Today , a company called Ion Torrent announced they were going to start selling a DNA-sequencing machine that can sequence an entire human genome for $1,000. It’s just the latest milestone in the long-term crash in the cost of gene-reading. There are lots of benefits that will flow from this ongoing transformation. For one thing, as I wrote in 2010 in the New York Times, it’s getting easier to identify new viruses that could turn to be the next HIV or SARS.
This is a story of about how the parts of a puzzle locked into place 800 million years ago. The puzzle is an ion pump that you can find in any mushroom, mold, or yeast. I’ve reproduced a picture of it here.
Fungus cells, like our own cells, have lots of little pouches inside of them for carrying out special kinds of chemical reactions. In order for those reactions to work, there have to be a lot of positively-charged protons inside the pouches. To get those protons into the pouches, ion pumps like this one force them through membranes.
Continue reading “Resurrecting Evolution to Solve an 800-Million-Year-Old Puzzle”
Txchnologist, January 10, 2012
In November 2011, NASA launched its biggest, most ambitious mission to Mars. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Lab spacecraft will arrive in orbit around the Red Planet this August, releasing a lander that will use rockets to control a slow descent into the atmosphere. Equipped with a “sky crane” (NASA’s official, and very cool, term), the lander will gently lower the one-ton Curosity rover on the surface of Mars. Curiosity, which weighs five times more than any previous Martian rover, will perform an unprecedented battery of tests for three months as it scoops up soil from the floor of the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater. Its mission, NASA says, will be to “assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support microbial life.”
1. Good morning. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal features Science Ink in their Visualizer Column. I stopped by their offices on Friday and recorded an interview with WSJ editor Gary Rosen, which I’ve embedded below.
Continue reading “The Wall Street Journal ogles tattoos, and more #scienceink news”
Today the Huffington Post is launching a new science “channel,” overseen by a full-time science editor. This should be interesting.
The Huffington Post is one of the most popular places for getting news and opinion, attracting well over 30 million views a month. It started out mainly as a blogging network, and then added on a lot of aggregation of news stories, supplemented by slide shows. More recently, they’ve been hiring full-time reporters and editors on subjects like politics and economics.