Floating Robotic Spheres: From the Millennium Falcon to the ISS

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Floating Robotic Spheres: From the Millennium Falcon to the ISS

Bill Christensen

Technovelgy.com Fri Jun 9, 9:01 AM ET

In 1999, MIT engineering Professor David Miller showed Star Wars on the first day of class. During the scene where Luke Skywalker practices his light saber against a seeker remote, Miller stood up and said “I want you to build me some of those.”

On May 19, 2006 from 10:30am-1:30pm CST Miller’s dream (not to mention that of George Lucas and about a zillion Star Wars fans, including me) became at least partly reality. The SPHERES mini-satellite, a tiny (eight-inch diameter) remote-controlled device, flew in the
International Space Station (ISS). SPHERES stands for Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites. Flight Engineer Jeff Williams “piloted” the SPHERES unit in three dimensions for the first time around the pressurized Destiny module.

According to
NASA, the demonstration tested the basics of formation flight and autonomous docking that should be useful in future multiple spacecraft formation flying. The long-range plan for SPHERES is to test flying in formation with a set of mini-satellites.

The first test flight consisted of a series of 10-15 pre-planned maneuvers lasting up to 10 minutes each. Once the appropriate software was loaded on the controlling laptop, the satellite began a set of pre-programmed maneuvers to test attitude control, station keeping, re-targeting, collision avoidance and fuel balancing. The mini-satellite is manuevered using compressed carbon dioxide gas thrusters.

Although the SPHERES mini-satellites are not equipped with blasters or lasers, the SPHERES device is designed to be a testbed for trying out experimental software to control clusters of satellites; it should be easy to add them.

The next step in the official testing is to tuck additional SPHERES units onto shuttle flights to test formation flying. The second satellite is scheduled to launch to the station on STS-121 in July 2006. The third will be launched on STS-116.

Scientists prepare to immitate the movie Twins

Actually, this whole story is presented as a big lie. It is NOT a three-parent embryo, it is a two parent embryo with mitochondria from a third woman. That doesn’t make her a mother in the slightest! It’s just more sensational journalism written by reporters who once took a biology class in 1974 but sure know how to write headlines that look like B-Movie plots. That may sell papers, but it makes America dumber. No wonder the Soviets are way ahead of us in the space race! The scientist in the news story even seems annoyed at how the reporter is getting it wrong. It all proves my theory that news reporters are the dumbest people on the planet. They are also the most influential (behind drunken slut celebrities.) Therefore, my new plan to take over the world is to breed dumber and dumber reporters who are under my control, and will brainwash the public into being complete idiots. I call my plan Fox News!

Embryos created with DNA from 3 people

By MARIA CHENG, AP Medical Writer

LONDON – British scientists say they have created human embryos containing DNA from two women and a man in a procedure that researchers hope might be used one day to produce embryos free of inherited diseases.

Though the preliminary research has raised concerns about the possibility of genetically modified babies, the scientists say that the embryos are still only primarily the product of one man and one woman.

“We are not trying to alter genes, we’re just trying to swap a small proportion of the bad ones for some good ones,” said Patrick Chinnery, a professor of neurogenetics at Newcastle University involved in the research.

The research was presented at a scientific conference recently, but has not been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.

The process aims to create healthy embryos for couples to avoid passing on genes carrying diseases.

The genes being replaced are the mitochondria, a cell’s energy source, which are contained outside the nucleus in a normal female egg. Mistakes in the mitochondria’s genetic code can result in serious diseases like muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, strokes and mental retardation.

In their research, Chinnery and colleagues used normal embryos created from one man and one woman that had defective mitochondria in the woman’s egg. They then transplanted that embryo into an emptied egg donated from a second woman who had healthy mitochondria.

The research is being funded by the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, a British charity.

Only trace amounts of a person’s genes come from the mitochondria, and experts said it would be incorrect to say that the embryos have three parents.

“Most of the genes that make you who you are are inside the nucleus,” Chinnery said. “We’re not going anywhere near that.”

So far, 10 such embryos have been created, though they have not been allowed to develop for more than five days. Chinnery hoped that after further experiments in the next few years the process might be available to parents undergoing in-vitro fertilization.

“If successful, this research could give families who might otherwise have a bleak future a chance to avoid some very grave diseases,” said Francoise Shenfield, a fertility expert with the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. Shenfield was not connected to the Newcastle University research.

Similar experiments have been conducted in animals in Japan, and has already led to the birth of healthy mice who had their mitochondria genes corrected.

Shenfield said that further tests to assess the safety and efficacy of the process were necessary before it could be offered as a potential treatment.

A bill to allow the procedure to be regulated as a therapy for couples — once it is proven to work — is expected to be discussed in Britain’s House of Commons in March.

Oldest Horseshoe Crab Fossil Discovered

What’s the best part of horseshoe crabs? The blue blood! Seriously. Also, they are old. And now it looks like they are even older than first though. This new Lunataspis aurora is tiny and is easily pushed around by bigger, later horseshoe crabs for anyone thinking of growing them in a display of ancient sea creatures. The fact that the ancient crabs were but smaller versions of modern day counterparts (instead of the usual bigger versions being the extinct one) has caused me to add a reverse switch to my growth rate so it can also be a shrink ray! Now I will have the biggest rats and smallest elephants of anyone! MuHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Here is the original news story:

Oldest Horseshoe Crab Fossil Discovered

Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com Mon Jan 28, 9:46 AM ET

Nearly a half a billion years ago, tiny horseshoe crabs crept along the shorelines much like today’s larger versions do, new fossil evidence suggests.

Two nearly complete fossil specimens discovered in Canada reveal a new genus of horseshoe crab, pushing their origins back at least 100 million years earlier than previously thought.

Dubbed Lunataspis aurora, the ancient horseshoe crab is estimated to have been just 1.5 inches (4 centimeters) from head to tail-tip. That’s much smaller than its modern-day relatives that can span nearly 20 inches (50 centimeters).

“We do not know if the fossils were small because they were simply young animals or because Lunataspis just didn’t grow any bigger,” said researcher David Rudkin of the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada.

Crabby find

Rudkin and his colleagues, including Graham Young of the Manitoba Museum, spotted the fossils buried in 445-million-year-old rocks from the Ordovician period in central and northern Manitoba. They describe the discovery in the January issue of the journal Paleontology.

The specimens included patches of the animals’ outer-covering and even evidence of their compound eyes.

Horseshoe crabs are not true crabs and are instead more closely related to spiders and scorpions. And like their eight-legged relatives, horseshoe crabs sport a flexible exoskeleton made of chitin rather than the hard-shell armoring worn by crabs.

Chitin degrades over time. For that reason, ancient specimens of horseshoe crabs have been sparse. Until now, the oldest fossils dated back 350 million years ago, from the Carboniferous period. Fossils have also been found in rocks from the Jurassic Period, suggesting the animals were crawling around beneath dinosaurs. Both the Carboniferous and the Jurassic fossil discoveries indicate the ancient horseshoe crabs greatly resembled their modern-day counterparts.

Primitive looks

Analysis of the recent finds also indicates the ocean creatures haven’t changed much over the eons.

“We wouldn’t necessarily have expected horseshoe crabs to look very much like the modern ones, but that’s exactly what they look like,” Rudkin said.

“This body plan that they’ve invented, they’ve stayed with it for almost a half a billion years. It’s a good plan,” Rudkin told LiveScience. “They’ve survived almost unchanged up until the present day, whereas lots of other animals haven’t.”

And whereas major extinction events have wiped even the mightiest, non-avian dinosaurs from our planet, this primitive-looking organism has come out unscathed.

“The horseshoe crab, the lowly little animal that crawls out of the sea every once in a while to mate, it’s survived for at least 445 million years in more or less the same form,” Rudkin said.

He added that understanding how horseshoe crabs adapted to their ecological niche so early and then weathered natural crises will give scientists broader insights about how ocean ecosystems changed over time.

Bananas are dirty cloners

Bananas are all the same. Pretty much, because they are almost all made by cuttings of the original plants, basically making them all clones. That also makes them genetically similar, which is bad when diseases hit. And two diseases are hitting, effectively killing off the entire banana supply. There will soon be no bananas, no bananas today. Why is that? Because Panama disease and black Sigatoka are ripping the crap out of bananas, and bananas can’t fight back because they are a bunch of cloned wusses. That’s pretty pathetic, bananas! The loss of bananas means creepy guys will never have a chance to watch girls eat bananas and get turned on. Actually, that’s probably a good thing. But it also means monkeys will riot. Ever wonder why the Apes took over the world on Planet of the Apes? It was a banana shortage! Bananas are important because they stave off nuclear destruction by the hand of evil apes. Why no one listens to me I’ll never understand. Now I have to waste time I could be devoting to making rocket-powered dinosaurs to genetically engineer some bananas that aren’t wimps. That’s right, I have to save the world from eventual Ape takeover so I can be free to destroy it myself by my own means. Jerks.

You think this is isolated? Soon we will have cloned cows, cloned animals, cloned plants. All these clones in mass production, just waiting for someone to come along and release a super-virus that can destroy them all….MuHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

GATTACA to GATTADAM!

It seems people just can’t resist playing God. I know I love making human-animal hybrids, intelligent robot slaves, and generally changing the size of animals for fun. And now some researchers have gone and tried to expand the number of bases of DNA.

First of all, the new bases, D and M (dSICS and dMMO2), have the stupidest names imaginable. Someone rename them things like damnedinine and monsterine quick! A bunch of letters is unacceptable. Secondly, we’ve had other bases pair up for years. RNA is rip with this, it is not that new. Thirdly, none of these are coded into any codon triplets yet. So this is basically the equivalent of announcing you’ve invented two new letters for the alphabet but haven’t invented any words to use them in. Color me unimpresses. Once you got working super-rats that have thirteen arms thanks to their monsterine bases coding for Tyro-mega-lysine Amino Acid thank you will have my interest. Until then, go suck on a pipetter!

Artificial letters added to life’s alphabet

* 13:07 30 January 2008
* NewScientist.com news service
* Robert Adler

Two artificial DNA “letters” that are accurately and efficiently replicated by a natural enzyme have been created by US researchers. Adding the two artificial building blocks to the four that naturally comprise DNA could allow wildly different kinds of genetic engineering, they say.

Eventually, the researchers say, they may be able to add them into the genetic code of living organisms.

The diversity of life on earth evolved using genetic code made from arrangements of four genetic “bases”, sometimes described as letters. They are divided into two pairs, which bond together from opposite strands of a DNA molecule to form the rungs of its characteristic double-helix shape.

The unnatural but functional new base pair is the fruit of nearly a decade of research by chemical biologist Floyd Romesberg, at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, US.

Romesberg and colleagues painstakingly created a library of nearly 200 potential new genetic bases that are slight variations on the natural ones. Unfortunately, none of them were similar enough in structure and chemistry to the real thing to be copied accurately by the polymerase enzymes that replicate DNA inside cells.
Random generation

Frustrated by the slow pace designing and synthesising potential new bases one at a time, Romesberg borrowed some tricks from drug development companies. The resulting large scale experiments generated many potential bases at random, which were then screened to see if they would be treated normally by a polymerase enzyme.

With the help of graduate student Aaron Leconte, the group synthesized and screened 3600 candidates. Two different screening approaches turned up the same pair of molecules, called dSICS and dMMO2.

The molecular pair that worked surprised Romesberg. “We got it and said, ‘Wow!’ It would have been very difficult to have designed that pair rationally.”

But the team still faced a challenge. The dSICS base paired with itself more readily than with its intended partner, so the group made minor chemical tweaks until the new compounds behaved properly.
Novel DNA

“We probably made 15 modifications,” says Romesberg, “and 14 made it worse.” Sticking a carbon atom attached to three hydrogen atoms onto the side of dSICS, changing it to d5SICS, finally solved the problem. “We now have an unnatural base pair that’s efficiently replicated and doesn’t need an unnatural polymerase,” says Romesberg. “It’s staring to behave like a real base pair.”

The team is now eager to find out just what makes it work. “We still don’t have a detailed understanding of how replication happens,” says Romesberg. “Now that we have an unnatural base pair, we are continuing experiments to understand it better.”

In the near future, Romesberg expects the new base pairs will be used to synthesize DNA with novel and unnatural properties. These might include highly specific primers for DNA amplification; tags for materials, such as explosives, that could be detected without risk of contamination from natural DNA; and building novel DNA-based nanomaterials.
Increased ‘evolvability’

More generally, Romesberg notes that DNA and RNA are now being used for hundreds of purposes: for example, to build complex shapes, build complex nanostructures, silence disease genes, or even perform calculations. A new, unnatural, base pair could multiply and diversify these applications.

The most challenging goal, says Romesberg, will be to incorporate unnatural base pairs into the genetic code of organisms. “We want to import these into a cell, study RNA trafficking, and in the longest term, expand the genetic code and ‘evolvability’ of an organism.”

Stanford University chemist Eric Kool, has studied the fundamental chemistry of base-pair bonding. He foresees challenges, but great potential in the unnatural bases.

“It requires a long effort by multiple laboratories, but I think ultimately it will lead to some important tools,” he says. “The ability to encode amino acids with unnatural base pairs will be quite powerful when it comes.”

Journal reference: Journal of the American Chemical Society (DOI: 10.1021/ja078223d)

The new bases in question: