Tonight is sunset Manhattanhenge, when the setting sun aligns perfectly with the street grid of Manhattan. The next perfect sunset alignment is on the other side of the solstice in July.
The sunrise Manhattanhenges take place on either side of the winter solstice.
Again with the bacteriophages! Mad scientists at the National Academy of Sciences have engineered sections of DNA to be used for plain, old data storage. (Like, dude, yer playlist is inside you.) Quote:
After some 750 trials, the team struck on the right recipe of proteins, and now have their sights set on creating a full “byte” – eight bits – of DNA information that can be similarly manipulated. The work is at the frontier of biological engineering, and senior author of the research Drew Endy said that applications of the approach are yet to come.
“I’m not even really concerned with the ways genetic data storage might be useful down the road, only in creating scalable and reliable biological bits as soon as possible,” Dr Endy said. “Then we’ll put them in the hands of other scientists to show the world how they might be used. One of the coolest places for computing is within biological systems.”
See, it’s cool. Turning DNA into storage, no chance of that replicating and going pluooey! He’s not really concerned.
Well, zombie creators, show him why he better be.
One of my preferred science fantasy/fiction themes is the unintended consequences of scientific discovery or its intentional misuse. Because humanity is struggling every day to survive its own technological age, it’s the issue of our time upon which everything else rests. Here’s a bit of it, as discussed by Michio Kaku.
Now git to work.