What’s really terrifying is that the average consumer can buy this electroshock machine and do it at home to their dementia-having partner, having read an article like this touting the unproven benefits of zapping the brain with electrons, and thus being an “expert.” I hate this sort of reporting; it’s shit and makes me angry.
Very true. I’d didnt look into the meat so I’m disappointed Ars was lax.
The fact that all this is happening right now inside my body creeps me out.
And not just once, either, but all the millions of your cells are all doing this sort of thing!
I really want to play a game about designing them. I guess SpaceChem came close.
That’s cool. Also not at all what I expected when I clicked the link - because in the press “oldest x” usually means a fossil (and they usually use “oldest” instead of “earliest”). So I thought it was an amusing misprint for 400-million-year-old shark. Which would have been off by 100+ million years anyway.
So all credit to the BBC for saying what they actually meant, and for correctly hyphenating the compound adjective!
Using human eyes as quantum photon detectors???
Good news on the plastic recycling front! (preliminary, but looks promising)
If it is worth doing once, it is worth doing (at least) twice apparently.
I hope it biodegrades too, or else we’ll still be scooping out straws and plastic bags from the insides of dead whales for the next century.
https://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/plastic_whale_wwf-625x352.jpg
So where are the damn phoenixes?
[T]he team simply smashed water with laser blasts between diamond anvils. Billionths of a second later, as shock waves rippled through and the water began crystallizing into nanometer-size ice cubes, the scientists used 16 more laser beams to vaporize a thin sliver of iron next to the sample. The resulting hot plasma flooded the crystallizing water with x-rays, which then diffracted from the ice crystals, allowing the team to discern their structure.
Atoms in the water had rearranged into the long-predicted but never-before-seen architecture, ice XVIII: a cubic lattice with oxygen atoms at every corner and the center of each face.
They keep saying it could have amazing applications. But how? If you need diamond anvil and 16 lasers, there is no way to scale that to hit the pressures and temperatures needed to utilize it in normal applications. I can see it being used for science, but anything else?
It’s a new state of matter. Who knows?
Life with from scratch DNA!
I feel like that’s the first headline that would appear in a movie about a zombie uprising.
A cool application of this is we can make much more efficient bacteria constructing them from scratch. No junk DNA, not unneeded protein or enzyme fabrication etc. If you’re going to do plastic eating bacteria, this might be the way to go.
Or a benign bacteria to put in hospitals so the really nasty antibiotic-resistant bacteria doesn’t flourish.
Or a bacteria that only infects hypocrites.
Aren’t bacterial genomes already pretty efficient?
Quote from the article:
Beyond the 20 amino acids used by all living things, there are hundreds of other kinds. A compressed genetic code will free up codons that scientists can use to encode these new building blocks, making new proteins that carry out new tasks in the body.
I can’t tell if this is ignorant or not. Wouldn’t this require designing a new kind of ribosome? Isn’t the ribosome one of the most ancient, complex, and well-conserved parts of the cell?