Slashdot Mirror
Bacteria Made to Behave as Computers
hende_jman writes "Scientists at Princeton University successfully 'programmed bacteria to behave like computers, assembling themselves into complex shapes based on instructions stuffed into their genes.' Though applications may not come for awhile, the article says that in the future this technology may be used in devices to detect bioterrorism chemicals. The article also has pictures of the programmed E. coli."
Anybody else have visions of the Greg Bear book "Blood Music" when you read this?
= 17562821
http://www.allscifi.com/Topics/info_5673.asp?BSID
I dream in binary.
All they need to do now is do this to a virus... then maybe we can give the virus a virus. Kinda funny, but it would be cool if it led to the desctuction of aids.
Yeah, and I feel stupider just for having done so. It reads like a bad novelization of a "major motion picture". As I read the book, I could just see Crichton sitting there thinking "OK, now I'll write in a couple cool CG special-effects shots for the movie".
I hear the movie deal was done before the book even came out. Unfortunately the plot and characters were overlooked, there's not a shred of originality in the whole thing. And the science doesn't even bear talking about.
I liked Jurassic Park, and Sphere was awesome, but his latest stuff is just trash. Crichton should just admit he knows very little about real science and go back to writing enjoyable science fiction that doesn't pretend to be a commentary on society's faith in technology and the scientific community.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Are you kidding, look at all the websites around the net. I live in a fascist dictatorship. The leader of my country is right up there with Hitler, the third biggest mass murder in history (Stalin & Mao Tse Tung taking the top two spots). To top that, I live in fear of the USA Patriot Act. That means I can be arrested by just PLANNING on blowing up buildings/landmarks/petting zoos. I tell you, the rest of the world has it pretty sweet compared to the toil of your average American's day-to-day life.
Seriously though, I sure as hell won't defend everything the US has done, but the mindless US-bashing is ridiculous.
--
The Marines: The few, the proud, the not very bright. - Slashdot tagline 04/21/05
I'm with you. I love my country and I always will, but I'm ashamed of its government.
How about Luis Posada Carriles? He is wanted by Venezuela for a plane bombing where about 70 people died. He is wanted in connection with numours assassination attemts by Cuba. He has proven ties with CIA and he is in Florida right now, seeking asylum. Interestingly, the US media is silent on the issue, with only a few article by Miami Herald and several brief mentions in some minor papers.
The United States is questioned in the UN, Cuba and Venezuela demand a response, but the US government is silent. They know better. They understand that if the media is not allowed to raise a stink, the issue will die down and noone will be aware of the crimes committed by CIA. Noone will realise that US does support terrorists, real terrorists that blow planes. And if anyone will tell the US public, it will react with indignation, because "everybody knows that the United States doesn't get involved in terrorism".
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
This is just wrong.. I believe that bacteria are also living things and are not to be tortured by us. It is time for humans to stop thinking that we are the sole owners of this planet.
Each day we come up with new ideas to torture, kill, humiliate fellow living things. Just because we are capable of things does not mean we should do it. We are also the only living things capable of understanding what we are doing. So time to stop all this.
literally. What could we do with this? I immediately thought of a problem it might help to solve. How do you get wires into a person's brain, in millions or billions of places, to read and write to individual neurons. We've seen articles recently that talk about using our brains to control devices, or using these probes to read neurons and decode the information. I wonder if these bacteria could be used somehow to grow very tiny wires throughout an entire brain which could provide a was to read and write information to the brain.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Your conclusion seems to be that these things are cause for recent terrorist actions against us. I don't think this is exactly correct. From what I've read many Arabs dislike the American government because of our military and monetary support for Israel, as well as the fact the we have troop stationed on their land (ie Saudi Arabia).
Even if all of these things are true, however, it doesn't follow that the American government has acted irresponsibly in the past and continues to do so now. The real world is full of hard choices, and maybe the best decision in the 1980's was to support the mujahadeen against the communists, even if there was a risk they would later turn against us. Is the world a better place without the Cold War but with Islamic terrorism? Are we a better country for having picked that battle and (arguably) won it?
You also seem to suggest that our responsibility for terrorism means we need a more pacifist, compromising, multilateral foreign policy. This doesn't sound like a recipe for success to me. Maybe you could provide more details on what exactly you would do differently from this administration.
BTW, nobody has found credible evidence of election fraud that would have turned the election. I have to wonder if the Democrats had done better, but with the same election abnormalities as have been reported, you would still consider the election "illegal". I somehow doubt it.
1) Soviet Union was not a colonialist state. It didn't "extract" resources from 3rd world countries, on the contrary, it poured resources into them. Ask any Egyptian, Cuban, Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese or a person from any other country friendly to the USSR. Soviet Union provided immeasurable resources - specialists, technologies, training, equipment, everything in order to help its friends build powerful societies. The United States, as you well realise, does exactly the opposite.
2) Yeah, sorry for forgetting about Afghanistan. That's one example where the Soviet Union did invade. It was much more complicated, however, and it was indeed done to remove a threat to the security of the Soviet Union (as you can easily see on any world map). Another example was Finland - again Soviet Union had no other choice and tried to resolve matters peacefully. There were no unprovoked attacks on countries on the other side of the world with extermination of civilian populace and stuff. Heck, Soviet soldiers and officers were summarily executed for pillage in 1945 in Germany. Soviet Union wasn't an aggressive country, despite the lies perpetrated by neocons in late 1980s (watch the brilliant BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares to see how it was carried out).
The general point is still valid - Soviet Union was usually a friend, while the United States generally acts as an enemy.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.