Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Genetics
Contest brings out the biohackers
Mix one part enthusiasm, two parts engineering and three parts biology — and you’ve got a recipe for do-it-yourself genetic engineering. Every November, college kids from Michigan to Munich descend on MIT, eager to show off their biohacking skills. In the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, teams battle one another to build the coolest synthetically altered organisms. If you want to create a microbe that will sniff out and destroy contaminants in mining waste ponds, or a cell that will produce drugs right in your body, iGEM is for you.
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- Life
Victorian zoological map redrawn
Species distribution patterns that inspired Darwin and Wallace get an update.
- Chemistry
Repellent slime has material virtues
Threads isolated from hagfishes' defensive goo demonstrate superior strength and flexibility.
- Science & Society
Cell biologists hone elevator pitches
Competition challenges scientists to summarize their work for a captive lay audience.
- Life
Pressure keeps cancer in check
In lab experiments, physically confining malignant cells prevents runaway growth.
- Life
Heart telltale
Engineered cells that flash when they beat may offer a new way to test drugs for cardiac toxicity.
- Tech
Antarctic test of novel ice drill poised to begin
Any day now, a team of 40 scientists and support personnel expects to begin using a warm, high pressure jet of water to bore a 30 centimeter hole through 83 meters of ice. Once it breaks through to the sea below, they’ll have a few days to quickly sample life from water before the hole begins freezing up again. It's just a test. But if all goes well, in a few weeks the team will move 700 miles and bore an even deeper hole to sample for freshwater life that may have been living for eons outside even indirect contact with Earth’s atmosphere.
- Life
News in brief: Counting project reveals forest’s bug diversity
Some 25,000 species of arthropods live in Panamanian forest.
- Life
Early life forms may have been terrestrial
A controversial theory suggests that at least some of the earliest widespread complex life forms lived on land.
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