soon design, ‘print’ organisms

James Vincent, The Independent | Oct 8, 2013, 06.10 AM IST
READ MORE print’ organisms|Playing God|biological printers
Scientists will soon be able to design and print simple organisms using biological 3D printers says J Craig Venter, the scientist who led the privatesector's mapping of the human genome. He predicts that new methods of digital design and manufacture will provide the next revolution in genetic with synthetic cells and organism tailor-made to tackle humanity's problems : a toolkit of sequenced genes will be used to create disease-resistant animals; higher yielding crops; and drugs that extend human life and boost our brain power.

These ideas have been outlined in Venter's latest book 'Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life' , in which the geneticists asks the age-old question 'what is life?' before detailing the history — and future — of creating the stuff from scratch. For Venter life can be reduced to "protein robots" and "DNA machines" but he also believes that technology will unlock far more exotic opportunities for creating life.
The title of the publication refers to the idea that we may be able to transmit DNA sequences found on Mars back to Earth (at the speed of light) to be replicated at home by biological printers.

"I am confident that life once thrived on Mars and may well still exist there today ," writes Venter. "The day is not far off when we will be able to send a robotically controlled genome-sequencing unit in a probe to other planets to read the DNA sequence of any alien microbe life that may be there." Venter's ideas may sound like science fiction but he has achieved comparable feats in the past.
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Image Caption: Planetary nebula IC 1295 surrounding a dim and dying star. Credit: ESO
[ Watch the Video: Zooming In On The Planetary Nebula IC 1295 ]
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A new image released by the European Space Observatory (ESO) shows the glowing green planetary nebula IC 1295.
The new pictures taken by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) shows the nebula surrounding a dim and dying star located about 3300 light-years away in the constellation of Scutum (The Shield).
“It has the unusual feature of being surrounded by multiple shells that make it resemble a micro-organism seen under a microscope, with many layers corresponding to the membranes of a cell,” according to an ESO statement.
The glowing green bubble seen in the image is made out of gas that used to be the star’s atmosphere. The gas has been expelled by unstable fusion reactions in the star’s core that generated sudden releases of energy. It contains ultraviolet radiation, which gives it its glow.
In the center of the image, you can see the burned-out remnant of the star’s core as a bright blue-white spot at the heart of the nebula. The central star will become a very faint white dwarf and slowly cool down over many billions of years.
Stars that have masses like the Sun and up to eight times that of the Sun will form planetary nebulae as they enter the final phase of their existence.
The name ‘planetary nebula’ has nothing to do with planets. It is actually a descriptive term applied to some early discoveries because of the visual similarity of these objects to the outer planets Uranus and Neptune. Early astronomers using older telescopes saw these far away planets as glowing gas.
ESO released another beautiful image of the bright star cluster NGC 6520 back in February. The image shows NGC 6520 alongside a strange dark cloud known as Barnard 86. These two objects sit inside millions of glowing stars in the brightest part of the Milky Way galaxy. Barnard 86 is a dark nebula known as a Bok globule. Although in the image it appears as if it was a break in the stars, the nebula is actually made up of small dust grains that block out starlight. Astronomers believe this nebula formed from the remnants of a molecular cloud that collapsed to form the nearby star cluster NGC 6520.
ESO’s VLT is the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory. The space observatory continues to provide scientists with unique views of the universe that exists beyond what conventional backyard telescopes pick up.

Source: Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online
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cube robots can self-assemble

PTI | Oct 7, 2013, 05.27 AM IST
READ MORE Massachusetts Institute of Technology|cube robots|CSAIL
WASHINGTON: Scientists have developed new Terminator-style cube-shaped robots that can leap through the air, jump on top of each other and assemble together to form arbitrary shapes. A more refined version of the robots could temporarily repair bridges or buildings during emergencies, or assemble into different types of furniture or heavy equipment as needed, researchers say.

Developed by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the robots, known as M-Blocks , are cubes with no external moving parts. They are able to climb over and around one another, roll across the ground, and even move while suspended upside down from metallic surfaces, researchers said. Inside each robot is a flywheel that can reach speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute; when the flywheel is braked, it imparts its angular momentum to the cube. On each edge of an M-Block , and on every face, are cleverly arranged permanent magnets that allow any two cubes to attach to each other.

"It's one of these things that the (modular-robotics ) community has been trying to do for a long time," said Daniela Rus, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "We just needed a creative insight and somebody who was passionate enough to keep coming at it — despite being discouraged," she said.

As with any modular-robot system, the hope is that the modules can be miniaturized— the ultimate aim of most such research is hordes of swarming 'microbots' that can self-assemble , like the "liquid steel" androids in the movie 'Terminator II' . MIT researchers are now building an army of 100 cubes, each of which can move in any direction, and designing algorithms to guide them. "We want hundreds of cubes, scattered randomly across the floor, to be able to identify each other, coalesce, and autonomously transform into a chair, or a ladder, or a desk, on demand ," said John Romanishin of CSAIL.
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