'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

This is surprisingly like the first step you'd take if you were about to start hacking the firmware on an embedded board: before you change bits, you upload a known good firmware to prove your programming process is working correctly.

Better write up: <a href="http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/05/first-functional-synthetic-bacterial-genome-announced.ars" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/05/first-functional...</a>

Gripe: "artificial life" already has a somewhat lengthy history of usage, referring to emulating biological activity or traits in software or hardware. It's often shortened to just alife or a-life.<p>It's related to genetic algorithms, genetic programming, and the like.<p>It would be nice if the using-real-chemicals-and-alive-stuff hacking were called "synthetic life", or something to distinguish it from existing terminology.

Call me a luddite, genetic engineering gives me the willies.

Announcement here <a href="http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replica...</a> with the press release, a FAQ and some fact sheets (and the video is promised to be available soon)

So when do we get dinosaurs?

they've got root

DNA: Now jailbroken.

Here are my questions about this, hope you smart folks don't mind chiming in:<p>How do you physically put DNA into a cell? A very small needle? Or is there something fancier?<p>How were the synthesized pieces of DNA produced? Very tiny robotic hands pushing the molecules together in the right sequence?<p>How did they stitch together the synthesized pieces of DNA? What would say which pieces go with which?

Perspective: <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/05/ventners-not-all-that/57046/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/05/ventners-...</a><p>(I am not currently well-informed enough in this area to either advocate or not this perspective, just providing it.)

This is a huge deal, and I'm not surprised to see that Craig Venter had something to do with it. Kudos!

Nature article <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100520/full/news.2010.253.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100520/full/news.2010.253.ht...</a><p>Nature asks and eight experts comment on significance <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100520/full/news.2010.255.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100520/full/news.2010.255.ht...</a>

Advancements like this make it feel exciting to be young and have so much time ahead of you. The future is bright. Science is key.

This is awesome. Literally, awe inspiring. We now have a compiler for the code which is DNA. Now we just need a "Hello, world!" app :)

very informative video on guardian from Craig Venter: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-s...</a>

Oddly enough this makes me feel a bit impotent. Here I am playing with my 1's and 0's... like a caveman. :-p

They just copied the genome of an existing micro-organism.<p>Making changes to the genome to accomplish some task is much harder to do.

Mandatory: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/c6dea/synthetic_life_breakthrough_announced_by/c0qeydc" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/c6dea/synthetic_lif...</a>