genome

Human sewage--the next source of electricity?

SAN FRANCISCO--Synthetic Genomics is certainly teaching microbes some interesting tricks.

The company, which specializes in genetically manipulating microorganisms and creating new organisms to accomplish industrial tasks, has devised a fuel cell that can generate water or electricity from the stuff that goes down your drain, said founder J. Craig Venter at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

"We have biological fuel cells driven by bacteria that take human wastewater and make drinking water or electricity out of it," he said. "We've been designing a number of organisms to try to replace traditional processes." … Read more

Craig Venter: Google your date's DNA

Genetics pioneer Craig Venter took the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit with organizer Tim O'Reilly. What's a biologist doing at a Web 2.0 conference? Talking about how information and biology are converging (and have been for a while).

Interesting tidbits: Venter's own DNA was sequenced as part of his research. It cost, he estimates, about $70 million. Today it costs only $300,000 to sequence a person's DNA, and the $100,000 benchmark is in sight. It's an information processing problem, he said. In other words, Moore's Law and genetics are … Read more

Pondering a cyborg future

I saw a video today of a wheelchair-bound man who moved his hand for the first time since he was stabbed in the neck two years ago.

Blown away?

Totally.

So for that matter was the rest of the audience listening to John Donoghue talk about the progress being made helping paralyzed people regain lost motor skills.

Donoghue, who directs the Brain Science program at Brown University, showed the brief clip Thursday during a panel discussion at a San Francisco conference organized by Fortune magazine.

Unfortunately, the experiments with brain implants being undertaken these days provide only limited and temporary … Read more