A team led by geneticist J. Craig Venter claims to have created a synthetic life form. This process involved building a genome from pre-existing fragments and then placing the resulting product inside a single-celled organism. The cell then accepted the genome and began replicating:

A few years ago, the researchers transplanted an entire natural genome — the genetic code — of one bacterium into another and watched it take over, turning a goat germ into a cattle germ.

Next, the researchers built from scratch another, smaller bacterium's genome, using off-the-shelf laboratory-made DNA fragments.

Friday's report combines those two achievements to test a big question: Could synthetic DNA really take over and drive a living cell? Somehow, it did.

"This is transforming life totally from one species into another by changing the software," said Venter, using a computer analogy to explain the DNA's role.[...]

That fixed, the transplant worked. The recipient cell started out with synthetic DNA and its original cytoplasm, but the new genome "booted up" that cell to start producing only proteins that normally would be found in the copied goat germ. The researchers had tagged the synthetic DNA to be able to tell it apart, and checked as the modified cell reproduced to confirm that new cells really looked and behaved like M. mycoides.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jUy0CkhjIEOS2ZY_SP3gWg8ELgewD9FQPB980 via DVICE | Photo: University of Florida

A German exchange student in Sydney, Australia was getting beaten and mugged by thugs. That's when the ninjas showed up:

They grabbed his phone and iPod and kicked him while he lay on the ground.

However, the men were spotted by a member of a nearby dojo.

Nathan Smith told his sensei and the rest of the students at Ninja Senshi Ryu and they rushed out to confront the thugs - all dressed in traditional black ninja garb.

On seeing the ninjas, the men fled, only to be later arrested by police.

"You should have seen their faces when they saw us in ninja gear coming towards them," the school's sensei, Kaylan Soto, told the Herald.

Link via Say Uncle | Photo via flickr user R'eyes, used under Creative Commons license

Every country is #1 at something. For Finland, it's the number of female doctors; for Gabon, it's manganese reserves; for Canada, it's fruit juice drinkers. Graphic designer David McCandless has a demographic to warm (or disturb) the patriotic heart of every nationality.

Link via Fast Company

A new office building in Osaka, Japan, has the largest passenger elevators in that country. Each of the five elevators at the Umeda Hankyu Building:

[...] can each carry up to 80 passengers, or 5,250 kilograms in load. The interior of each car is 3.4m wide, 2.8m long and 2.6m high, with a floor space of 9.52 square meters.

Link via Popular Science | Photo: Mitsubishi Electric

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Are you easily entertained by flashing lights and shiny objects? Well, then, good news! You'll like this trippy display of computer graphics which, Google Translate suggests, is a promotional video for a French telecommunications company. It's called "ENVISION: Step into the Sensory Box."

via Geekologie

It looks like an old, rusty fence, right? Just take a step to the left and look at it again.



It's a human face! This graffiti is located on a fence in Berlin and was created by Mental Gassi, a German art collective that places large human faces in public places.

via Nerdesque | Mental Gassi Blog

Generally, pacemaker batteries last for several years. But a new technology developed by researchers at Joseph Fourier University in France may make that long-lasting battery obsolete. This device may be able to generate electrical energy by absorbing glucose inside the human body. It's sort of like hosting an alien parasite, except without the irritating chest-bursting side effects. In Fast Company, Kit Eaton writes:

The trick the scientists worked out was to build the cell's electrodes out of compressed graphite, which has been treated with enzymes that oxidize incoming glucose molecules, with a resulting release of electrical energy. Add in a plastic-based membrane that only permits glucose and oxygen to penetrate and some platinum wiring and what you get is the world's first successful glucose fuel cell that can harvest chemicals already present in a living organism. It's capable of putting out a peak power of 6.5 microwatts in its experimental implementation, which is not enough to power a typical pacemaker (which needs around 10 microwatts) but the team is confident that the tech can be optimized to achieve this power output.

So what's all the buzz about this device? Its potential is absolutely incredible for medical devices that are permanently implanted into patients' bodies--things like pacemakers at the moment, but potentially in the future including gizmos like insulin pumps or, just possibly, an artificial heart. In one stroke, this reduces the need for complex surgery to replace the conventional power cells inside these devices, with all sorts of health and lifestyle benefits of having a reliable self-fueling electricity supply--along with the undeniable cachet of turning its users into genuinely bionic people

Link | Image: Virtue Beat

No, it's not just a weird work of art, but a demonstration by two scientists about how a slime mold can be used to plan road and communications networks efficiently:

Physarum polycephalum, a type of slime mold, grows tendrils in search of food and withdraws extraneous arms to focus on the most efficient paths between sources. Although the American map is just an illustrative model made for Popular Science, researchers in the U.K. have used slime mold to create similar replicas of local roads and railways, backed up by computer models. Andy Adamatzky and Jeff Jones, specialists in unconventional computing at the University of the West of England in Bristol, found that, left to its own devices, the slime mold mimicked a good part of the country’s actual road systems. Because slime mold finds the paths that are most resilient to faults or damage, it could be used to make mobile-communication and transportation networks hardier.

Videos at the link.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-05/slimeography | Photo: Andy Adamatzky and Jeff Jones

(Video Link)

German artist Aram Bartholl often juxtaposes online life with real life, as seen in his giant Google Maps indicators and actualization of World of Warcraft avatars. One of his recent projects is to place CAPTCHAs -- the images of letters and numbers used to prevent computers from creating accounts with online services -- in public spaces. Bertholl places them next to graffiti tags because graffiti, like CAPTCHAs, are codes that can only be read by certain people. The project is called "Are You Human?"

via Make | Artist's Website

(YouTube Link)

There's an annual remote control submarine regatta in Canberra, Australia. Here's a 2008 video of a RC surface warship in a pool dropping exploding depth charges on a RC submarine cruising beneath it. Below you'll see a video showing a subsurface perspective of what I think is the same incident.


(YouTube Link)

via Urlesque, where there are more examples of RC vehicles with deadly firepower

The Inntel Hotel in Zaandam, the Netherlands, is intentionally designed to look like traditional houses of the region stacked on top of each other. It's 11 stories tall and has 160 rooms. This hotel, designed by Wilfried van Winden, opened last March.

Link via DVICE | Official Website | Photo: Roel Backaert

Among other social purposes, the handshake is a means of expressing reconciliation between estranged participants. To help people get to that point, designer Dominic Wilcox made this art installation: The Pre-Handshake Handshake Device.

A traditional handshake can sometimes be just too big a step for those entrenched in their dislike of the other. No matter how important it is for two people to reconcile their differences they simply can’t get over their pride and lower themselves to the symbolism of a handshake with the other party.

I designed this product in an attempt to give those people a new, more acceptable alternative. I hope that this device will lower the bar for initiating reconciliation from the heights of the full contact hand on hand handshake to a more palatable non contact handshake. I plan to contact embassies around the world where resentment is prevalent. I would like to see all family counseling offices have one in their meeting rooms. I would encourage anyone who has fallen out with a friend, family member, work colleague, gang member or world leader to use the Pre-handshake Handshake Device and let bygones be bygones.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Dominic Wilcox

(YouTube Link)

Three British pranksters, reflecting upon the great seafaring history of their nation, decided to paddle an inflatable bouncy castle across Italy's Lake Garda. They did so during a major international regatta, and brought along a man in a shark costume (just to be prepared). The act was a publicity stunt for a project called Live Every Litre, which hopes to encourage young people to travel.

via Gizmodo

(Video Link)

Designer Mike Clare made roll cookies that have a marker that can be detected by augmented reality software. When he waves one of the cookies in front of the webcam, his computer displays a colorful symbol on it.

Link via Geekosystem

Artist Nathan Vincent creates doilies with traditionally masculine themes in order to explore gender roles in Western society:

My work explores gender permissions and the challenges that arise from straying from the prescribed norms. It questions the qualities of gender by considering what constitutes masculine and feminine. It critiques stereotypical gender mediums by creating "masculine objects" using "feminine processes" such as crochet, sewing, and applique.

http://nathanvincent.com/section/5896_2D_WORK.html via DudeCraft