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Biological Computer Created at Stanford
sciencehabit writes "For the first time, synthetic biologists have created a genetic device that mimics one of the widgets on which all of modern electronics is based, the three-terminal transistor. Like standard electronic transistors, the new biological transistor is expected to work in many different biological circuit designs. This should make it easier for scientists to program cells to do everything from monitor pollutants and the progression of disease to turning on the output of medicines and biofuels."
We have synthetic biologists now?!?! What happened to the real ones?
Reminds me of a quote.. "Synthetic scotch and synthetic commanders..." - Scotty
Hahahhaha funny.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
My wife and I have created 4 of those.
This was all over the news ... yesterday. Kudos, though, for linking to the original Science paper instead of some crappy summary of it - even though the Science paper is paywalled.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
it is a war between building a working biological computer and getting the quantum computers to add 2+2 correctly 100% of the time! who will win? im betting on quantum computers. (especially since i would love to see an ansible sometime in my life)
The Stanford team then showed that they could line up multiple transcriptors to carry out logical functions, creating standard logical circuits called AND gates, OR gates, XOR gates, and so on, which combine signals according to certain rules. (A computer's processor is a vast assemblage of such gates.) They also showed that their novel biological circuit designs were adept at producing signals with large amplification and that they could be used to up the expression of a variety of genes, such as the production of fluorescent signals that made it simple to detect cells that were carrying out their programming.
I wonder exactly how they "assemble" the circuit and keep the components from diffusing or floating away, thus diassembling the circuit. What keeps the "circuit" of DNA strands in place?
The summary has nothing to do with the headline. A transistor does not a computer make. To have anything worth talking about (as far as computers go), you would need to have a stupendous amount of these so-called "transistor"s interacting. This is no small leap- there is a significant amount of engineering work that goes into a processor even at higher levels of abstraction than gates.
This is like saying that someone's made a car, when all they really did was make a gear or something. It's just sensationalist BS that belittles the work of actual computer engineers.
Perhaps the headline should have said "logic gates" instead of "computer". It didn't say "Core i7" either, though. Babbage's machine was a computer. Programing graphics processors with punch cards dates to the early 1800s, so "computer" doesn't imply a modern desktop.
I suspect you'd agree that any processor capable of running Windows is a computer. Therefore, any machine that can run a hypervisor, which in turn runs Windows, is a computer. You probably know where I'm headed - Turing machines. Any Turing machine can emulate a Core processor, and is therefore a computer. Wolfram's Turing machine requires only a few gates, so these researchers can probably build a biological Wolfram Turing computer today.
So, is this going to bring a new meaning to the term "computer virus"? As in an actual biological virus might affect the hardware.
I think it is more interesting that we have created synthetic biologists (as per the summary).
An abacus may be seen to be a series of registers. Each string holds beads and the positioning of the beads on the string sets the value of the register.
:>)
The human operator of the abacus is the executor of the machine code: it's the human that:
-- reads the value of a register (by looking at it)
-- stores a numeric value in a register (by sliding beads)
-- performs the carry when overflow occurs by carriage returning the beads in one row and moving an extra bead in the next (above or below depending on your own definition) string
-- transfers values from paper or mind onto the string
.
So obviously an abacus merely is a large temporary variable allowing a human being to perform calculations without holding all of the digits in their own memory: the abacus is a set of registers holding integer numeric values, an abacus by itself is not a computer, but just part of a computing system. It requires an agent, a human "computer" (or a sufficiently programmed and capable (vision + motion) robot !!!) actor in order to be a full computing system.
An abacus may be seen to be a series of registers. Each string holds beads and the positioning of the beads on the string sets the value of the register. :>)
The human operator of the abacus is the executor of the machine code: it's the human that:
-- reads the value of a register (by looking at it)
-- stores a numeric value in a register (by sliding beads)
-- performs the carry when overflow occurs by carriage returning the beads in one row and moving an extra bead in the next (above or below depending on your own definition) string
-- transfers values from paper or mind onto the string
.
So obviously an abacus merely is a large temporary variable allowing a human being to perform calculations without holding all of the digits in their own memory: the abacus is a set of registers holding integer numeric values, an abacus by itself is not a computer, but just part of a computing system. It requires an agent, a human "computer" (or a sufficiently programmed and capable (vision + motion) robot !!!) actor in order to be a full computing system.