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”.

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.

Every so often you hear of those crazy folks at DARPA looking into something zany like a sonic gun that’ll make you puke or a robotic truck that can cross a desert on its own, but every once in a while you can actually almost see a point to one of their mad-scientist creations. Here’s one that I could swear I read in a book or saw in a movie or something somewhere sci-fi, brought to reality. (Well … almost.)

No longer will the soldier of the future have to fear bleeding to death on the battlefield from a gut shot, because now, thanks to DARPA, a medic can inject him with foam to slow the bleeding.

As part of DARPA’s Wound Stasis program, Arsenal Medical has developed an expanding polyurethane polymer foam that can be injected into the abdominal cavity to stanch internal bleeding. The binary compound foam rapidly expands to 30 times its volume once mixed, compressing wounds that are almost impossible to compress and reducing bleeding dramatically, controlling hemorrhaging for over an hour. (And probably making it really hard to breathe.) This increases the survival rate at three hours after the injury from 8% survival (observed in control tests) to 72%.

For those of you worried/disturbed by the thought of control tests to get those numbers, rest assured that DARPA didn’t shoot humans in the stomach just to see how long it took them to bleed out. No, instead they used the MythBusters favorite “human analog”, Porky the Pig. (Allegedly. What may or may not go on inside of secret military testing is not my purview.) I almost feel like we need a moment of reflection on the importance of scientific testing from GLaDOS here…

But in any event, the ends certainly justify some delicious porcine BBQs to be held after testing.

In related tests it took surgeons less than a minute to remove the big foam block in the abdominal cavity, which cleverly comes out in just one piece … if you first made a hole big enough to pull a giant foam block the size of your abdominal cavity out in one piece. GLaDOS, just where are you when we need you? And will there be cake?

Anywho, back to DARPA, who is now prepping for their FDA approval process, and Arsenal Medical who is working on a civilian-oriented version of the foam. And me who is glad that I’m no longer a soldier and thus do not have to worry about which would be worse: dying of a gut shot, or surviving by becoming a human balloon…

One has to wonder though, will they be working on a version of this foam that dissolves on its own? You certainly wouldn’t want to miss a piece if it doesn’t dissolve.

One also has to wonder, how do civilian products compare? Can one just simply grab a can of gap-filler insulating foam from your local hardware store to do the same job? After all, you never know when a nail gun incident on the worksite could happen.

And how long will it take some sick ____ to use this foam as a torture device in a horror movie? Or in smaller amounts as a subdermal alteration in a spy flick?

Well, speaking of movies, here’s one of DARPA’s not-so-silly string in action:

Real cybernetics may be getting closer than you think! Researchers at the University of Newcastle have a whole new approach to hooking electronics up to you, and this time it just might work.

Typically with cybernetics you spend forever designing the electronics to fit the biological model of what you’re connecting to. It’s an approach of varying success, but generally ends up killing a lot of the cells that the electronics connect to because they just weren’t designed to be electrocuted. (Who is?)  Nor is an organic system of nerves timed the same way that an electrical signal is. A direct electrical stimulation is just not how our organic bodies were designed. As a result, cybernetics just haven’t been very effective because we haven’t found a good way to bridge the gap between electrical device and living tissue.  Bodies just weren’t meant to be zapped.  “Don’t tase me bro!”

Enter Daniel Frankel of the University of Newcastle’s Department of Chemical Engineering and fellow researchers who took a whole new approach. Instead of a direct electrical connection they created a three-part layer. They were creating “eyes” so they genetically modified hamster DNA to create cells that produce nitric oxide when exposed to light. These cells in turn were connected to a platinum electrode that creates electrical current from elevated levels of nitric oxide. The result is that an optical signal (light) is converted into a chemical signal (nitric oxide) that is converted into an electrical signal that any machine can read. Thus creating their very own biological eyes that hook up to electronics, but with an organic chemical response as an intermediate layer to protect cells from electricity damage, thus finding an interesting way to bridge the gap between electronic and organic signaling that doesn’t damage organic cells.

In fact the very reason that nitric oxide was chosen as a chemical signal is because nature does it quite often, such as in the operation of our muscles and the dilation of our blood vessels. Our bodies know how to work with and how to clean up excess production of nitric oxide. So it’s a far safer approach to hooking up computers to us organic types.  Thus making a future where one day we might actually have decent cybernetics possible.

In this particular case, it’s also a kind of creepy concept of making organic eyes for a computer. As if your webcam wasn’t good enough.

A study in China brings a potential “Duh!” moment to the foreground: that for bad drivers cellphones are but a pretense to crash into you.

Eh?

Seems it may be true though. The study examined accident data before and after bans on cellphone usage while driving and found there to be no significant difference before or after the ban in the number of accidents, regardless of the ban. Further study into the reason(s) why came up with one simple answer, that “frequent phone users indeed drove more dangerously than occasional phone users did.”

Or in other words, a bad driver is a bad driver is a bad driver, regardless of laws or even the specific cause of the distraction. Rocking out to music, talking on phones, applying makeup, eating, fornicating, whatever the excuse for the accident, the real culprit is not the distraction itself, but the distractable driver choosing to make poor decisions. Take away their phones and they’ll just do something else equally stupid … right before they crash into you.

And that’s assuming that they actually obeyed the law and stopped using their cellphones in the first place, something people who make bad decisions are also prone to do: ignore inconvenient laws.  Like using cellphones.  Like speeding.  Like actually stopping at stop signs.  Etc.

So in the end all that no-cellphone-while-driving laws do is … nothing.  Apparently.