The fact that XNA is complementary to DNA, yet structurally unique, makes it immediately useful for medicine, biotechnology and biology research. Holliger imagines XNAs that could be injected into the human body to detect early, subtle signs of disease that current technologies miss.
Steven Benner, a fellow at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla., has also advanced the effort by expanding the genetic alphabet with two new nucleobases, Z and P. A larger alphabet could form a wider array of genes and, eventually, proteins. “The goal is to create chemically controlled systems that behave like biological systems, without being biological systems,” Benner says. “We believe whatever you can draw on a page, you can make.” — Ferris Jabr
This article was originally published with the title World Changing Ideas.
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21 Comments
Add Comment"Foam that restores breathing" I vaguely remember some very old research pointing the use of IntraVenous hydrogen peroxide -duly diluted, I guess- to treat things such as CO poisoning, and ozone injections in the spine discs were used to treat discal hernias producing pain, sciatica, and neurologic deficits. "Nothing new under the sun: what some do today, others have done it previously, and other will repeat it tomorrow"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Early Treatment for Alzheimer's" There were also some reports, that few accepted, pointing efficacy of Anapsos in dementia and in Multiple Sclerosis, at least in the MS-related fatigue. The activities claimed for drugs and non-drug medicinal products outside the officially endorsed drug data sheets are enormous
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Electronic Tattoos" Some types of labels attached to general stores' products do potentially allow you to put all your boughts in a bag, cross the supermarket door, and automatically having your bought registered an billed to your credit card or bank account, but have also the potential, if continuously attached to a product such a hose, to track where the person that bought the product actually is located.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Drones at home" In the times of "Cold War" most of the information the socialist block had about western technology advances came from open access publications. It was said that he core computing unit of some video game consoles was used by some countries to build computers that drove cruise misiles and things like, and the soviet submarines' propellers were so noisy that the US Navy knew at any moment the precise location of the CCCP nuclear subs. A company, probably japanese, sold to the USSR a numeric digital lathe that allowed the soviets to build silent propellers and their nuclear submarines escape the western vigilance. "Double use technology" would be a name with no content, or containing everything, as even an screwdriver can be used for hurting the one that sold it to a potential enemy. Karl Marx stated: "The bourgeoisie will sell us the rope with which we'll hang them".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBiggest World changing idea is to create man-made world free from all existing evils in the society.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisS. N. Tiwary
Director
The big problem in the proposal you seem to like so much, would be that the procedures implemented for this goal don't differ to the activities of professor Rodriguez-Delgado with bulls, and the rationale in them is to me analog to the rationale of those practicing female genital mutilation in African and other women. A warning exists about "psychocivilized societies" in informations so old as filmed interviews with C G Jung made in Houston,TX, around 1947, collected as a long duration movie by an spanish movie-maker in 2007: Jung speaks about "psychologists" unnecesarily mutilating those approaching them to obtain relievement for his/her sufferings, and the whole concept had its biggest development in serious mistakes and deep attacks to the human dignity, as the political use of psychiatry in the former USSR, some say with a certain wisdom that there you needed to be really insane to exercise a political opposition, and this kind of approaches to a new mankind may be in the causes that triggered the violent reactions of some latin-american armies against "revolutionary forces" that included also "psychologists" and "psychoanalists" in their objectives, not only them, but some of their patients, and although a perfect society, made by perfectly domesticated people is an actual possibility (as in "1984" and "Brave new world") with the current psychotherapy techniques, many of these approaches to a "new man or woman" are like the therapy the main character in Stanley Kubrick's "A clockwork orange" gets. In a german "bucherei" a leftist oriented bookshop, different from "buchhandlung", more innocent ones, I saw a book entitled "Eines neues mann fuer die neue frau" -"A new man for the new woman", the problem in this was that neues is "neutral gender" in german the male gender would elicit "Einer neuer mann" or "neuer mensch", while "frau" preserves the female gender. (Madchen, young girls or young woman is also neutrum, while Frau, woman, is feminine in German). Sincerely, proposals like yours may have a hidden terrifying and horrible correlate, and I'll take any ethically possible step to block its growth and spread. I can say this louder, but not clearer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEven more, the changes in minds necessary to build these "new men and women" are totally irreversible, and will be passed to the offspring of the "transformed persons"; as probably to perform that kind of "psychosurgery" the authors need to be in their full human potential, this can create classes of masters and slaves for the rest of history. Sincerely, this is absolutely unacceptable, but sadly, it's happening today.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would nominate the following two technologies-in-development to be on this list:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTaking a steam locomotive built in 1937 and retrofitting it to burn a special biofuel.
"CSR is confident it can create a higher-speed passenger rail locomotive that is Cleaner, Quicker and Cheaper than any locomotive on the market today."
http://www.csrail.org/
And this technology which shows promise to make recycling and waste landfills obsolete by reducing waste to commercially valuable materials. In the era of this technology, current landfills may considered "mines" from which to extract raw materials.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/01/ff_trashblaster/
Existence can not be validated without your being conscious of it. So, your being conscious is the Original. The observer and the observed is a singular process. When you are hungry, only one thought that of food is there. When food goes inside the body and the processing starts, brain becomes ready for its function, that is, thoughts start generating. Including the thought of 'you', God, creation and so on. Thoughts arise because of life energy. The secret, the origin is in this energy and not what thoughts depict.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe are conscious against being not-conscious (as everything exists as a contrast against something). This is the totality. This unending friction between being conscious against not-being conscious is the unending panorama being created. We are assuming Reality as a dead end. Brain has to bear the paradox to see the timelessness.
https://sites.google.com/site/yvchawla/fusion-1
YV Chawla has something there that deserves to be commented on. In my opinion, the ideas that have been represented are immensely interesting and very good science. They may change the world. But not enough. They seem small beside the challenges we face. And they are all technological solutions from the "hard sciences". It would be interesting to see a list of world-changing ideas from the social, educational, and psychological sciences as well, ones that address real social, educational, and psychological problems in and of the world. Granted, many may have already been commented on in blogs posted and hosted by Scientific American/Nature, Discover Magazine, and on Science Today. But it would be nice to see an edited list of the top ones, along with a measure of the possibility or likelihood of implementation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Sugar-Powered Pacemakers" states that the pacemaker batteries have always a major drawback, since they must be surgically replaced every 5 to 15 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would like to mention that rechargeable pacemakers with a long-life rechargeable batteries have been develeloped as well, for example a rechargeable pacemaker by Pacesetter dated back to 1970s.
Recently there is significant effort in finding local sources of energy for the implanted devices ("energy harvesting"). The approches include harvesting the mechanical vibrations due to the movements of the body (and heart contractions), using the ATP-based energy, ambient electromagnetic energy, temperature gradients, and others.
Many of the ideas presented would be anything but World Changing; Electronic Tattooing, really. It occurs to me that ridding the world of forces that impede scientific and social progress would be very important. My vote is for ridding the world of belief in Gods and the use of religious dogmas.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(1) Use XNA instead of DNA/RNA to create experimental organisms that cannot infect us on the quaint theory that natural selection doesn't cause organisms to evolve to exploit a niche.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(2) Inject nanoparticles containing oxygen into people in cardiogenic shock on the quaint theory that oxygen would improve their situation.
(3) Purify a cup of seawater to fresh using enough soybean oil to fill a swimming pool. Maybe decanoic acid would work better at $68/kg if we can convince mining companies that it is better than pouring waste water down a hole.
(4) Spend $100 million on a tiny study to see if a new drug with the absurdly unlikely name "Crenezumab" (which, spelled backwards, is the equally unlikely but more pronounceable "Bamuzenerc") can cure an obscure genetic disease that may or may not be Alzheimers in an isolated family group of Colombians.
(5) Find out if you are going to like your baby before it is born, using gene sequencing! "Here, baby, mommy's got a nice coat hanger for you."
(6) Prove that Wal-Mart is sustainable by torturing mathematics.
(7) "If users feel like they control their data, they are more likely to let companies, governments and individuals selectively access the information to provide services." Yeah, right.
(8) Produce a fuel cell that runs on the glucose in your blood instead of charging your pacemaker by inductive coupling. You can have an extra donut every fifteen years or so, fatty.
(9) Electronic tattoos: Facebook on your arm. Now with live status updates from your vital organs! "How's my liver today?" "It's complicated..."
(10) Drones in the home: someone in front of a monitor in Texas can make sure you are behaving.
(11) Ten weak ideas all on one page. Just kidding, it's ten pages.
Science advances: Manipulation of information, discovered and used in the 19th and 20th centuries, is being used in this "INFORMATION AGE" and its protagonists confuse the virtual, with the really real.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScientifically, it is a very interesting phenomenon that is happening to very smart people, but that in this way, are throwing in the trash their ability.
And this if, before, one could blame the inept lovers of war, it seems that the stolen money to the defeated enemies, that is, the weak and the only business that inept would think, finally, are buying the best minds of the time.
But make no mistake, disguised as a modern, taking advantage that the previous protagonists of each generation have died, is the same reason that the 100,000 year history of the modern human brain, seems to be only 300 years.
It can then be true: World Changing Ideas 2012? It will be only virtual?
For fear, we renounce human capacity, using the OCEANOGENIC POWER; in favor, and intelligently, to fumigate with carbon and NUKE, the view as plague: human kind.
How are not going to consider like a plague, those who prefer behave like animals, or who believe that all serve only, as animals, for a single business: to theirs?
This will be a game changer as well. http://youtu.be/KXgSwQS7Xb8
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou may as well say 'man-free' world in that case.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor more information on The Sustainability Consortium, please visit www.sustainabilityconsortium.org
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEarly Treatment for Alzheimer's:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-If we can make "turmeric" a part of our daily life/food..then Alzheimer will not touch Americans. You hardly see any Indian having this disease.
This is written so simplt about the water purification but it would have impacted much more if any practical date has been given along with this artical...Looks somewhat fantasy to all reader.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut no doubt..all Bajpayee sir has done remarkable work...We appreciate.
Slow flight uses less energy than fast swimming. Heavy freight can be flown at low cost at slow airspeed. See concordlift.com for the presentation at the recent AIAA-ATIO conference. World transforming effect especially on developing country's economies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe pacemakers article terrified me. I wouldn't accept one of these unless it had a battery backup. Anybody that has ever had low blood sugar would be concerned about this technology. Who wants a pacemaker that you basically have to "feed".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this