“The point being, science needs room to figure out exactly what this technology is capable of doing. Right now, researchers have a ton of potential on their hands, but not a lot of agreement about how far that potential reaches.” Read more
David Cyranosk & Sara Reardon - Nature.com
In a world first, Chinese scientists have reported editing the genomes of human embryos. The results are published1 in the online journal Protein & Cell and confirm widespread rumours that such experiments had been conducted — rumours that sparked a high-profile debate last month2, 3 about the ethical implications of such work. Read more
By David Cyranoski — Scientific American
In a Comment published on March 12 in Nature, Edward Lanphier, chairman of the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine in Washington DC, and four co-authors call on scientists to agree not to modify human embryos — even for research.
“Such research could be exploited for non-therapeutic modifications. We are concerned that a public outcry about such an ethical breach could hinder a promising area of therapeutic development,” write Lanphier and his colleagues, who include Fyodor Urnov, a pioneer in gene-editing techniques and scientist at Sangamo BioSciences in Richmond, California. Many groups, including Urnov’s company, are already using gene-editing tools to develop therapies that correct genetic defects in people (such as by editing white blood cells). They fear that attempts to produce ‘designer babies’ by applying the methods to embryos will create a backlash against all use of the technology.Read more
Kurzweil AI
Bacteria within you — which outnumber your own cells about 100 times — may be affecting both your cravings and moods to get you to eat what they want, and may be driving you toward obesity.
That’s the conclusion of an article published this week in the journal BioEssays by researchers from UC San Francisco, Arizona State University and University of New Mexico from a review of the recent scientific literature.
By Zak Cheney-Rice — News.Mic
The news: Russian cosmonauts have discovered something remarkable clinging to the outside of the International Space Station: living organisms.
The microscopic creatures appeared during a space walk intended to clean the vessel’s surface, and were allegedly identified — incredibly — as a type of sea plankton. This is big: According to Sploid, Russian scientists are both “shocked by [the] discovery and can’t really explain how [it] is possible.”
Written By: David J. Hill — Singularity Hub
While computers scientists find new ways to supercharge computers, a team of plant scientists have demonstrated that they can supercharge a plant.
Hoping to speed up plant photosynthesis, researchers from the US and UK have successfully upgraded a carbon-fixing enzyme vital to photosynthesis in a tobacco plant with two enzymes from cyanobacteria, which function at a faster rate. If photosynthesis can be performed more efficiently, plants would grow larger and crops could have higher yields, possibly as high as 60% according to computer models.
The Exponential Nature of Ebola
Otto E. Rossler
Institute for Physical and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Tubingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 8, 72076 Tubingen, Germany
Inscribed on the UN Building:
Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul;
If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain;
If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain.
(Saadi, 1210–1292)
Gaia Vince — BBC Future
In Ancient Greek mythology, the Earth Goddess Gaia had nine titan sons, who attempted to control not just the Earth, but the entire Universe. I’d like to introduce another. It’s a new creature who emerged only in recent decades. But it’s a creature who is already as influential over life on the planet as the phytoplankton or forests that regulate global temperature, the weather and the air we breathe.
That new creature is us, or more precisely, what humanity is becoming. The entirety of our species, Homo sapiens, is evolving into a superorganism; I’ll call this new life force Homo omnis, or ‘Homni’.
Elizabeth Gibney — Nature
Physicists have found hints that the asymmetry of life — the fact that most biochemical molecules are ‘left-handed’ or ‘right-handed’ — could have been caused by electrons from nuclear decay in the early days of evolution. In an experiment that took 13 years to perfect1, the researchers have found that these electrons tend to destroy certain organic molecules slightly more often than they destroy their mirror images.
Many organic molecules, including glucose and most biological amino acids, are ‘chiral’. This means that they are different than their mirror-image molecules, just like a left and a right glove are. Moreover, in such cases life tends to consistently use one of the possible versions — for example, the DNA double helix in its standard form always twists like a right-handed screw. But the reason for this preference has long remained a mystery.
