Now on ScienceBlogs: Will Quantum Fusion Save the Day?
Commuting Dust Mites This is a 285 micrometer racecar, printed at the Vienna University of Technology. Credit: Vienna University of Technology Imagine a car small enough for a dust mite. Crazy, right?...
Homeless Hotspots, animated Obviously, since the hardware can be stolen, this would work better if the gear was surgically implanted in the homeless people who could then constitute a new race of cyborg servants who would not have to be paid much....
Hidden Beauty in Turboencabulators You might ask yourself, "What in the world is this guy in the white lab coat talking about?"...
Recharge your phone with tiny turbines attached to your mouth? I'm not recommending this. In fact, I may recommend against it. But I thought you should know:...
Don't Throw Out Those Introns A somewhat accidental discovery and random meetings between proteins in a cell: These are the subjects of two new online articles. Each, it its way, involves a technological advance that will, in turn, lead to further scientific discovery. The first...
Running Netflix on Linux Do you have a Roku with which you watch Netflix? Do you watch Netflix on a Mac? If so, you are using either the Linux operating system or a closely related "*Nix" operating system. (Mac's run on a form of OS that is the same...
The True Steel of the Ancestors The amount of radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere has increased, and these get into steel, making it weakly radioactive when air is blown into the furnace.
Knowing the Score on Relationships A new data analysis tool is able to find interesting relationships and trends in complex data sets - relationships that are invisible to other types of statistical analyses.
Greetings from the Children of Planet Earth In 1977, NASA sent a pair of unmanned probes named Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 into space. Among the infrared spectrometers and radio receivers included on each probe were identical copies of the same non-scientific object: the Voyager Golden...
Air Guitar, Now Couch Guitar! "Air guitar" has taken on almost cult status in some circles. How about "couch guitar"?...
Resurrecting Ancient Life Russian scientists succeeded in growing a plant from 30,000 year-old (late Pleistocene) fruit tissue! The fruit tissue was found in an ancient squirrel's burrow frozen in the permafrost. You are probably thinking, what in the world does this have to...
Extreme Dwarfism Computing Brookesia micra sp. n. from Nosy Hara, northern Madagascar. Imagine a supercomputer suitable for this cute little guy, the recently discovered Brookesia micra....
Celestial Square One On Dynamics of Cats, Steinn Sigurðsson flags a few foreboding articles on the future of NASA. Sigurðsson says the orbiting telescope Galex, or Galaxy Evolution Explorer, will be shut down later this year despite continuing to function. NASA has withdrawn...
How to Wreck Your Career With Social Media This was the title of the group discussion I led at Boskone on Saturday, and since it's probably relevant to the interests of people reading this blog, I figure it's worth posting a quick recap. Of course, between the unfamiliar...
First Human-Robonaut Handshake in Outer Space This is a feel good story of the day - the world's first human to humanoid robot handshake, in space! The robot even sent out a tweet....
2011 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners The following is a subset of the LinuxQuestionsDotOrg's Members' Choice Awards:...
Environmentally Friendly Hard Drive Case This is interesting:...
Changing the rep of Fungi one mushroom-based robot thingie-builder at a time It's alive!!!!! And, it's wallboard....
Reading Diary: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Walter Isaacson's book on Apple founder & CEO Steve Jobs is a fairly long book. It's not exactly a thriller either, especially since I know how it ends. As a result it took me a while to plow through it....
Real Science and Health News: From a Truth Vigilante "If people decide they're going to deny the facts of history and the facts of science and technology, there's not much you can do with them. For most of them, I just feel sorry that we failed in their education."...
myMac 01 I am a Mac. Oh, wait, no, different commercial. Let me start again. I have a Mac. I call it myMac and I've only had it for a few hours. Those of you who know me know I could not possibly own a Mac, so...
Defeating Hubble, from the ground! "The Earth's atmosphere is an imperfect window on the universe... atmospheric turbulence blurs the images of celestial objects, even when they are viewed through the most powerful ground-based telescopes." -John Bahcall There's no doubt that the Hubble Space Telescope has...
Lap Desk? It's apparently a good day for asking questions of the readership, so here's another one: as SteelyKid has gotten older and more active, she's become a real drain on productivity, especially at bedtime. Bedtime is now a process rather like...
"Incentives" for 5 Star Reviews on Ecommerce Sites In case you missed it, here's a pointer to a recent Times story concerning baked reviews on Amazon and the...
Weekend Diversion: The Best (and Easiest) Charity Ever! "You cannot hope to build a better world without improving individuals. We all must work for our own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity." -Marie Curie Most of us remember the importance of...
“I call it Internet Exploder. Like Unikraken, I only use it to download better browsers.” JasonTD on Windows Users: Do Not Press Just Any Key!
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Some engineers use cranes and steel to make their designs reality, but synthetic biologists engineer using tools on a different scale: DNA and the other molecular components of living cells. Synthetic biology uses cellular systems and structures to produce artificial models based on natural order. Read these posts from the ScienceBlogs archives for more:
Pharyngula May 30, 2007
The Loom January 31, 2008
Discovering Biology in a Digital World July 2, 2006