and now for your every moment off zen

For the last two years, I have been asleep. Not in the literal sense of sleeping, but in the sense of acting automatically, forever attending to the past or what would be happening in the future, but rarely paying attention to the present moment. My first “wake-up” call, or at least the first one that I listened to, was about one year ago, in the form of a serious illness that I thought was just a really bad headache. After that experience, I knew something in my life needed to change, but I was not sure what it was or how to get there. That something different showed up a few months later. This past semester, I took a mindfulness group course as part of my practicum experience. Although I was interested, I was also definitely skeptical; my previous attempts to put my clinical training into practice had not worked, so why should mindfulness meditation be effective? Surprisingly, it worked.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO ACT MINDFULLY?

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ós sr.doutor

Ando a tomar o EspermaCanulado”- Espasmo Canulase
“Tenho cataratas na vista e ando a tomar o Simião” - Sermion
“Andei a tomar umas injecções de Esferovite” - Parenterovit
“Era um antibiótico perlim pim pim mas não me fez nada” - Piprilim
“Agora estou melhor, tomo o Bate Certo” - Betaserc
“Tomo o Sigerom e o Chico Bem” - Stugeron e Gincoben
“Ando a tomar o Castro Leão” - Castilium
“Tomei Sexovir” - Isovir

and holy venter said: let here be light

Synthetic genome resets biotech goals

The assembly of a genome that can ‘reboot’ cells of a closely related species is one step in a much longer path.

Alla Katsnelson

Synthetic biology is a field with an audacious but ultimately utilitarian goal: to redesign the building blocks of life to serve the needs of humanity. It is also an endeavour that challenges clear-cut definitions of natural versus artificial life.

Last week’s announcement by researchers in the United States that they have created a synthetic copy of a bacterial genome and used it to commandeer the cell of a closely related species is a landmark on both fronts (D. G. Gibson et al. Sciencedoi:10.1126/science.1190719; 2010). The group’s success, much-anticipated by the scientific community, provides tools for manipulating the genome on a significantly larger scale than has previously been possible. “I think this is an important technique towards the ultimate goal of completely redesigning genomes,” says Ron Weiss, a synthetic biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The achievement also demonstrates just how challenging a road synthetic biologists have embarked on.

A blue chemical marker shows colonies formed from a single cell containing the synthetic genome.SCIENCE/AAAS

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