wildcat2030:

Hoping to give new meaning to the term “natural light,” a small group of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric streetlamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read by.

The project, which will use a sophisticated form of genetic engineering called synthetic biology, is attracting attention not only for its audacious goal, but for how it is being carried out.

Rather than being the work of a corporation or an academic laboratory, it will be done by a small group of hobbyist scientists in one of the growing number of communal laboratories springing up around the nation as biotechnology becomes cheap enough to give rise to a do-it-yourself movement.

The project is also being financed in a D.I.Y. sort of way: It has attracted more than $250,000 in pledges from about 4,500 donors in about two weeks on the Web site Kickstarter. (via A Dream of Glowing Trees Is Assailed for Gene-Tinkering - NYTimes.com)

(via quantum-alchemy)

smarterplanet:

New Plasma Device Considered The ‘Holy Grail’ Of Energy Generation And Storage

Scientists at the University of Missouri have devised a new way to create and control plasma that could transform American energy generation and storage.

Randy Curry, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri’s College of Engineering, and his team developed a device that launches a ring of plasma at distances of up to two feet. Although the plasma reaches a temperature hotter than the surface of the sun, it doesn’t emit radiation and is completely safe in proximity to humans.

While most of us are familiar with three states of matter – liquid, gas and solid – there is also a fourth state known as plasma, which includes things such as fire and lightning. Life on Earth depends on the energy emitted by plasma produced during fusion reactions within the sun.

The secret to Curry’s success was developing a way to make plasma form its own self-magnetic field, which holds it together as it travels through the air.

“Launching plasma in open air is the ‘Holy Grail’ in the field of physics,” said Curry.

more

(via futurescope)

8bitfuture:

2009’s fastest supercomputer to be dismantled.

The IBM Roadrunner was at the number 1 slot on the Top 500 supercomputer list three times during 2008/2009, but the cost to run it compared to that of other systems has meant it no longer makes sense to keep it running. It will be dismantled next month.

Roadrunner was the first supercomputer to reach one petaflop, or one million billion floating point operations per second. The machine at the top of the most recent list has been benchmarked at 17.6 petaflops, with researchers now looking at how to achieve exascale speeds - 1000 times faster than a petaflop.

Petaflop machines aren’t automatically obsolete—a petaflop is still speedy enough to crack the top 25 fastest supercomputers. Roadrunner is thus still capable of performing scientific work at mind-boggling speeds, but has been surpassed by competitors in terms of energy efficiency. For example, in the November 2012 ratings Roadrunner required 2,345 kilowatts to hit 1.042 petaflops and a world ranking of #22. The supercomputer at #21 required only 1,177 kilowatts, and #23 (clocked at 1.035 petaflops) required just 493 kilowatts.

(via 8bitfuture)

joshbyard:

Genetic Computing: Researchers Split Viral Gene to Create Biological AND Gate

In recent years, researchers in the messy world of biology have been able to build systems that function like the clean, binary switches on computer chips…

Unfortunately, most of these share a significant limitation: they rely on proteins from bacteria that act as switches to turn genes on and off under specific conditions. We know about only a limited number of these genetic switches, which may set a severe limit on the number of logical operations we can string together inside a cell.

A paper in this week’s PNAS describes a system that may allow us to get around this limitation. The new method takes a protein from a virus that infects bacteria and cuts it in two, making a pair of genes (A and B) that each produce part of the mature protein. The two parts then act as a biological version of an AND logic gate, with output (in the form of protein activity) present only when both A and B interact.

When either or both A and B are missing, the output is off. In biological terms, the inputs usually involve a simple molecule that can be sensed by proteins inside a bacteria. This paper, for example, used two kinds of sugars (arabinose and lactose).

When the sugars are present, they attach to proteins inside the cell, activating genes that are controlled by those proteins. To make an AND gate, you need to design a bit of biology that can respond to both of these signals—it should be active only when both a gene regulated by arabinose and a gene regulated by lactose are each active.

(via Wetware advances: Biological logic gate built by splitting viral gene | Ars Technica)

(via futurescope)

8bitfuture:

Ancient fossils found in meteorite.

A newly published research paper reveals an analysis of fragments of a fireball that appeared in the sky over Sri Lanka late last year. Researchers at Cardiff University analysed many samples collected in the following days, and after ruling out terrestrial contamination on three different pieces, have found carbon-rich microfossil structures within the rocks.

According to the team, their analysis “provides clear and convincing evidence that these obviously ancient remains of extinct marine algae found embedded in the Polonnaruwa meteorite are indigenous to the stones and not the result of post-arrival microbial contaminants”.

Although the research shows the stone pieces came from space, the paper could not reveal for certain where they originally came from. In fact they could be from Earth - a remnant of one of many asteroid impacts in Earths history which eject rocks into space. This is unlikely, however, as one of the structures found on the stones is so extremely long and thin it seems to have been formed in a low-gravity, low-pressure environment.

(via 8bitfuture)