— This pop star has words for the tech bros who used her as their muse. Love might not cost a thing, but that dress did.
Cell Yeah
Just Call Me Spudnik
What’s going on: Break out your goggles and beakers — we’re getting nerdy. A team of University of Minnesota biologists says they’ve created cells in a lab that can grow and reproduce on their own. This is kind of a big deal. “We’ve replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology,” lead researcher, Kate Adamala, PhD, said in a statement. By combining dozens of proteins and molecules, scientists reverse-engineered a simple cell and named it SpudCell because, well, it looks like a potato. We’ve come a long way from the potato battery.
It’s alive! Or is it?: Don't call her Dr. Frankenstein just yet. Adamala is “hesitant to call this ‘alive,’” since “there’s no clear line” as to what defines life. But, alive or not, these synthetic cells may be able to do things organic ones can’t, like make new kinds of medicines or replace the high-energy production methods that pharma companies use to manufacture drugs. SpudCells might even be used for carbon capture — something that’s been considered pricey and somewhat impractical — the way scientists are studying bacteria’s potential to clean up oil spills and eat into plastics. Like we said… kind of a big deal. The scientists have formed a nonprofit to open-source the development of SpudCells, to hopefully keep this breakthrough from being used unethically on things like chemical weapons. Not the cell-splitting we had in mind.
