By Michael Le Page
A recently discovered parasitic wasp appears to have extraordinary mind-controlling abilities – it can alter the behaviour of at least seven other species.
Many parasites manipulate the behaviour of their victims in extraordinary ways. For instance, sacculina barnacles invade crabs and make them care for barnacle larvae as if they were their own offspring. If the host crab is male, the parasite turns them female.
The wheels are in motion to send the first humans to Mars. For many, the first image that calls to mind may be of a spaceship touching down in a vast, red desert. But arriving on Mars is only half the picture. People also need to live there, something that can be difficult to imagine because there are so many unknowns. Martian habitation presents one of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21st century. And it is a challenge synthetic biology will be integral in solving.
One of the most exciting ventures tackling this problem is CUBES, the Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space. SynBioBeta recently spoke with Adam Arkin, the director of CUBES and professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley. Arkin, who will also speak at SynBioBeta 2019, described the goals of the CUBES project and how their work could enable human life on Mars.
CUBES is a five-year NASA Science Technology Research Institute. Veteran researchers, postdocs, and undergraduates have come together across six universities to develop biomanufacturing systems for Mars missions. But, explains Arkin, “since there isn’t a specified reference mission architecture for a real mission to Mars, we don’t know precisely what our constraints are.” Over the next five years, CUBES will build increasingly realistic models of what it will take to make integrated bio-systems feasible in space.
Eric Schmidt told a conference crowd that Silicon Valley is obsessed with biology because it’s the perfect “marriage” with tech right now.
Checkerspot, a biotech startup using microalgae to produce performance materials, announced today that it has closed its Series A financing for $13 million. The round was led by Builders VC, and included Breakout Ventures, Viking Global Investors, KdT Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Sahsen Ventures, and Godfrey Capital, among others.
Checkerspot combines bioengineering, chemistry, and materials science to go from microalgae to next-generation performance materials.
“This is a pretty significant milestone for us,” said Checkerspot CEO Charles Dimmler. He said the funding would support the company’s continued infrastructure development, as well as ongoing commercial activities with Beyond Surface Technologies and DIC that focus on novel triglycerides and polyols. He also said it would help complete the development of a direct-to-consumer product later this year.
A Nature analysis explores the investors betting on quantum technology. The science is immature and a multi-purpose quantum computer doesn’t yet exist. But that isn’t stopping investors pouring cash into quantum start-ups.
Charging stations will outnumber gas stations, and batteries will be better and cheaper.
Other approaches to space involve moving some or all the engineering activities out of government into the private sector, in the hopes that the private sector will be able to produce otherwise unavailable efficiencies. This sounds good in practice, but we must recognize that shifting some management responsibilities does not alleviate the government responsibility to regulate and look out after the public good.
But imprudent regulation impairs private sector efforts, simply because they may have a harder time getting relief from government rules than, let’s say, the DoD might. Unnecessarily stringent rules, requirements, and regulations discourage success. The precautionary principle has its appeal, but when the underlying activity itself is relatively new and uncertain, precautionary restrictions quickly turn into outright prohibition. Any arbitrary prohibition limits the diversity of our national spaceflight portfolio.
It may seem that this or that actor might benefit from favoritism, permissive oversight, or other unfair advantages. But while everybody trying to do something new in space benefits from distinct benefits and advantages, they also face unique obstacles and difficulties.
When I imagine the inner workings of a robot, I think hard, cold mechanics running on physics: shafts, wheels, gears. Human bodies, in contrast, are more of a contained molecular soup operating on the principles of biochemistry.
Yet similar to robots, our cells are also attuned to mechanical forces—just at a much smaller scale. Tiny pushes and pulls, for example, can urge stem cells to continue dividing, or nudge them into maturity to replace broken tissues. Chemistry isn’t king when it comes to governing our bodies; physical forces are similarly powerful. The problem is how to tap into them.
In a new perspectives article in Science, Dr. Khalid Salaita and graduate student Aaron Blanchard from Emory University in Atlanta point to DNA as the solution. The team painted a futuristic picture of DNA mechanotechnology, in which we use DNA machines to control our biology. Rather than a toxic chemotherapy drip, for example, a cancer patient may one day be injected with DNA nanodevices that help their immune cells better grab onto—and snuff out—cancerous ones.
Project Medusa plans to use biomanufacturing to grow military-grade runways using nothing more than dirt and microorganisms.
NASA’s next mission to Mars will be its most advanced yet. But if scientists discover there was once life — or there is life — on the Red Planet, will the public be able to handle such an extraterrestrial concept?
NASA chief scientist Jim Green doesn’t think so.
“It will be revolutionary,” Green told the Telegraph. “It will start a whole new line of thinking. I don’t think we’re prepared for the results. We’re not.”