] Tiny molecular daggers that latch onto fibres stab and
] destroy microbes have been created, meaning "killer
] clothes" may soon be available. Anti-fungal socks could
] take on athlete's foot while, on a more serious note,
] military uniforms could kill anthrax.

Somehow I get the feeling that there might be useful microbes that would also be killed...

Clothing that kills microbes...

] A bacterial infection that overpowers most antibiotics
] has escaped the confines of hospitals and is showing up
] in alarming numbers among the general public in
] California, according to health officials.

The super-bugs have arrived!

] But there is one group of animals in which the peculiar
] combination of the contraction of these muscles and the
] closure of the glottis does serve a clear purpose:
] primitive air breathers that still possess gills, such as
] lungfish, gar and many amphibians.

Hiccups a holdover from when we had gills

] People who hope cloning will resurrect a pet will be
] disappointed, said Duane Kraemer, one of A&M's animal
] cloning experts. Experts say environment is as important
] as genes in determining a cat's personality. And as far
] as appearance, having the same DNA as another calico cat
] doesn't always produce the same coat pattern.

People are paying thousands to have their pet's DNA frozen so they can clone it when the techniques are perfected... Pet Cemetery anyone?

I think that this mostly demonstrates that people still do not understand what cloning is. I don't think this is likely to be commonplace outside of pet breeding circles.

CNN.com - Copied cat hardly resembles original - Jan. 22, 2003

] It is a freakish, doped-up, mutant clone which hasn't had
] sex for thousands of years - and the strain may be about
] to tell on the nation's fruitbowl favourite. Scientists
] based in France have warned that, without radical and
] swift action, in 10 years' time we really could have no
] bananas.

Bananas don't really reproduce and apparently have been maintained by human farmers for 10,000 years. They face destruction from fungus. Other stories in the news today indicate that a sequencing effort is underway.

The Guardian | Yes - in 10 years we may have no bananas

] "A message encoded as artificial DNA can be stored within
] the genomes of multiplying bacteria and then accurately
] retrieved, US scientists have shown.
]
] Their concern that all current ways of storing information,
] from paper to electronic memory, can easily be lost or
] destroyed prompted them to devise a new type of memory -
] within living organisms.
]
] "A big concern is the protection of valuable information in
] the case of a nuclear catastrophe," says information
] technologist Pak Chung Wong, of the Pacific Northwest
] National Laboratory in Washington State. The laboratory was
] set up as a nuclear energy research institute."

Hrm. I have a hard time buying the idea that this is really going to be useful in a nuclear catastrophe. However, these bacteria would make for one hell of a covert channel. Of course, the encoding/decoding process would have to be as automatic as possible, but imagine smuggling secrets in your belly button.

I still maintain that it is feasible that our own DNA already has messages encoded in it and the SETI people need to get to work on decoding it. :)

Storing information in DNA

"Writing in the advanced online edition of Nature magazine, Stanford University scientists Christopher D. Snow and Vijay S. Pande describe how they, with the help of 30,000 personal computers, successfully simulated part of the complex folding process that a typical protein molecule undergoes to achieve its unique, three-dimensional shape."

ScienceDaily Magazine -- Folding@home Scientists Report First Distributed Computing Success

"The problem is that a non-stimulated neuron doesn't simply lounge around bewailing its boring fate; most scientists believe that a neuron stuck in a boring brain will also die. So keeping your cranial neuron colony frisky but relaxed seems to be the key to successful living and aging. "

Wired News: A Word for Brainy People: Plastic

"A mummified dinosaur, unwrapped from the rocks of Montana, has revealed how the creature looked and how it lived 77 million years ago — down to the texture of its skin and the contents of its stomach, scientists say."

Dino-mummy shows some skin

This is kind of fun. You can do a hell of a lot with multi-media in an educational setting. I found multi-media animations of filter functions in DSP class to be incredibly insightful. Calculus is really a poor way of explaining things that are really very intuitive if you can see them in action. There is a lot of distance we can get out of something that seems so simple.

Dissect a Frog!