Synthetic Biology

Here's a new term for you: synthetic biology.  It's one  you'll likely hear more often in the future, especially given a recent accomplishment from the Scripps Research Institute out of California.  More on that in a moment.

I don't want this to be a blog that just reposts links, but with one exception. If you're trying to understand the weirdness of the material world, it's good to keep an eye on the vanguard. The first rule of dealing with change is to try not to be blindsided by it, at least whenever possible. 

You've likely heard yesterday's news that scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California have created the first sythetic DNA. This will, I'm sure, give some nightmares of microscopic Frankensteins maiming the life familliar.  Certainly any new technology brings with it ethical and safety concerns.  Somewhere in our anthropocene past was a faction who likely objected to using fire because of it's ability to harm life and rage out of control.  Did that stop it's adoption?

The most obvious use for this technology is creating pharmacueticals.  What are the unbvious uses? I wish I knew.  When microprocessors were invited, likely no one predicted personal computers, cell phones, ipads, ecommerce, google, facebook, twitter.

For a repost, this has already rambled on longer than I intended.  My goal was to find an article that I thought did a good job of covering the essentials. Providing that would save you the trouble of finding a good one.  My favorite so far is the one at Popular Mechanics.  Also, here's the list returned by Google.

History On Line

I recently watched the documentary "Titanic's Final Mystery" in which historian Tim Maltin uses historical sources to tease out new information about the tragedy of said ship's sinking nearly a century ago. To get a sense of weather conditions in the North Atlantic, in particular on the night of the sinking, Maltin reviews the logs of ships that crossed the ocean in April of 1912. NOAA's ships logs were, at least, transferred to computer punch cards in the 1970s. Records of German ships are still kept in their original log books at an archive in Germany. This is important because in historical research the only thing that counts is original records.

What jumped out at me was how he viewed them. In neither case were these records available on line. Maltin had to physically travel to their storage facilities to examine them.

Someday, I need to do a post about how 'proving' a point in the internet age still requires going beyond Google, sometimes way beyond Google. At least, that will be the case until all the paper in all the obscure archives is digitized.

Paper is one thing. Our intuition expects that paper will transferred to computer. But artifacts? This week I learned that museums are starting to put three dimensional scans of artifacts on line. Until now the public's access to archaeological relics has been restricted to views behind ropes and through panes of glass. Only top scholars get the privilege of turning these objects over and looking at them closely.

That isn't likely to ever change. But with online scans and now burgeoning virtual reality technology, exemplified by the recently released Oculus Rift, you and I will eventually get the chance to examine ancient artifacts.

The latest museum to enter the 3D club is the University College London's Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. Never heard of it? Among Etymologists, UCL ranks right behind the Cairo Museum and the British museum in the number and quality of ancient Egyptian artifacts.

You can view UCL's collection here. Meanwhile, I'll be looking for links to other collections. I hope someone has built a specialized search engine. I doubt this is on Google's radar yet.