It’s a dream come true for biological engineers: MIT researchers have created a “biological circuit” e-coli bacterium that can perform 16 boolean logic functions and store the results in a strand of DNA written using recombinases. It’s the first time that living cells have been turned into an organic computer. Well … almost.

The brains of every living thing aside, the MIT smart-bacteria is still missing one vital feature: the ability to read stored information back. So the computational logic is still somewhat missing as it’s only one-way. But it’s a huge breakthrough all the same.

Now, you might just be wondering, what, exactly, is this actually good for?

Well it’s certainly not going to revolutionize computers for a start. Reading DNA is not exactly something that we can do quickly. But in that our squishy organic bodies aren’t exactly conducive to machine melding, this opens up a whole new world of medicine at the very least.

For example, tests for cancer can be, well, rather invasive, what with the poking and the prodding and the cutting and all. Biopsies are a b____. But imagine a world in which your doctor could give you a yogurt beverage laced with these genetically engineered bio-circuits programmed to detect cancer. You drink. You poo. And then the hospital examines the resultant DNA output and viola, you know if you have cancer or not.

Part of what makes it so effective is that bacteria like to reproduce themselves, and as they do this, the information stored in the DNA becomes duplicated as well. That’s what DNA is there for. This creates a high redundancy of the information that makes it much easier to extract the resulting data than trying to find a single solitary bacteria cell before it dies. The more they multiply, the easier it is to find a copy. So it’s actually conducive to working with our own biology as by the time that smart-poo makes it out our back ends, there’s plenty enough redundancy of the data to be found.

And similar to your smart-poo future of easy disease identification, likewise in the future your doctor could even offer you a much less dangerous form of chemotherapy where the drugs are embedded with biological circuits that self-destruct only when they’ve reached a targeted area, delivering the medication only to the cells that were targeted. The beauty of a biological circuit that can alter its own DNA is that it can be “programmed” to self-destruct by intentionally making its own genetic material non-viable once it has completed its mission. It’d be a much safer solution than flooding your whole body with medication, and would make you a whole lot less ill.

Another such application of a bio-circuit is that you could make bio-sensor strips of a suspended bacteria gel that change colors when they detect pre-programmed drugs, toxins, diseases, or even explosives. Imagine no longer needing the nose of a dog, but using a simple strip of gel that absorbs particulate from the air. The simplicity and low cost would allow these bio-sensors to be utilized anywhere and everywhere.

Not to mention, potentially, being a mechanism which can one day be used to re-write DNA in living hosts to cure someone of a genetic disease. Bacteria programmed to use recombinases to alter targeted ‘bits’ of DNA are an awfully close to being the very tools you’d need to fix our own genes.

The ability to engineer a biological circuit can go a great way to changing our whole world.

And there’s always the Dark Side. Cynics will no doubt point out that any tool that can be used for good can also be used for ill.

So it may come as something of a sigh of relief that we’re still a long way off from any of this. But the building blocks that were once separate are now being put together. It’s fast becoming a question of “when” rather than “if”.

So you want to make a moon base.

But you don’t know how in the universe you’re ever going to ship enough materials to the moon to make a base.

And it’s kind of hard to build a moon mine, refinery, and smithy to build the materials that you need to make a moon base completely sourced from the moon.

… Or is it?

That’s what the European Space Agency is actually suggesting … sort of. They want to ship a 3D printer to the moon to print buildings from moon rocks. Basically.

Architecture firm Foster + Partners has been working on a proof of concept for just such a plan, turning a 1.5 ton block into a simulated moon base using a 3D printer from Monolite, a UK company. The Monolite mobile printing array of nozzles successfully sprayed their simulated lunar rock print material onto a six meter frame.

The trick, claims Enrico Dini, Monolite’s founder, is to mix the moon rock with magnesium oxide to create a “’paper’ we can print with.” The second step involves salt, according to Enrico, who says, “Then for our structural ‘ink’ we apply a binding salt which converts material to a stone-like solid.”

Of course printing something on Earth is not the same as printing something on the moon. With minimal to no gravity or working with no atmosphere, you’d hardly be impressed if your “ink” were to sputter out into space instead of onto what you’d hoped to print. But Monolite reckons that they have that covered too, thanks to capillary forces holding droplets of 2mm size in place in the soil.

They hope.

After all, they didn’t use real moon rock, as that’s kind of hard to come by. They just grabbed some basalt from a volcano in Italy, which should be similar enough … in theory. Likewise the process hasn’t actually been tested in space, in Earth orbit, on the moon, or otherwise. It’s all still just a lot of practical theory.

Still, if it worked it’d be a sure sight better than spitting loads and loads of expanding capsules up to the moon for astronauts to live in. Stage 1 would obviously be gaining a presence on the moon. Stage 2 would then be printing off the real buildings to use for a permanent moon base.

Sounds good. Let’s get crackin’!

It also kind of makes me wonder … just why exactly aren’t we doing this on good old Earth too? Why can’t I just 3D print myself a McMansion?

It’s the stuff of science fiction spy movies, only now it’s for real. Obviously it’s possible to use deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) as a storage medium for information, since we’re not cats and elephants aren’t mice. DNA has to encode information reliably by its very fundamental nature or else all would be chaos. But in the past, scientists have only just barely managed to demonstrate the theory, encoding very small amounts of information as strands of DNA.

All that, however, has finally changed.

Researchers have now managed to encode a JPEG picture of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), a PDF of the Watson and Crick paper that first described DNA, all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in a text file, and even an MP3 recording of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. They have officially proven that DNA can be manufactured to well and truly hold large amounts of data, all in something smaller than a speck of dust.

Of course don’t be expecting this to revolutionize your USB memory stick capacity or anything like that. There was a lot of hard work in a laboratory that went into creating these strands of DNA.

Where the advantage of DNA as a storage medium is, however, is archiving information. If we can still pluck the occasional strand of DNA from a long-dead dinosaur, then certainly DNA can keep information stored for as long as the Age of Man needs it.  (Let’s just hope that over the years that data doesn’t become as corrupted as the recipe GLaDOS uses for cake!)

Another advantage to storing information in DNA is that if this DNA is in real live tissue, it should in fact be passed on to future generations if done right.

Which raises the question, has anyone tried to decrypt the molecules of our DNA? Perhaps there’s a message from god in there saying, “Made you look!“

Mother Nature seems to have a few PhDs in quantum physics, researchers at Cambridge University have discovered as they look into the ocean-dwelling Green Sulfur Bacteria. This bacteria manages to thrive at a depth of 2,000 meters below the sea, still using photosynthesis to nab energy from the sun, in spite of sunlight barely making it down that far.

So how does Green Sulfur Bacteria manage to use photosynthesis to thrive in a nearly lightless environment?

It isn’t easy!

Photosynthesis in general works as thus: Chlorophyll, a natural pigment, absorbs energy from photons (AKA sunlight). That absorbed energy from photons is turned into excitons and carried as a quantum wave into the “reaction center” of a pigment protein complex, where electrons necessary for the chemistry of photosynthesis are released. So photosynthesis itself is already something of a quantum physics experiment in plant life all around us. But plants, not really needing great efficiency as sunlight is rather abundant, don’t necessarily do this as well as they theoretically could.

And breathe. Sciencey stuff is halfway through now.

Where the Green Sulfur Bacteria has astonished researchers and may pave ways for all sorts of future improvements is that it has a highly specialized approach to ensuring that as little of that energy gets wasted as possible. What has excited researchers is that the Green Sulfur Bacteria takes the energy that would have been lost due to inefficiency and actually re-energizes it back to exciton level through molecular vibrations, ensuring that every possible photon absorbed results in a chemical reaction.

Preserving the quantum coherence with much more efficiency has important implications in efficiency for a number of applications, from solar cells (obviously) to things like room-temperature quantum computing.

It’s just another example of nature showing us extreme elegance of design in a supposedly random universe.

And one step closer to quantum CPUs powering our home computers.

No, it’s no the premise of a bad movie, Deep Fried Snacks On A Plane, where Samuel L. Jackson fends off rejects from Attack of the Killer Tomatoes Potatoes. This is about science. There’s testing to be done, and for once it’s not GLaDOS in the potato, but us.

Err … sort of.

Boeing has a new in-flight Wi-Fi assist technology that they wanted to test. They wanted data on how well the wireless signals reach throughout the cabin, if connections were indeed more stable and consistent, and if the rampant radio waves affected onboard systems adversely. They wanted to know what spots were hot, and what spots were not, so that you could stay connected anywhere in the cabin. Only not wanting to trap a bunch of humans in a (albeit minimally) potentially dangerous plane for days upon days of motionless boredom, they turned to cheap sacks of mostly water, just like us but not: potatoes.

Less smelly than days of testing with the MythBuster’s favorite human analog, pigs, potatoes have enough water in them to mimic the effect of humans on the quality of the radio waves whilst resisting decay wonderfully enough to last and last sans the stink. According to Boeing a sack of potatoes is just as good as a human … for testing wireless signal absorption. So Boeing loaded up a decommissioned airplane with 20,000 lbs of Wi-Fi absorbing human analog spuds and got down to testing. For science!

Thanks to Boeing’s testing, the next time that you fly the friendly skies your electronic devices should be able to connect and stay tethered wirelessly without a signal drop as you zoom through the air at high speeds. And it should help keep the critical airplane infrastructure safer from rogue radio waves as well. All from a couch full of potatoes.

French fries were undoubtedly to be had once testing was done. No word however on if the cake was a lie or not.