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Genomics entrepreneur Craig Venter has created a synthetic cell that contains the smallest genome of any known, independent organism. Functioning with 473 genes, the cell is a milestone in his team’s 20-year quest to reduce life to its bare essentials and, by extension, to design life from scratch.
Venter, who has co-founded a company that seeks to harness synthetic cells for making industrial products, says that the feat heralds the creation of customized cells to make drugs, fuels and other products. But an explosion in powerful ‘gene-editing’ techniques, which enable relatively easy and selective tinkering with genomes, raises a niggling question: why go to the trouble of making new life forms when you can simply tweak what already exists?
Authored by Ryan Bushey, Digital Editor, R&D Magazine
ARPA-E, a division of the U.S. department of energy, unveiled a new program it funds called the TERRA Project.
TERRA stands for Transportation Energy Resources from Renewable Agriculture. Six teams are participating in this endeavor where they will implement new technologies like robots and drones to develop next-generation biofuels that are more durable than its predecessor—corn ethanol.
Of all the planets in our solar system, Jupiter seems to stand out as this massive giants.
When scientists started uncovering the secrets of this mysterious planet, they discovered that Jupiter was probably a ‘star in the making’ during the early years of the solar system.
Jupiter and the sun
Jupiter has a lot in common with the sun than you think.
It is made of the same elements such as Hydrogen and Helium that are found in the sun and other stars!
But it is not massive enough and does not have have the pressure and temperature to fuse the existing Hydrogen atoms to form helium, which is the power source of stars.
How do stars form ?
Stars form directly from the collapse of dense clouds of
interstellar gas and dust. Because of rotation, these clouds form
flattened disks that surround the central, growing stars.
After the star
has nearly reached its final mass, by accreting gas from the disk, the
leftover matter in the disk is free to form planets.
How was Jupiter formed ?
Jupiter is generally believed to have formed in a two-step
process:
First, a vast swarm of ice and rock ‘planetesimals’ formed.
These comet-sized bodies collided and accumulated into ever-larger
planetary embryos.
Once an embryo became about as massive as ten Earths,
its self-gravity became strong enough to pull in gas directly from the
disk.
During this second step, the proto-Jupiter gained most of its
present mass (a total of 318 times the mass of the Earth).
But sadly soon
thereafter, the disk gas was removed by the intense early solar wind (from our sun) ,
before Jupiter could grow to a similar size.
This destroyed all hopes that Jupiter had on becoming a star
What if it had become a star ?
If Jupiter had become a star,our solar system would have
become a binary star system.
A binary star system is those systems having
two stars.they both revolve around themselves in their own orbits.
It is
interesting to note that most of the solar systems in the universe are
binary,triple or higher multiple star systems but our sun is rather
unusual.
In other star systems the mass distribution of the stars is equitable, but in ours the sun decided to not let that happen
Why? We have no clue ! Scientists are still trying to fathom these mysterious details of the birth process. But the more we know, the more we learn we don’t know :D
TL;DR
The sun grabbed most of the mass during the formation
of the solar system and threw a huge solar wind which knocked off all of
Jupiter’s surrounding gases, making it a failed star.
// Another gem from Brown University’s computational biology research
The definitive feature of the many thousand cis-regulatory control modules in an animal genome is their information processing capability. In the “genomic computer” intra-machine communication occurs by means of diffusion (of transcription factors), while in electronic computers it occurs by electron transit along pre-organized wires. There follow fundamental differences in design principle in respect to the meaning of time, speed, multiplicity of processors, memory, robustness of computation and hardware and software. The genomic computer controls spatial gene expression in the development of the body plan, and its appearance in remote evolutionary time must be considered to have been a founding requirement for animal grade life.
For ‘Life On Film’ Jonathan Karr of Stanford Covert lab rendered a 36 panel movie of the simulations you can access via WholeCellViz [link]. That’s 36 of a possible 11,336 visualisations of a simulated organisms lifespan. Nevertheless the scope of the data firehose came through on screen.
Head over to the website now as the site really shines in its interactivity. I’m really struck by the intersection of data visualisation literacy with means of understanding a living thing at such granularity.
The Whole Cell Viz data-visualisation is the product of over 900 research papers worth of data on Mycoplasma Genitalium. The humble STD has a minimal genome of 525 genes and its model organism status meant there was a wealth of data to draw on. The Covert Lab at Stanford aggregated all this data into a system where entire simulated lifespans of Mycoplasma Genitalium could be processed on a computer, and the ‘life’ of the organism rendered infographically accessible through dynamic data visualisations.
Skin cells manipulated to grow into predefined patterns and recorded via time-lapse imaging techniques. Verena Friedrich’s commentary on the persuasive strategems of the cosmoceutical industries
Nights spent binge reading research papers and tinkering with DIY technology have served us well at loteos, a web platform run by students fascinated by the universe and what they can do with it. Here, we write about new theories, ideas, and tech in the fantastic world of science that pique our varying interests…But…as geeks we don’t simply read articles, we dive into them. We encourage everyone to use our blog to learn about, discuss, and post their own media in the sci-sphere. So, grab your goggles, and “let’s talk science”. To discuss an article click the eye icon at the end of every post and scroll to the bottom of the page to the disqus widget. To ask the editors public questions and submit your own media hit the three vertical lines at the top left corner of the page. And finally, to share an item hit the ellipsis icon at the end of every post.
![wetwareontologies:
“ For ‘Life On Film’ Jonathan Karr of Stanford Covert lab rendered a 36 panel movie of the simulations you can access via WholeCellViz [link]. That’s 36 of a possible 11,336 visualisations of a simulated organisms lifespan....](https://64.media.tumblr.com/b95bc48634367eacb987c3d11fd351a6/tumblr_mudb90Za1D1rk5igso9_r1_400.gifv)
![wetwareontologies:
“ For ‘Life On Film’ Jonathan Karr of Stanford Covert lab rendered a 36 panel movie of the simulations you can access via WholeCellViz [link]. That’s 36 of a possible 11,336 visualisations of a simulated organisms lifespan....](https://64.media.tumblr.com/8d22218b9c4110ece8f832af3290437a/tumblr_mudb90Za1D1rk5igso1_400.gifv)
![wetwareontologies:
“ For ‘Life On Film’ Jonathan Karr of Stanford Covert lab rendered a 36 panel movie of the simulations you can access via WholeCellViz [link]. That’s 36 of a possible 11,336 visualisations of a simulated organisms lifespan....](https://64.media.tumblr.com/8e5cf8c2aab33d5a1ee82f80e478d1cd/tumblr_mudb90Za1D1rk5igso2_r1_500.gifv)
![wetwareontologies:
“ For ‘Life On Film’ Jonathan Karr of Stanford Covert lab rendered a 36 panel movie of the simulations you can access via WholeCellViz [link]. That’s 36 of a possible 11,336 visualisations of a simulated organisms lifespan....](https://64.media.tumblr.com/1cd70531e76f8df744b69df7d4546975/tumblr_mudb90Za1D1rk5igso3_r1_400.gifv)
![wetwareontologies:
“ For ‘Life On Film’ Jonathan Karr of Stanford Covert lab rendered a 36 panel movie of the simulations you can access via WholeCellViz [link]. That’s 36 of a possible 11,336 visualisations of a simulated organisms lifespan....](https://64.media.tumblr.com/9dcd5c395e82eba589ba58dfc210b693/tumblr_mudb90Za1D1rk5igso4_r1_500.gifv)
![wetwareontologies:
“ For ‘Life On Film’ Jonathan Karr of Stanford Covert lab rendered a 36 panel movie of the simulations you can access via WholeCellViz [link]. That’s 36 of a possible 11,336 visualisations of a simulated organisms lifespan....](https://64.media.tumblr.com/914362dc3235ec823eec0b430ea979ae/tumblr_mudb90Za1D1rk5igso5_r1_500.gifv)
![wetwareontologies:
“ For ‘Life On Film’ Jonathan Karr of Stanford Covert lab rendered a 36 panel movie of the simulations you can access via WholeCellViz [link]. That’s 36 of a possible 11,336 visualisations of a simulated organisms lifespan....](https://64.media.tumblr.com/82c742a75cedd86d60e9cea36abbe156/tumblr_mudb90Za1D1rk5igso6_r1_400.gifv)
![wetwareontologies:
“ For ‘Life On Film’ Jonathan Karr of Stanford Covert lab rendered a 36 panel movie of the simulations you can access via WholeCellViz [link]. That’s 36 of a possible 11,336 visualisations of a simulated organisms lifespan....](https://64.media.tumblr.com/07638a711c8e5d3a6b0dfc0d5d6ec27c/tumblr_mudb90Za1D1rk5igso7_r1_400.gifv)
![wetwareontologies:
“ For ‘Life On Film’ Jonathan Karr of Stanford Covert lab rendered a 36 panel movie of the simulations you can access via WholeCellViz [link]. That’s 36 of a possible 11,336 visualisations of a simulated organisms lifespan....](https://64.media.tumblr.com/43798eeb347863e87b35adbb2469dd42/tumblr_mudb90Za1D1rk5igso8_r1_400.gifv)
![wetwareontologies:
“ For ‘Life On Film’ Jonathan Karr of Stanford Covert lab rendered a 36 panel movie of the simulations you can access via WholeCellViz [link]. That’s 36 of a possible 11,336 visualisations of a simulated organisms lifespan....](https://64.media.tumblr.com/312dbd1508962743662856c6d09efc7e/tumblr_mudb90Za1D1rk5igso10_r1_400.gifv)
