Tag Archives: DNA

What would you say to a person asking you if life could exist on the Sun (even worse, “in the Sun”)? My first, and definitive reaction would be to say: are you crazy? That is an obvious impossibility, it is asking for life in an exploding nuclear bomb! Hence, I …

It looks like a software program (artificial intelligence) can create a probable image of a person based on that person’s DNA. This is nothing short of amazing. The DNA is the code of our genotype, what we look like is the phenotype and this depends on how the various genes …

The cost of sequencing the human genome has fell in these last twenty years, from a billion $ (2.7 B$ actually) to around 1,000$. It is not just the cost of sequencing, it is also the time it takes for sequencing, 13 years for that first genome, a few days …

Researchers have know for many years now that our basic brain components, the neurones, are functionally and physiologically very similar to neurones of all other species. That means that understanding the working of a snail neurone means understanding the working of “our” neurones. I know, it feels bad to know …

Molecular robotics The progress of technology that allows us to manipulate the DNA, CRISPR and others, is allowing researcher to create DNA that can serve specific purposes, outside of its usual cell environment where it is used to create copy of mRNA that are used by the cell to build …

CRISPR-CasX The CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) – Cas  (CRISPR Associated Protein) system was discovered, and invented, in the last century, the first reference is found in an article in 1987. The CRISPR was discovered in bacteria: they are short DNA sequences that bacteria have inherited from viruses …

The last Megatrend presented in the FTI’s report focusses on Synthetic Biology and its application in Agriculture. Synthetic Biology is the idea, now a practice, of being able to create/modify life in a bottom up way, composing the strand of life, DNA and in some cases RNA, in ways that …

The White Paper being prepared by the Digital Reality Initiative is fundamentally about the fading boundary between reality and digital reality, actually it is about the emergence of Reality resulting from the co-presence of these two realities. These two manifest themselves in the creation of digital worlds like images that are …

The advance in smart material technologies includes the capability of self replication. Studies in this area started in the last decade and exploited the results of Nature: using DNA strings with attached molecules of materials scientists demonstrated the possibility of replication (see the image). Of course the replication instructions to …

Augmentation through changes in the genotype is fraught with ethical issues both rooted in the lack of knowledge on the consequences and on general considerations, including the unfair advantage that may be gained by a restricted few (among these extremes there are plenty more!). In the coming decade(s) we can expect …