ripperdoc's clinic

We imagine making products “not found in nature”—but even natural microbes make molecules that organic chemists would never dream of. Look at thisantitumor agent discovered from a filamentous soil bacterium, the kind of bacteria that give soil that new smell in the springtime (Science 297:1170). Those sets of three parallel lines are each triple bonds, within a nine-carbon ring. Who would even think to draw such a thing, let alone make it? To make it, the bacteria use modular enzymes, nanoscale assembly lines that condense one functional part after another. The original nanotechnology.

Key highlights:

• Lots of old people
• Lots of environmental danger

So messy to change batteries on my artificial liver so this is a very welcome innovation!

… even today, the most advanced microprocessor chips have so many transistors that it is impractical to supply power to all of them at the same time. So some of the transistors are left unpowered — or dark, in industry parlance — while the others are working. The phenomenon is known as dark silicon.

Like Futurismic, I love the moniker “dark silicon”. And like Futurismic, I don’t believe Moore’s Law will stop any time soon.

… or in other words, track people by putting a tag into their cocktail cherries.

Perfect storage space!

Being able to activate aggressiveness with the flick of a (light) switch is truly scary, and it is argued that the technique should work on humans, not just mice…