For the first time, scientists have found lifeforms where nobody thought it was possible: floating in the troposphere, the slice of the atmosphere approximately four to six miles (eight to 15 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. And not just a tiny few, but lot: 20% of every particle in that atmospheric layer are living organisms. More »
Lake Vida in East Antarctica is seven times saltier than the sea, 13 degrees celsius below freezing and pitch black. It was a place researchers thought life would never exist—but they were wrong. More »
Remember all the hard work you put into sand castles as a little kid? Crouching, scooping and shaping. It was tough! And it was always for naught because the stupid ocean would eventually swallow your castles whole and wash it away. What if you could make sand castles live forever, though? Turns out you can. More »
To anyone who’s ever had their ability to nurture questioned, science now offers an infallible retort in the form of your lush, thriving belly button growth. More »
The gold you see in the photo above was not found in a river or a mine. It was produced by a bacteria that, according to researchers at Michigan State University, can survive in extreme toxic environments and create 24-karat gold nuggets. Pure gold. More »
These woozy prints of the famous faces of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin were created using a modified photo printing process invented by artist Zachary Copfer. Rather than use traditional light-sensitive photo emulsion to print photos, he instead used a special genetically altered E coli. It’s gross to think about, but oh so beautiful to look at. More »
Imagine a bacteria that could not only suck the excess CO2 out of the air, but turn that waste gas into a clean-burning biofuel for cars. If the current research on genetically-engineered bacteria goes to plan at MIT, these wonder creatures could help solve our energy and climate woes. More »
A drug-resistant superbug could be catastrophic for our species, but how are we supposed to stop an incurable illness? By stunting it before it takes hold. Scientists have discovered a molecule that some virulent bacteria need in order to latch onto a host. They think they might be able to create a treatment that would render the molecule useless. Can we finally cross one doomsday scenario off our list of fears? More »
Everyone, meet Mycoplasma genitalium, the subject of many scientific papers, even more vists to the clinic and now the first organism to be entirely recreated in binary. Computer models are often used for simplicity, or when studying the real thing just ain’t viable, but most look at an isolated process. Stanford researchers wanted to break with tradition and selected one of the simplest organisms around, M. genitalium, to be their test subject. They collated data from over 900 publications to account for everything going on inside the bacterial cell. But it wasn’t just a case of running a model of each cellular process. They had to account for all the interactions that go on — basically, a hell of a lot of math. The team managed to recreate cell division using the model, although a single pass took almost 10 hours with MATLAB software running on a 128-core Linux cluster. The representation was so accurate it predicted what M. genitalium looks like, just from the genetic data. And, despite the raft of research already conducted on the bacterium, the model revealed previously undiscovered inconsistencies in individual cell cycles. Such simulations could be used in the future to better understand the complicated biology of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. Looks like we’re going to need more cores in that cluster. If you’d like to hear Stanford researcher Markus Covert’s view on the work, we’ve embedded some footage beyond the fold.
Continue reading Scientists create first computer simulation of a complete organism
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Scientists create first computer simulation of a complete organism originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Jul 2012 09:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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At the end of a sticky summer, your lawn furniture’s going to be gross with mold, algae, moss, fungi, or other bacterial yuck. You get to go in and take a shower after a day in the sun, but your furniture just festers. Unless it’s made with titanium dioxide, as these German researchers discovered. More »
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