dna

Facebook is expanding its efforts to fight child pornography using Microsoft technology, Redmond announced in a blog post yesterday.

The world's largest social network has joined the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's PhotoDNA program. The service, which was developed by Microsoft Research and Dartmouth College in 2009, uses image-matching technology to find known depictions of child pornography across the Web. Facebook plans to use the technology across its network to ensure child pornography is not circulating through the site.

Microsoft has been using PhotoDNA with great success since the service's development. According to the company, … Read more

DNA molecules are not merely carriers of information. They are also highly stable and programmable, which is why researchers have been working so feverishly on a design strategy called DNA origami.

And now a team at MIT is developing a program that makes the game playable by more than just a select few.

DNA origami--constructing specific 2D and 3D shapes out of DNA strands--could prove to be a highly effective means of developing nanoscale tools, such as synthetic photocells that perform artificial photosynthesis and highly targeted drugs (think of sending a cancer drug to hunt down a specific tumor).

But it's still young. Paul Rothemund of CalTech first introduced DNA origami in 2006 (thereby making the cover of Nature and delivering a TED Talk showing tiny DNA smiley faces), and William Shih's lab at Harvard Medical School was able to up the game from 2D to 3D a few years later.

The result is that today a small number of brilliant and highly specialized minds are bent over a nanoscale game of origami, playing with various sequences to try to build specific shapes for specific tasks. Imagine a room of highly sophisticated gamers playing with building blocks in a world without Tetris; if they had the game, they'd be able to work faster.… Read more

NASA scientists have discovered a new type of bacteria that is able to substitute arsenic--a poison to most living creatures--as a biological building block, something no other known life form on Earth can do, the agency said today.

In a press conference held at NASA's Washington D.C. headquarters, scientists announced that they had discovered a new form of bacteria, known as GFAJ-1, in California's Mono Lake that has DNA completely foreign to anything ever before found on Earth. It has the ability to substitute arsenic at the DNA level for phosphorus.

That would distinguish it from every … Read more

E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is coming up next week, and CNET News is sending Josh Lowensohn and Daniel Terdiman to the show to report on it. We've got them both in the house today to tell us what to expect. We're going to cover the future of platforms, why Farmville is such a success, why PC games lag consoles, what happens when you give a Rock Band guitar to a real musician, and more.

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Show notes and talking points… Read more

This week, artificial life! Last month, of course, Craig Venter announced that he had modified a living organism by replacing its DNA with a synthetically-created genome. The J. Craig Venter Institute project took Mycoplasma capricolum bacteria and completely rewrote its genetic code of more than 1 million base pairs of DNA.

It's another step on the way to the creation of designed organisms. It's important science and it raises fascinating technological and ethical questions, some of which we'll be discussing today.

We have two great guests for this show. First, in the studio with us, Dr. Kiki Sanford from podcasts This Week in Science and Dr. Kiki's Science Hour.

And from the philosophy department of my alma mater, Reed College, Dr. Mark Bedau. Mark is also editor of the MIT journal Artificial Life.

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Millions of Americans arrested for but not convicted of crimes will likely have their DNA forcibly extracted and added to a national database, according to a bill approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday.

By a 357 to 32 vote, the House approved legislation that will pay state governments to require DNA samples, which could mean drawing blood with a needle, from adults "arrested for" certain serious crimes. Not one Democrat voted against the database measure, which would hand out about $75 million to states that agree to make such testing mandatory.

"We should … Read more

If you thought nanobots might give us cause for concern when the singularity occurs, how about nanobots made from DNA? U.S. scientists have developed microscopic robots composed of DNA that can follow instructions and work together like an assembly line to make products such as particles of gold.

Reporting in the journal Nature, New York University chemistry professor Nadrian Seeman and colleagues describe a tiny DNA factory consisting of a DNA track for assembly, three molecular forklifts that can deliver parts, and a DNA "walker" that moves around like a car on an assembly line.

The team … Read more

CLC bio's Sequence Viewer is a free tool for basic bioinformatics analysis. It offers many of the features and capabilities of the publisher's high-end science software, such as the ability to perform many bioinformatics analyses, including interactive restriction site analysis, creating and editing alignments, phylogenetics, integrated GenBank searches, and advanced DNA to protein translation. It also carries over the premium utilities' sophisticated data management and exporting capabilities as well as compatibility with a wide range of platforms and file formats. It offers a continuously evolving lab-grade application in a compact, easy-to-use format that can access many integrated research … Read more

DNA testing, in use since the late 1970s, has helped demonstrate that we are all, if distantly, related, and that there is only one race: the human race. (Cue "Kumbaya.") With nearly 100 percent accuracy, testing one's DNA--genetically inherited from both parents and found in every part of the body--has become a standard means of identifying biological relationships.

So it should come as no surprise when certain celebrities are linked, as happened last week when DNA testing showed that George Stephanopoulos, co-anchor of ABC News' "Good Morning America" who recently took a DNA test … Read more