genetics
Design
Bioluminescent Lamp Glows With The Power Of Hamster Cells
6:40AM Adam Frucci | Who needs a lamp to be classy when it can be fucking horrifying? That’s what the “Half Life” lamp is, because it glows thanks to living, genetically altered hamster cells that have been enriched with firefly genes. Holy shit. More »
Science
Scientists Mapping Out 10,000 Animal Genomes For “Genetic Zoo”
2:00PM Rosa Golijan | On the tail-end of news that all of the HIV genome and 98% of the pig genome has been decoded, scientists are announcing that they’ve got a plan to collect and sequence the DNA of 10,000 vertebrate species. More »
Science
Mighty Mouse Has One Less Gene, Lives 20% Longer
12:20PM Rosa Golijan | Sorry, Apple. Researchers have already created a mightier mouse: By deleting a single gene from a mouse’s genetic makeup, they’ve enabled it to suffer fewer age related ailments and live 20% longer. On humans, that’d be about 16 bonus years. More »
Hardware
IBM Examining Microchips Built On DNA “Oragami” Nanostructures
7:30AM Jack Loftus | From the “at least 10 years out” category of microchip fabrication comes word that IBM is working to reduce future costs and microchip sizes by using DNA. That’s correct, the building blocks of life could one day contribute to your virtual reality headshot in Halo 28: Master Chief Comes Back From the Dead for the 12th Time. More »
Science
Genome Sequencing Gets 99.9833% Price Cut
11:20AM Rosa Golijan | Dr. Quake of Stanford University only needed $US50,000 and a month’s time to complete a genome sequencing process which previously took $US300 million, over 250 people, and several years. How cheap would Windows 7 be with this guy’s cost-cutting? More »
Science
12:56PM Nick Broughall | True story: up until about five minutes ago, I was toying with the idea of writing a book called, “Why onions make you cry, and other horror stories for children”. It was going to be a masterpiece of childhood fiction about an onion getting revenge on humankind. But now my plans for a best-selling children’s book are nothing more than pipedreams, and it’s all because of some stupid Kiwi scientists.
These scientists have figured out a way of genetically modifying an onion so that you can switch off the enzyme that makes you cry when you cut it open. They hope that they will be able to grow tearless onions and sell them within the next decade.
Considering that onions get their flavour from the same enzyme, I would assume that it would assume that their playing Onion-God (the villain in my story, cooincidentally) would take away the flavour. But they seem to think that the opposite will happen.According to Colin Eady, the senior NZ scientist working on the project: “We anticipate that the health and flavour profiles will actually be enhanced by what we’ve done. What we’re hoping is that we’ll essentially have a lot of the nice, sweet aromas associated with onions without that associated bitter, pungent, tear-producing factor.”
And so my kid’s book idea is ruined. Who’d buy a novel about onions making you cry when, by the time it’s actually written, onions won’t make you cry? It’s a sad day for me…
[Yahoo News via BoingBoing]
More »
Kiwis create tear-free onion, now working on tear-free All Blacks
12:56PM Nick Broughall | True story: up until about five minutes ago, I was toying with the idea of writing a book called, “Why onions make you cry, and other horror stories for children”. It was going to be a masterpiece of childhood fiction about an onion getting revenge on humankind. But now my plans for a best-selling children’s book are nothing more than pipedreams, and it’s all because of some stupid Kiwi scientists.
These scientists have figured out a way of genetically modifying an onion so that you can switch off the enzyme that makes you cry when you cut it open. They hope that they will be able to grow tearless onions and sell them within the next decade.
Considering that onions get their flavour from the same enzyme, I would assume that it would assume that their playing Onion-God (the villain in my story, cooincidentally) would take away the flavour. But they seem to think that the opposite will happen.According to Colin Eady, the senior NZ scientist working on the project: “We anticipate that the health and flavour profiles will actually be enhanced by what we’ve done. What we’re hoping is that we’ll essentially have a lot of the nice, sweet aromas associated with onions without that associated bitter, pungent, tear-producing factor.”
And so my kid’s book idea is ruined. Who’d buy a novel about onions making you cry when, by the time it’s actually written, onions won’t make you cry? It’s a sad day for me…
[Yahoo News via BoingBoing]
More »
Random Stuff
Glow-in-the-Dark Cats Could Make For a Unique Home Lighting Solution
12:00PM Sean Fallon | Scientists at the Gyeongsang National University in South Korea have cloned cats that have the ability to glow-in-the dark when exposed to ultraviolet light. By inserting a virus into the skin cells of a mother cat and placing those contaminated cells into the womb, scientists were able to prove that it was possible to clone an animal with a manipulated gene. Apparently, this development could allow for a better understanding of human genetic diseases in the future. But what about the benefits of glowing cats? More »
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