Panmere

Instead of being mere months away from creating a synthetic organism, yesterday’s AP news article predicts creation of a synthetic organism occuring in a more comfortably distant 3-10 years. Two aspects of the article caught my attention.
From the article:

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step - getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic […]

Climatologist Roy Spencer posted a very interesting entry this week at the Climate Science blog, entitled “Positive Feedback: Have We Been Fooling Ourselves?“, in which he focuses on the following concern:

The traditional way in which feedbacks have been diagnosed from observational data has very likely misled us about the existence of positive feedbacks in the climate […]

Published online in Nature Methods today [doi:10.1038/nmeth1078]:

Tomographic phase microscopy
We report a technique for quantitative three-dimensional (3D) mapping of refractive index in live cells and tissues using a phase-shifting laser interferometric microscope with variable illumination angle. We demonstrate tomographic imaging of cells and multicellular organisms, and time-dependent changes in cell structure. Our results will permit quantitative characterization […]