome. But the mutant phages conformed to the model only some of the time. A change that should have caused them to weaken would instead have their progeny bursting open E coli cells twice as fast as before. It wasn’t working. Eventually, Endy had a realization: “If we want to model the natural world, we have to rewrite [the natural world] to be modellable.” Instead of trying to make a better map, change the territory. Thus was born the field of synthetic biology. Borrowing techniques from software engineering, Endy began to “refactor” bacteriophage T7’s genome. He made bacteriophage T7.1, a life form designed for ease of interpretation to the human mind.
Hayabusa-2:! Japan’s space agency (JAXA) has made history by successfully landing two robotic explorers on the surface of an asteroid. The two small “rovers”, which were despatched from the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on Friday, will move around the 1km-wide space rock known as Ryugu. The asteroid’s low gravity means they can hop across it, capturing temperatures and images of the surface. “Both rovers are in good condition,” the agency confirmed on Saturday…here: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45598156
Pictures have emerged from the surface of an asteroid after Japan landed two robotic rovers on it.
Read more
Should we trust technology experts? We live in times of incredible innovations and impressive complexity. The last 30 years of technological development overturned our society, and the next 30 will likely reshape the foundations of what it means to be human. Machines have been the wealth engines of our industrial modernity, while data control and artificial intelligence will structure the power battlefields of this century.
It’s not hard then to understand why technologists, computer scientists, engineers, tech-entrepreneurs, IT experts, data analysts, etc — dress the status of champions in our age. They are shipping us into the wonders of Web 3.0, Industry 4.0, 5G communications, the blockchain transition, the G (eneticengineering). R (obotics). AI. N (anotechnologies) Revolution…and another thousand of cryptic acronyms forbidden to ordinary mortals.
We are flooded with tech-narratives. Let’s start by playing with our imaginations. What does naturally come to your mind if I say:
Read more
Given the speed at which reproductive technology has advanced over the past few decades, it doesn’t feel all that far-fetched: A future in which anyone can have a baby, regardless of creed or need, whenever they feel like it. Already, in our present moment, one can buy or sell eggs and sperm; we can give embryos genetic tests to ensure the children they produce don’t have any life-threatening hereditary conditions; and babies can even be born, now, with the genetic information from three parents.
So it follows that we should soon be able to to have pregnancy outside the body — artificial wombs. R ight?
You’d think. Scientists have already figured out how to mimic many of the body’s processes for techniques like in-vitro fertilization and even hormonal birth control. But the ways mothers’ bodies support and signal fetuses is incredibly complicated — and the science isn’t yet at a point where we can simulate these processes. And because scientists are prohibited from studying embryos 14 days past their fertilization, that’s one sci-fi vision that is not likely to come to fruition.
Read more
DONATE TO CAMPAIGN ► https://goo.gl/kfGdnh
Original Video ► https://goo.gl/YrjnLa
Website ► https://www.lifespan.io/
“Conquering the negative effects of aging is one of the oldest dreams of humanity, and now through the steady progress of science, we are poised to fulfill that dream.
Whether this occurs in 20 years or 200 is largely a question of funding. The best way to accelerate this process is by mobilizing those who desire the option of a longer and healthier life into a cohesive social force — crowdfunding relevant research and advocating for its benefits to society.