Friday, December 05, 2014

conceptual beginnings of nanomachines


Motherboard | The shape of DNA is a double helix, right? That’s what we are taught. Well, now the answer is “not always.” Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered how to program DNA so that it’s shaped like a bowl, or a spiral, or a ring, or a tile, or all sorts of different things.
It’s the latest in a string of discoveries about the underlying structure of life and the building blocks that make it up. We’ve learned that life might not even need DNA to exist, and a potential means to create life of that DNA-less nature was recently demonstrated when scientists created enzymes in a lab without the stuff. Then, you’ve got scientists who have been able to create new nucleotides (the “letters” in DNA) that do not exist in nature and insert them into a living organism. And now, this: DNA can look like just about anything.

3 comments:

Vic78 said...

That's some comic book shit. MIT's a pretty swell place. What kind of breakthroughs are we going to see in the 2020s?

Ed Dunn said...

I was up there looking for MIT and could not find it - someone told me it was this building but I didn't see MIT on it..picture proof...

CNu said...

That's the Great Dome on the Infinite Corridor. I know that you see Massachusetts Institute of Technology chiseled above those columns...,

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