Tag Archives: biology

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Drexler on our mysterious cellular vaults

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vaultEric Drexler discusses “vaults” – tiny structures present in the cells of every plant and animal:

Like ribosomes, they’re atomically precise self-assembled structures made of protein and RNA, but they’re big and hollow, large enough to pack many ribosomes inside.

…

Looking forward, this information could help protein engineers develop methodologies for designing large self-assembling structures.

Vaults are unusual in many ways, but what I find most surprising about them is this:

To this day, no one knows what they do.

Mmm. A nanoscopic biological structure of unknown purpose and potential technological utility: I smell MacGuffin…

[image from Eric Drexler’s blog]

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First clone of an extinct animal created

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While plenty of endangered species have had the honour, the Pyrenean ibex has become the first completely extinct species to be cloned from banked genetic material. It didn’t last long, though:

“We are not especially disappointed for the death of the cloned newborn,” Folch explained in an email, because such deaths in cloning experiments are common.

“We will try to improve the technology in order to increase the efficiency of the cloning process.”

Inevitably, the hand of Michael Crichton reaches out beyond the grave and forces the biologists to reassure us that this isn’t the first step on the road to Jurassic Park. More pertinently, the cloned critter’s death (of respiratory failure) demonstrates that the technology for banging out copies of extinct species is far from perfected.

But it begs the question of which species we should attempt to bring back once we’re able – if any. What should the selection criteria be?

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The descent of robot: artificial evolution

wall_robotResearchers at the University of Aberdeen have developed a new method of designing complex robots using genetic algorithms:

The EA randomly creates large numbers of control “genomes” for the robot. These behaviour patterns are tested in training sessions, and the most successful genomes are “bred” together to create still better versions – until the best control system is arrived at.

MacLeod’s team took this idea a step further, however, and developed an incremental evolutionary algorithm (IEA) capable of adding new parts to its robot brain over time.

Further reading: an excellent non-fiction book that explores the idea of evolution as a general method of design is The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker.

[from New Scientist, via KurzweilAI][image from badjonni on flickr]

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Productive Nanosystems – The Movie

Most of us are aware that DNA and RNA are the molecular machinery that synthesise proteins and allow the complex reactions of life to take place, but actually visualising the processes is a considerable mental leap.

Most such visualisations rely on visual simplifications that actually present a false impression of the processes involved, but via Eric Drexler we discover the following examples by Drew Berry, which are apparently much truer to the actual processes that occur. Take the seven or so minutes needed to watch this, and you’ll be set up for your daily dose of scientific sensawunda for the rest of the week – biochemistry is incredibly awesome:

Aside from the sheer wow-factor of seeing molecules acting like high-precision machines deep at the cores of our cells, it’s worth bearing in mind that there’s no magic involved, and that we’re constantly getting better at understanding how these processes work.

Which, I expect, is why Drexler is so fascinated by them: once we know how the body’s nanomachines work, we’ll be properly equipped to start building new ones.

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Is there life on Mars? Atmospheric methane says ‘maybe’

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MarsAfter last year’s long-awaited confirmed discovery of water on the red planet, David Bowie comes another step closer to finding the answer to his question: NASA called a press conference today to announce that they have, in partnership with some university science teams, “achieved the first definitive detection of methane in the atmosphere of Mars”.

So what’s the big deal with that? Basically, there’s two reasons you might find methane in a planetary atmosphere: geological activity or biological activity. It’s going to take a lot more work to discover which of the two is the culprit in the case of Mars (and the NASA announcement does a better job that I can of explaining it all), but either option is pretty exciting to space nerds… after all, it’s not all that long ago that we pretty much assumed the whole planet was inert.

And as a side-tangent, this is great political timing from NASA, whether accidental or deliberate – with a new president about to enter the White House with promises to shake things up, announcements like this get everybody talking about space with that old-school sensawunda I remember from my childhood… and given the bleak state of the news headlines at the moment, something to make us look up from the mundane for a moment can only be a positive. Something big to dream about. [image by chipdatajeffb]

I mean, just think – life on Mars! It’s like something out of a science fiction novel, isn’t it? 😉