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Gene editing can end disease and fight global famine
We're looking at the single greatest advancement in genetics since Mendelev started growing peas. CRISPR-Cas9 gene-modification technology is powerful enough to cure humanity's worst diseases, yet simple enough to be used by amateur biologists. You thought 3-D printers and the maker movement were going to change the world? Get ready for a new kind of tinkerer -- one that wields gene-snipping scissors.
Nanoflowers can detect bacteria before they make you sick
You typically won't know you're infected with E. coli until it starts wreaking havoc on your gut. That's why a group of scientists from Washington State University are building a handheld biosensor that can sniff out even tiny amounts of pathogen in food. The biosensor will rely on flower-shaped nanoparticles the team developed. These nanoflowers can trap bacteria enzymes and amplify them, so they can be recognized by a simple pH strip. According to team leader Yuehe Lin, they plan to use the nanoflowers to create a simple biosensor similar to a pregnancy test strip that anyone can use.
ICYMI: Smashing bacteria, high-jumping roboroaches and more
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){} Today on In Case You Missed It: Researchers from Seoul National University and UC Berkeley developed a robotic roach that jumps more than five feet high because people weren't scared enough of robots as it is. A team from Brigham Young University wants to figure out how hard you have to hit bacteria to kill it. Apparently smashing them into walls at 670 MPH isn't hard enough. And one enterprising maker spent more than two years building a fully functional Pong table -- complete with a cubical "ball."
Scientists redesign the tree of life to add a thousand species
Scientists have been having a hard time figuring out where newly discovered organisms, such as giant viruses, fit in the tree of life. That's especially true for a particular group of researchers who unearthed 1,011 new species within the course of 15 years. In order to accommodate the new organisms they found -- and since life on Earth turned out to be more diverse than what previous generations of scientists thought -- they've decided that it's time to reinvent the evolutionary tree. Besides the 1,011 organisms they discovered, the team also studied the DNA of 2,072 known species to be able to get an accurate representation of nature's diversity.
Programming language makes circuits out of bacteria
Biological circuits have been a reality for years. However, making them is no mean feat: you typically have to create everything from scratch, which is impractical for everyone but a specialized genetic engineer. MIT has a better way, though. It developed a programming language that makes it comparatively easy to produce these organic machines -- you just write code (based on existing computer instructions) and get a bacteria-friendly DNA sequence that does what you want. In the lab, sample circuits in E. coli did everything from ranking inputs to measuring oxygen levels.
Human-made bacteria has the tiniest genome ever
Believe it or not, creating artificial life (albeit based on existing species) isn't new. However, scientists have managed a particularly unusual feat: they've built synthetic bacteria that has the smallest known genome of any lifeform... ever. Their modification of Mycoplasma mycoides has just 473 genes, or so few that it likely couldn't survive and reproduce if you shrank the genome further. The trick was to do a better job of determining which genes were essential. Many of those that weren't deemed necessary in the past turned out to be half of a vital pair, giving researchers a good sense of what they could afford to cut.
Microrobots use the power of bacteria to avoid obstacles
We don't need to scale down Google's self-driving system to make microrobots that can swim in fluid while avoiding obstacles. Drexel University professor MinJun Kim and his team of engineers have discovered how to use bacteria to do so. See, Serratia marcescens, the flagellated microorganism commonly associated with urinary tract and respiratory infections, carries a negative charge. If you smear that on a tiny chip, you get a negatively charged microrobot that can stay afloat (thanks to the bacteria's flagella) and swim around by riding electric fields applied to its environment.
Light-triggered nanoparticles kill drug-resistant bacteria
Many current attempts at killing drug-resistant "superbugs" amount to racing against time, whether it's improving research technology or developing germ-fighting techniques that are less likely to promote resistance. That's not really an effective long-term strategy, is it? However, University of Colorado scientists might have a more permanent solution. They've developed light-triggered nanoparticles (specifically, quantum dots) that can kill stubborn bacteria on demand. They're dormant when it's dark, but shining the right light wavelength will make the particles attack infected cells. And unlike metal nanoparticles, they won't inadvertently wreck healthy cells in the process.
The prose at the end of the universe
For over a decade, Canadian poet Dr. Christian Bök has toiled to create living prose. Bök calls the project The Xenotext and, should he be successful in his attempts, he will have done something truly special. The idea, at its core? To encipher poetry within an immortal bacterium's genome. Poetry that will last forever. "A big concern is the protection of valuable information in the case of a nuclear catastrophe," Pak Chung Wong told the New Scientist in 2003. Wong, then an information technologist at the Pacific Northwestern Laboratory, had just enciphered some lyrics from "It's a Small World" into the genome of Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium that can survive in extreme conditions. Wong theorized that the DNA of bacteria, and perhaps even hardy organisms like cockroaches and types of weed, could be used to preserve our data for future generations.
NASA to test sugary bacteria as space-based power source
Following its successful harvest of red leaf lettuce, NASA has announced plans to launch genetically engineered bacteria into orbit to see if they can be harnessed by future astronauts as potent survival resource. The experiment is scheduled to take place in 2017 and will study the genus Anabaena. The sugars that these cyanobacterium photosynthesize can be fed to other genetically-modified bacteria in a system the agency calls PowerCell. These second-stage bacteria would, in turn, generate chemicals, food, fuel and even medicine for far-flung astronauts. "The first pilgrims who came to the Americas didn't bring all their food for the rest of their lives," Lynn Rothschild of NASA's Ames Research Center, said in a statement. "You need to live off the land."
This 'Plant Lamp' uses bacteria to generate electricity
Maintaining infrastructure in the rainforest is a pretty tall order -- the area is dense with vegetation and prone to intense moisture and flooding. Villages like Nuevo Saposoa in Peru have had their electrical grids disabled or destroyed by the elements, leaving residents at the mercy of daylight or the fumes of kerosene lamps to work, read or study. Researchers at Peru's Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología have created a novel solution: an LED lamp powered by a houseplant.
ICYMI: Driving fails, global warming bacteria fix and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-252707{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-252707, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-252707{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-252707").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: AAA and the University of Utah teamed up to collect data on how well driver's fare while using voice commands. The results are pretty terrible: Apparently it takes a full 27 seconds for a driver to fully concentrate after attempting to call someone while behind the wheel. Meanwhile Florida may be good for something beyond just the best Twitter account this side of the Atlantic. Researchers there found a strain of deep-sea bacteria that might be able to help fight global warming by attacking greenhouse gases. And a Spaniard got the first implanted 3D printed ribs in the world after a cancer fight. Good on him!
Just add water and this squid-inspired plastic heals itself
While you've been busy scarfing down fried calamari rings, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have been doing something else with squid. Namely? Studying the cephalopod's ring teeth for a way to create a material that heals when water's present, much in the way that those tentacle-bound choppers do. The way the report spotted by Popular Science tells it, the researchers were able to reproduce the type of proteins found in the self-healing squid teeth and trigger bacteria to make it in a lab environment.
Researchers make a living circuit out of bacteria
Under the right circumstances, bacteria can be quite cooperative -- both with each other and the organism they're living in. A research team at Rice University has managed to exploit that natural congeniality to, for the first time, create a biological circuit that works much like a conventional computer chip. But the goal of the researchers' work isn't to build better biocomputers, it's to help them more fully understand how these organisms interact within our guts.
Bacteria-powered folding batteries could power paper biosensors
We've seen flexible displays for some time now, and engineers at Binghamton University developed an origami-inspired foldable battery. The folding part is great, but these batteries are also powered by bacteria and made from paper, providing an low-cost option for remote locales where resources are scarce. That all sounds good, but what are the potential uses? Well, paper-based biosensors have been around for a bit too, but they usually have to be paired with some sort of device to be of any use. The goal is to create tech that allows those sensors to power themselves. Currently, the battery folds down to about the size of a matchbook and costs five cents to make.
Agar.io brings massively multiplayer games to the petri dish
Most massively multiplayer online games take place in epic fantasy worlds or the distant future, but one of the latest sensations takes place on a much, much smaller scale. Agar.io pits thousands of players against each other in a web-based petri dish, where each gamer represents a cell. Your only real goal is to grow larger than everyone else by swallowing other cells and dodging your bigger rivals. It sounds simple, but it can get very hectic -- and it's a good abstraction of the fierce survival-of-the-fittest competition that you sometimes see on the microscopic level.
Researchers show you can be uniquely identified by your bacteria
The bacteria on and inside of your body, also known as your microbiome, could be another sort of fingerprint to identify you, according to new research out of Harvard. Researchers found that your bacterial buddies have enough unique features to be traced right back to you -- at least, when compared to hundreds of other people. Using data from the Human Microbiome Project, they applied an algorithm that identified the distinguishing features of microbiomes, and they were subsequently able to identify who they came from based on followup visits. The bacterial fingerprints were stable in people for over a year, and testing of gut microbiomes managed to accurately identify people 80 percent of the time. There's still plenty of testing to be done, naturally, but the findings show that researchers might want to be extra careful when dealing with microbiome data moving forward. Otherwise someone participating in a gut bacteria test could, for example, be outed as having a particularly embarrassing STD.
Scientists take detailed pictures of the smallest known life forms
Just how small can life get? Almost unbelievably small, if you ask a team of Berkeley Lab researchers. They've taken the first detailed electron microscope pictures of the tiniest bacteria known to date -- at a typical 0.009 cubic microns in volume, you could fit 150 of them in an already miniscule e. coli cell. Scientists had to catch the hard-to-spot microbes by using a new portable cryo plunger, which flash-froze groundwater to near absolute zero (about -458F) to keep the cells intact while they were in transit.
New way to find antibiotics helps fight resistant 'superbugs'
Bacterial infections are hard to fight. It's not just that there are "superbugs" which resist antibiotics, like MRSA -- it's that the methods for finding effective antibiotics aren't very efficient. However, scientists have developed a technique that harnesses environmental bacteria to find antimicrobial weapons much more quickly. Their approach uses a mix of moistened soil, liquid agar (bacterial culture) and diluted bacterial samples to isolate microbes for study while giving them the natural conditions they need to grow. At least in theory, medical researchers no longer have to limit their antibiotic development to bacteria that survive in lab conditions. If it grows in dirt, it's a candidate.
Dyson tackles the humidifier, kills water-based bacteria with UV light
In a launch presentation in Tokyo, Japan (apparently the company's favorite place for new product launches), Dyson tackled the surprisingly sketchy hygiene issues that come with more typical humidifiers. To prove how gosh-darn better Dyson's Hygienic Mist humidifier is, the company's microbiology team (which of course it has) incubated water with bacteria to see how a typical humidifier transmits that to a room. A selection of agar jelly plates grossly demonstrated how that bacteria spreads around a room. However, in an early comparison, with the same concentration of bacteria in the water, Dyson's test humidifier, with UV light cleansing the water, knocked out 99.9 percent of the bacteria -- the current model manages this in three minutes. The device launches in Japan in early November, priced at 60,000 yen (roughly a hefty $560) and we've got the rest of the engineering details after the break.
