Cells as Living Calculators
Using analog computation circuits, MIT engineers design cells that can compute logarithms, divide and take square roots.
MIT engineers have transformed bacterial cells into living calculators that can compute logarithms, divide, and take square roots, using three or fewer genetic parts.
These are… actually pretty inspiring.
Cool.
Forever reblog.
“you are never taller than when you stand up for yourself”
thats just awesome
“You’re the result of 4 billion years of evolutionary success; F***ING ACT LIKE IT.”
My fave right there.
“Bite off more than you can chew and chew it” is my life motto
“When life gets harder, you must have leveled up”
Love that
I need to make the ‘level up’ one my personal life motto
• Accidentally close a tab? Ctrl+Shift+T reopens it.
• Bananas release dopamine, eat them when you’re sad.
• CTRL+SHIFT+ESC is the one handed version of CTRL+ALT+DEL
• Don’t brush your teeth hard, it makes them sensitive and removes enamel.
• Don’t like spiders? Put citronella oil on your walls and they will not go there.
• Drink one glass of water for every alcoholic drink you have, you’ll get drunk without getting a hangover.
• Get clear ice cubes by boiling water before freezing it
• Heal paper cuts and immediately stop the pain with chapstick.
• If you accidentally write on your dry erase board with a permanent marker, scribble over it with a dry eraser marker to remove it.
• If your shoes smell, put them in the freezer overnight, it will kill the bacteria.
• Make bug bites stop itching with a banana peel.
• Make a paper longer with 12-point text, but 14-point periods and commas.
• Need to get around a blocked website at work? Try replacing the http:// with https://
• Never send your resume as a word file (unless asked) Instead, save it to a pdf file, it’s much cleaner and professional looking.
• Pick a flavor of gum you don’t normally chew, and chew it while studying during a test.
• Place a piece of bread in a container with your homemade cookies and they will stay soft.
• Put a dry towel into a dryer with wet clothes, they will dry faster.
• Put toothpaste on a pimple and it will dry out.
• Practise fake smiling in the mirror every day before going to work/school, you’ll genuinely start to feel happier.
• Rub canola/olive oil on knives before cutting onions, you won’t cry, alternatively chew gum and you won’t either.
• Short on time with a wrinkled dress shirt? Hang it up in the bathroom while showering to steam it flat.
• The night before, place things you don’t want to forget the next morning on top of your shoes.
• Use hydrogen peroxide to remove blood stains from clothing.
• When cleaning windows use newspapers or coffee filters instead of paper towels, they will not leave streaks.
• When microwaving bread products/pizza put a glass of water in with it, it will keep your bread from going spongy.
• When you move into a new place you’re renting, take pictures of any and all damage, then post them on facebook (privately if preferred) so you can use the reference date as proof you didn’t do it.
• When searching plane tickets online delete your cookies prior, prices go up when you visit a site multiple times.
“Most of biotechnology has not yet been imagined, let alone made true. By freely sharing important basic tools everyone can work better together,” Bonnet said.
^ “has not yet been imagined” … this is why I like biotechnology fiction, position paper-style writing, debates, proposals, ideas, and concepts at least as much as the real laboratory reduction to practice that is available at present. Also, I think this article gives thorough yet comprehensible coverage of the subject matter for a general audience.
You probably missed it, but a paper in the March 28 issue of Science with the dry-as-dust title, “Amplifying Genetic Logic Gates,” marks a transformative moment in human history. Thanks to a synthetic snippet of DNA, it is now possible to use living genes as computers. This changes pretty much everything. In a generation, the world is going to be an unrecognizable place.
Right, so the scientists in China are really taking an interesting approach. Traditionally, scientists have engineered animals by focusing on a specific gene first. Say they find a gene that controls cancer, they want to study cancer. They will tinker with it to create an animal that gets cancer. That’s a slow and very deliberate process.
The Chinese researchers have decided they want to speed up the creation of mutant mice. So what they’re essentially doing is randomly disabling mouse genes one at a time. And they do this using what’s called a jumping gene, and essentially they insert it or inject it into a mouse embryo. And it - the jumping gene jumps into a random place in the mouse’s genome and disrupts a gene there.
Then only when the mouse grows up and starts exhibiting various deformities do scientists really figure out what kind of gene they’ve disrupted. And so by doing this over and over and over again, they’ve created hundreds of different kinds of mutant mice. And there are mice that are prone to tumors. There are mice that get male pattern baldness. There are mice that have various behavioral abnormalities.
One of them buries marbles endlessly, it sort of seems to be an OCD-like condition. There’s a strange kind of mouse that only seems to be able to make left turns. And they’re getting all these crazy mutants just by essentially throwing darts at a genetic dartboard and seeing what happens.
(…)
There’s a mouse that has tusks like an elephant might have. They’re - sort of anything you can imagine is being created in this laboratory.
| — | Emily Anthes on bioengineering animals (via NPR) |
Drew Endy wants to build a programming language for the body.
Endy is the co-director of the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology — BIOFAB, for short — where he’s part of a team that’s developing a language that will use genetic data to actually program biological cells. That may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but the project is already underway, and the team intends to open source the language, so that other scientists can use it and modify it and perfect it.
This Week in Science - April 29 - May 5, 2013:
- Smallest movie ever made here.
- Sea horse armor inspires engineers here.
- New insect-eye-like-camera here.
- Bioengineered windpipe here.
- Bionic ear here.
- Anti-matter falling up here.
- Harvard robotocists fly RoboBee here.
- Saturn’s seasonal magnetosphere here.
- Vega launches here.
- Climate change causing painted turtles extinction here.
- Black hole birth observed for first time here.
- New species of mole rat here.
so I’ve been thinking about going to school for bioengineering. I’m not sure if I want to make the jump though. I’ve been spending my time on painting and learning about history. But I think both of those things I’m fine with doing on my own time. My only problem is that I don’t think I’m that good at math……
I have, slightly, the same problem. I want to go into bioengineering but it’s impossible to find any affordable universities that offer the program. I’m also horrible at math. I was in my teachers math room every morning last semester for help.
(manboobz.com) - And so the MRAs have found yet another woman to hate.
Earlier this month, as many of you no doubt know, a Men’s Rights group sponsored a lecture at the University of Toronto. The event drew protesters, and the protesters drew MRAs with video cameras. One of the MRAs filmed a confrontation between a red-haired feminist activist and a number of MRAs who continually interrupted her as she tried to read a brief statement.
Her crime? She wasn’t exactly polite in responding to the interrupters. And so, after video of the confrontation was uploaded to YouTube, and linked to on the Men’s Rights subreddit and elsewhere, she became a virtual punching bag for the angry misogynists of the internet.
A Voice for Men, naturally, led the charge, running an article by Canadian MRA Dan Perrins labeling her “Little red frothing fornication mouth” and commenting on her breasts. The Amazing Atheist weighed in with a video I couldn’t bring myself to even watch.
Since being targeted by angry YouTube misogynists and MRAs, the red-haired activist has received death threats, rape threats and literally hundreds of other hateful and harassing messages. She’s also been “doxxed” — that is, she’s had her personal information plastered all over the internet, including on A Voice for Men’s forum. Ten days after being uploaded to YouTube, the video of her faceoff against the MRAs has garnered more than 300,000 views, and YouTubers are still leaving threats and insults and crude sexual comments.
This, apparently, is what “Men’s Human Rights Activism” consists of: the doxxing and harassment of individual women.
There are screen caps of several of the messages she has been receiving under the read more link.
Be warned, several of them are very triggering. This kind of thing needs to see the light of day, though, as MRAs like to pretend that this doesn’t happen.
THIS NEEDS MORE FUCKING NOTES
Any motherfucker who tries to defend the Men’s Rights Movement to me will be reminded of situations like this and others.
Because if a woman DARES to debate a man and tells him to rightfully shut the fuck up so she can get a fucking sentence out? MRAs respond with SEXIST names ( little red frothing fornication mouth??? ) and slurs, threaten her with rape and death, and release her private information to unknown and unstable individuals and groups.
LITERALLY their only problem with this woman was that she tried to debate some of them and got mad when they wouldn’t let her speak. She didn’t threaten them, tell them to get raped or anything else. She tried to make a fucking statement and told them to shut the fuck up for a second. THAT”S IT.
That’s what MRAs believe is deserving of such vile, violent, and dehumanizing behavior.
So, no, I do not give a fuck about the “poor menz” and I will continue not to give a fuck until I see the majority of men in this world slap behavior like this down and slap it down loudly, and publicly.
I am so sick of your fucking bullshit, men. SICK OF IT. Between this and the recent bout of teenage rape victims killing themselves because people continue to harass them with VIDEOS AND PHOTOS of their rapes while simultaneously telling them they were NOT raped?? I AM DONE.
I AM FUCKING DONE.
Don’t look at me. Don’t talk to me. I hate you.
How do MRAs even think they’re fucking right anymore? You can just pull out a fucking history book and show that they’re doing the EXACT FUCKING THING as people who have oppressed other have done. AND THEY’D STILL THINK THEY WERE SOMEHOW RIGHT.
