Tag: BIOLOGY

Most video games offer some sort of escape from reality, but researchers at Stanford University are now working to inject actual life back into the gaming ecosystem -- one single-celled organism at a time. As NBC Bay Area reports, the scientists recently developed a series of games involving microscopic organisms, which players must move around various obstacle courses. Thus far, the team has ...

NASA announced that a research team has found a microbe in California's Mono Lake that is unlike anything encountered before. This microbe's cell components replace phosphorous, one of the building blocks of life, with arsenic. This is the first life-form discovered that deviates from the basic SPONCH formula for creating DNA . The discovery expands the possibility of finding extraterrestrial ...

When Freddy Johansen posted photos from a whale watching cruise on his Flickr account, he probably imagined that only a handful of close friends or family would find them interesting. As it turns out, though, the Norwegian's seemingly nonchalant photo of a humpback whale inadvertently resulted in a record-breaking biological discovery. As the Boston Globe reports, scientists first spotted ...

This year's IgNobel Prize winners, as always, came up with ingenious ways to do really zany things. This year's winner in the physics category, for example, discovered that people who wear socks on the outsides of their shoes are less likely to fall while walking on ice. Another researcher earned the vaunted prize for his straight-to-DVD research on fruit bat fellatio. Perhaps the weirdest ...

Foldit may seem like a relatively straightforward game, but the scientific theory behind it is anything but. Created by Washington University's Seth Cooper, the game requires players to deconstruct the complex, three-dimensional structures of various proteins -- a task typically left to biochemistry PhD students or researchers. Foldit, though, allows even novices to enter the world of protein ...

Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute have just created an entirely new synthetic life form in a laboratory, marking a watershed moment that could radically alter the way humans interact with nature. As Wired reports, the achievement is a culmination of over two-years' worth of research, numerous failed attempts and millions of dollars. In March, however, the team injected over a million ...

All writers want their words to be immortalized in posterity, but poet Christian Bök has some serious issues with his work falling under the sands of time. Bök is planning to inscribe his poetry within the DNA of a tough-as-nails bacterium known as Deinococcus radiodurans so that it will potentially last for billions of years. The bacterium can survive acids, freezing temperatures, ...

Share It's a universal truth that the more time you spend in front of your computer, the grosser your keyboard gets. While we may be able to wipe away the grease stains and breadcrumb trails that late night snacking leaves in its wake, there's another, more microscopic residue that we can't wipe away -- and it may say a lot more about us than just our eating habits. A new study conducted ...

What better way to fight the dangers of biological warfare than with... biological warfare? As Wired's Danger Room reports, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is set on investing a full $6 million in a project called "BioDesign," an ambitious plan that, if successful, would spawn a whole army of genetically engineered organisms programmed to fight the good fight -- until the end of ...

We've known for a while now that video games can make players sharper, but only recently have scientists reached a better understanding of what specific parts of the brain actually affect our gaming aptitude. In a recent study, researchers at the University of Illinois focused on an area of the brain called the striatum, which had been shown in past research with animals to serve as a "learning ...

If you happen to notice a swarm of robots floating past your beachfront home, don't panic; it's not the first wave of the SkyNet invasion. Aided by funding from the National Science Foundation, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) is planning to deploy fleets of autonomous robots, possibly numbering in the hundreds, to study localized oceanic environments. High on the list of ...

As the saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure. Well, that's certainly true for sculptor Forrest McCluer, who salvaged 30 computers from a garbage pile outside an office building and made it his personal mission to turn that junk into art. Now, one series in his 'The 30 Computers Project' brings a whole new meaning to term computer virus. McCluer used some of the discarded computer ...

It's good to hear that engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are starting to spend some time outside every once in a while. Pablo Alvarado, a mechanical engineer, and his colleagues at that prestigious university must have done so in developing their latest project: the robo-fish. Between five and eight inches long, the prototypes are comprised of a mere 10 movable parts ...

If you grew up with a few brothers and sisters, you know there are certain unspoken rules when it comes to food. You have to move fast without being noticed to get the last fish stick. According to a new study, it's not just humans who can learn these survival rules; robots can, too. Technology Review reports that a team of scientists at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de ...

Reading an entire novel is often considered a nice week's accomplishment, but a Stanford University professor has put that idea to shame. In just seven days, he mapped his entire DNA. According to an AP story on the Denver Post's Web site, bioengineering professor Stephen Quake, PhD, announced yesterday that he'd sequenced his genome in just one week, using only one machine and drawing on less ...