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POPSNew kinds of weather on the way
cont: Blench Most weather conditions involve temperature or moisture, but blench is all about smell - and, as smells go, this one is awful. It's described as a combination of artificial strawberry, egg, the artifiicial strawberry found in scented erasers, and body odor. It sticks to clothes and skin, and some people try to remove the "blench stench" using lemon juice. But don't be too hasty to wipe it off - after a few minutes indoors, the smell of blench changes, leaving you smelling like a dewy rose garden in the early hours of the morning. Sea Humps Rising temperatures penetrate ever deeper into the ocean, eventually causing the entire ocean to evaporate from the bottom up. The sea rises for a moment, but then swiftly cools, and descends again with a loud thud. This process can continue, every few seconds, for many hours, and the pounding sound can be disruptive for those who live by the sea. Limp Wallys Limp Wallys are a type of fog which forms in thin, floppy strands, a
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POPSArtificial life will be created 'within months' more (at source): Carole Lartigue and colleagues removed the bacteria's entire genome and inserted it into the yeast - an organism that is distant from bacteria on the tree of life. Yeast is easier to manipulate in the lab and this process allowed the team to alter the genes - in this case, deleting one gene not necessary for bacteria to live.
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POPS Structure of HIV genome 'decoded' more (at source): RNA is able to fold into intricate patterns and structures. Therefore decoding a full genome opens up genetic information that was not previously accessible, and may hold answers to why the virus acts as it does. The team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said they planned to use the information to see if they could make tiny changes to the virus.
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POPS"The DNA Code" - New Research Shows Life Hardwired in the Universe more: They also match those in simulations of early Earth, and most critically, those simulations were performed by other people. The implications are staggering: good news for anyone worried about how we're alone, and bad news for anyone who demands some kind of "Designer" to put life together - it seems that physics can assemble the organic jigsaw all by itself, thank you very much, and has probably done so throughout space since the beginning of everything. The study indicates that you don't need a miracle to arrive at the chemical cocktail for early life, just a decently large asteroid with the right components. That's all. The entire universe could be stuffed with life, from the earliest prebiotic protein-a-likes to fully DNAed descendants. The path from one to the other is long, but we've had thirteen and a half billion years so far and it's happened at least once.
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POPSThe shape(s) of things to come more: An MIT group is building “self-folding origami” machines that “use specialized sheets of material with built-in actuators and data. These machines use cutting-edge mathematical theorems to fold themselves into virtually any three-dimensional object.” The Programmable Matter project is five months into its second phase, which is supposed to wind up early next Spring. When they’re done, the researchers ought to “assemble four or five three-dimensional solids of a specific size and shape from a set of building blocks.”
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POPSSuper Rats are here continues: Prof Smith of the university's applied sciences department warned that "super rats" may be thriving in communities across Britain. The Government no longer provides funding to track resistance, meaning the scale of the problem is unclear. "Natural selection means that when you have a rat population in your town, poison will kill the ones that aren't resistant, the ones that survive may have the gene, they then have babies who can receive the gene themselves," he said. "There are mutations and changes in their DNA that alter the ability of rats to deal with these poisons. It appears to be moving west and has now been located in Swindon and Bristol. It is a warning of things to come."
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POPSA closer look at termites continued: This trial-and-error method of natural selection does not go on ad infinitum; nature is smarter than that. Each magnetic termite colony passes on a particular successful mound orientation to the next one through a clever technique: Each termite has a magnetic compass programmed into its system that allows it to sense a particular magnetic bearing, which it then passes on to its offspring. Something like an architectural blueprint ingrained into the DNA. Pretty cool, huh?
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POPSDNA Found to Have "Impossible" Telepathic Properties continues (more at source): Even so, the research published in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B, shows very clearly that homology recognition between sequences of several hundred nucleotides occurs without physical contact or presence of proteins. Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules or chemical signals.
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POPS"Babies born in 2019 will have genetic code mapped at birth" continues: But the development will also lead to questions about privacy and access to individuals' genetic records. Genotyping services, which examine about two million of the genome's six billion DNA letters for clues to disease, are already available to consumers for about £700. Customers can have their whole genome mapped for about £70,000. Illumina is preparing to launch a much cheaper whole-genome service within two years. It has already begun seeking consent from its first customers, who are likely to pay between £7,000 and £14,000.
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POPSKnife switch causes actor to slit his own throat on stage continues: One officer told Austrian TV news: "The rumours are wild, with some claiming that he was the victim of jealous rival. "We don't know anything for sure yet; we have to work through everyone." The knife was reportedly bought at a local shop; one possibility is that the props staff forgot to blunt its blade. "The knife even still had the price tag on it," an investigator said. After emergency treatment at a hospital, Hoevels declared that the show must go on, and returned to the stage on Sunday night with a bandage tied around his neck, ready to once again meet his mock demise.
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POPSReturn of the Neanderthal? continues (more at site): Cool, huh? But that's not the half of it. Wade notes: The full genome of the Neanderthal, an ancient human species probably driven to extinction by the first modern humans that entered Europe some 45,000 years ago, is expected to be recovered shortly. If the mammoth can be resurrected, the same would be technically possible for Neanderthals. In fact, Wade points out, there are good reasons to re-create a Neanderthal: "No one knows if Neanderthals could speak. A living one would answer that question and many others."
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