1. Is this shaping up to be the summer of WTF?

    06 June 2010

    Last last month and early this month, a disturbing amount of WTF appears to have been cropping up around the country. While that shouldn't really surprise anyone as it seems like a common state of mind anymore, I still find it fascinating in the "Wow, that's how they cut someone out of a wrecked car?" way.

    First of all, the Supreme Court decided by a vote of 5 to 4 that one's Miranda Rights mean far less than they used to. Dating back to the court case Miranda v. Arizona in 1966, the Miranda rights of American citizens are the …

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  2. Have you ever had a feeling that life was going to suck soon?

    04 June 2010

    When last I went in for dental work I'd done some planning ahead and made an appointment to get one last problem taken care of, namely, the oldest and first filling in the clinical disaster area known as my mouth that had started leaking a few years ago. So, I went in to see my dentist this morning... after the usual round of novocaine injections and pleasantries Dr. Huang started to drill away the old filling and clean the decay and accumulated cellular garbage out. About halfway through the procedure I started feeling everything. Not because the local gave out …

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  3. Bacteria created with first wholly synthetic genome.

    27 May 2010

    Late last week it was announced by the J. Craig Venter Institute that they had created the first synthetic cell, a variant of the bacterium mycoplasma mycoides, which is the micro-organism that causes bovine contagious pleuropneumonia. The project cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $40mus, and involved a team of geneticists sitting down and writing an entire genome of 1.1 million base pairs, using the much smaller genome of related species m.genitalium as a template. Once the smaller genome was understood it then became possible to develop a brand-new one from scratch. The research team then figured out …

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