theodin
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I bio-engineered glowing beer and it hasn’t killed me (yet)
I've been making beer for about 10 years and, in the name of fun and experimentation, I've done some weird stuff. Toss some sarsaparilla and birch bark in the pot? Why not? "Dry hop" with a box of Apple Jacks? Try and stop me. But I may have finally gone a bit too far, when I genetically engineered a beer to glow green. All right, so how did I do it? With a technology called CRISPR, which is pretty much the belle of the science ball right now. CRISPR stands for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats" and it essentially lets you snip out bits of DNA and replace them with whatever you want. It actually relies on a basic feature of bacterial immune systems.
I played God with The Odin's DIY CRISPR Kit
Twenty-three years after its cinematic debut, I finally understand where Alec Baldwin was coming from in the 1993 psychological thriller Malice. The power to bring life where once there was none is a potent drug. I was recently afforded the opportunity to create a new kind of bacterial life thanks to the DIY Bacterial CRISPR Kit from Bio-Hacking collective The Odin. I honestly haven't had this much fun doing science since AP Chem.
Charging into the epic story of Lord of the Rings Online: Helm's Deep
It might not be anything as shocking (and, erm, incredibly slow) as hypothetical Ent play, but the epic story of Lord of the Rings Online: Helm's Deep promises to be a grand experience to match or exceed what we've experienced before. Three new books with about 12 chapters apiece await those who dive into the expansion and charge into western Rohan. While the epic story has always been a mixture of Turbine's storytelling creations and Tolkien's canonical events, Helm's Deep will hew a lot more closely to the books than ever before. This is the penultimate part of The Two Towers, and the dev team wants to do it right. That's not to say you won't get to see your favorite secondary characters, so fret not if you're looking for more inspiration for that Nona/Horn romance novel you've been writing. It's just that they'll be taking a backseat to the major players -- and a few surprises -- as events lead us to the titular fortress and the most important battle in the game to date.
The Road to Mordor: Hands-on with Riders of Rohan's mounted combat
I remember the very first thought I had when Turbine announced Lord of the Rings Online: Riders of Rohan: If the mounted combat isn't very, very good, this expansion's going to be a big dud. I don't think we've ever had an expansion that leaned so heavily on a core system for not only the bulk of its gameplay but also its style. Crude my thought may have been, it felt like the truth. I don't know any other successful MMO that utilized mounted combat as anything but a sideshow curiosity. The LotRO team was putting too much emphasis on mounted combat for it to fizzle. I think I can breathe easier now that I've had a chance to spend an hour fiddling with mounted combat while talking to Senior Producer Aaron Campbell. What I saw was an alpha build of the expansion (the beta is scheduled to start soon, perhaps as soon as next week), but once I got used to careening over the plains at 88 miles per hour, it felt just right. It felt like LotRO.
