MainlyMartian

Synthetic Biology 2.0: Fun to come

An interesting addition to the various agendas surrounding this conference is an open letter from a variety of NGOs concerned about the implications of the technology and the limitations of scientific self governance, which can be read here. I hope some of those involved will be able to present their position in person during the debates on these issues that will take place on the third day of the conference -- I understand there are currently some invitations in the ether.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm chairing a session on that third day, which puts me in a position which might be seen as leading to a conflict of interest. For what it's worth, I do think there are issues with journalists reporting on conferences at which they are also participating, but I don't think those issues mean that such reporting is always a no-no, provided that the appropriate disclaimers are in place. But it does mean that I don't think I'm going to express my opinions on these particular issues right now.

This has now been crossposted onto the Nature Newsblog. If moved to comment, please do so there.

Synthetic Biology 2.0: BTUs per bushel

A fascinating first presentation from Steve Chu, who runs Lawrence Berkeley Lab, one of the sponsors of this event, on the challenge of finding technologies for clean energy production and the possibilities that various synthetic-biology technologies offer for meeting that challenge. There was lots of talk of artificial photosynthesis, and some wonderfully far out ideas, such as redesigning plants so that their carbon-dioxide intakes and water outputs are separated, rather than being combined in the magnificently subtle mechanisms of the stomata. I suspect that this is not in fact practical or desirable, but maybe I've been hanging out too long with the plant scientists who Chu has found critical of this idea. Chu, in response, says the plant people might benefit from learning to think like physicists or science fiction authors, and I'm not one to play down the possibilities of learning from SF. What's more, the fact that the set of "things which are subtler than physicists think" is pretty much equal to the observable universe doesn't mean that physicists don't have wonderful insights to offer to everyone else, even if the tone in which those insights are offered can, occasionally, be a little hard to take. Anyway, even if the disambiguated stomata never come to pass, or don't deliver advantages, they still represent an idea about photosynthesis that I, as someone with a book on the subject inching towards publication, have never come across before, so lots of extra credit for freshness.

Much more practical is the two-pronged strategy Chu outlined for improving biomass systems: re-engineer the plants to be more easily converted into fuel (eg less lignin), and re-engineer various microbes to be better at carrying out that conversion directly. It makes a lot of sense, though there are some fairly subtle questions of sustainability that need to be addressed, at least as far as I'm concerned, before we can safely assume that large-scale agricultural systems will provide a significant fraction of our future fuel needs.

What didn't make a lot of sense, to European ears, was the way in which some of this was expressed. "Gallons per acre"? Please! They'll be talking about BTUs per bushel next. 21st century science and technology really shouldn't be expressed in sixteenth century units.

This has now been crossposted onto the Nature Newsblog. If moved to comment, please do so there.

Synthetic Biology 2.0: What's afoot?

This post and those which follow should really be going up on the Nature Newsblog (part of my day-job duties as the chief news and features editor of that great journal), but due to a fairly predictable snafu which is mostly my fault I don't seem to be able to post there at the moment, so I'm putting it up here and will probably get it cross posted there in due course. Alert readers will notice that what follows is not very martian, and those whose interest in planets doesn't extend to attempts to rewire the life forms of this one are advised to skip it.

It's always fun to come to a conference where something is afoot -- where there's not just a bunch of presentations, but a genuine agenda. The first synthetic biology conference, at MIT two years ago, was such a conference -- an attempt to bring together a whole bunch of people working on a diverse bunch of technologies and scientific approaches that are made possible by cheap DNA synthesis, and to some extent to establish the pre-eminence among those approaches of the vision of synthetic biology then being championed at MIT. That vision is of a world where biological circuits can be designed from scratch, using "biobricks", in an analgous way to electronic circuits, but with standardised sequences of DNA and the proteins they describe taking the place of resistors, transistors, diodes and the like. The conference was the basis of a feature I wrote on synthetic biology for Wired in my previous existence.

Two years on, here we all are at Synthetic Biology 2.0, the followup conference, at UC Berkley. And again its a conference with an agenda. Or, more properly, many agendas. The main one, I think, is to reassert the message of Synthetic Biology 1.0 -- that lots of different things people are doing with different biological systems can be treated as a coherent emerging discipline. But there are also a bunch of other things going on, among them: an attempt to show that this sort of stuff has real world applications, especially in the energy arena; a showcase for the fact that this technology has commercial possibilities (various companies have sprung up in the field in the past two years, including Craig Venter's Synthetic Genomics and Codon Devices, which boasts on its board Drew Endy, the most eloquent of the proponents of the "MIT vision" described above; an attempt to get the nasc ent community to agree how to regulate itself and to avoid this technology being used for naughty purposes; a window to show the world that this technology, well regulated, can be a force for good.

Not all these agendas are necessarily aligned. For example, without being unduly cynical, there could be commercial applications, at least in the short term, even if there aren't dramatic real world applications. And self regulation could easily co-exist with, or indeed reinforce, public worries. And not everyone here will sign up to all or indeed any of them. So it will be interesting to see how it all unfolds, especially on the third day, where the science and society implications are going to be discussed. (Disclaimer: I will be moderating one of the sessions on that day.)

This has now been crossposted onto the Nature Newsblog. If moved to comment, please do so there.

Nature Newsblog

I am, alas, not at the LPSC, but my colleague Mark is, and he's blogging it; meanwhile, other Nature colleagues are blogging the American Physical Society's March meeting.

Breaking cover/Google Mars

This post should probably stand, for an indefinite while, as a monument to the on-hiatus-ness of this blog. I have a new job, Chief News and Features Editor at Nature, which leaves just as little time for blogging as working on the book did previously.

But rather than just announce the hiatus, here are some little scraps; MRO is in orbit (hurrah). The NASA program is currently without long term goals (boo). And Google has gone to Mars.

My thanks to everyone who came to see the talk I gave in Tucson last week, by the way (and apologies to anyone who might have come had I mentioned it here, or directly to them), and particular thanks to Richard Poss for arranging things and hosting me and generally being so kind.

Look homeward

Apologies for the absence; travel, work and yet another iBook logic board catastrophe. Service of a sort will be resumed as and when.

Meanwhile, a wonderful movie taken during MESSENGER's fly by of the earth can be found here (thanks to pnh).

Eating the Sun

Update written two years later, on noticing that this post is currently the highest ranking Google search result for "Eating the Sun" that I have any contol over.

The book is now published (synopsis|Amazon), it has a blog that is updated slightly more often than this one, and this weekend I will be headed to a different Scottish city to promote it. 

I just sent off the manuscript for the new book. Here's what I think is going to be said about it in the Fourth Estate (UK) catalogue

Photosynthesis is the most mundane of miracles. Every day it lets the world's plants turn a nuclear war's worth of solar power into new leaves and stems and branches; if it stopped, there would be no food to eat or air to breathe. Eating the Sun tells the remarkable story of the scientists who discovered the workings of this miracle, and reveals the epic scale of its power to shape the environment. Showing everything from the evolution of life to the current climate crisis in a new green light, Eating the Sun will change the way the reader sees the world.

It is, in short, about the attribute of the earth which is least Mars-like...

And now off to Glasgow, where it appears I may also be appearing on this.

Worldcon

Next week I'll be up at this year's World Science Fiction Convention, Interaction in Glasgow. More than happy to meet any of you who might be there. My programme items are:

The Pros and Cons of Blogging Science, Friday at 11.00

How Have Worlds Changed, Friday at 14:00

Exploring the Planets, Friday at 15:30

A reading on Saturday at 11.00

and "The Long Tail": Economics of a Post-Scarcity World, Saturday at 15:30

I'm particularly chuffed to have a reading. I've never given a public reading before; I'll probably offer a little bit of the work in progress, and my one piece of science fiction. I imagine it will be packed, as the only competition is some bloke called Pratchett...

Any input any of you have for any of the panels (especially you, Chris, out there in RSS land) most welcome. The Exploring the Planets event will give me the opportunity to question David Southwood, so let me know if there's anything you want raised about ESA. (I wonder whether he read this?)

I have no idea whether I'll be blogging while I'm up there. It seems a fairly sure thing that Cheryl will be, though.

It's a very long time since I've been to a worldcon (I'm not a regular at any type of con), and I have to say I'm looking forward to it quite a lot. They really are the most remarkable events, organised on a wonderfully dedicated volunteer basis, and offering everything from insight into future pandemics to the psychology of isolation to cargo cults to belly dancing lessons to war trains made of lego to the open source approach to science to whether lesbianism in genre TV is progressive to the fractured narrative and the causal world to Simon Conway Morris and Jack Cohen on extraterrestrial life to how to mosh, slam and stage dive. All human life is here...

Mumma's methane

At the September meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Science, which is rather pleasingly in Cambridge this year, Mike Mumma will be presenting some very interesting sounding methane data. The abstract is here. The key idea is that the rate of methane production is a great deal higher than calculations based on the theoretical atmospheric lifetime would suggest

Our differential extractions for methane implied strong latitudinal gradients - these are contrary to predictions if photochemistry limits the lifetime of methane on Mars, but instead require local release and a much shorter lifetime. The lifetime against destruction cannot be much longer than equator-to-pole transport times imposed by the Hadley circulation (weeks). A shorter lifetime requires that estimated production rates be revised upwards commensurately.

If the methane had a long lifetime, it would be spread evenly across the face of the planet. It doesn't, so it has a short lifetime (possibly because of catalysed interactions with surface oxidants, or oxidants on dust). And for a given total amount of atmospheric methane a shorter liftime means a higher rate of production. The 2,000 cows have reinforcements.

Neither the absolute rate or the implication that production must be regional in themselves argue for or against biological production. Geothermal sources are regional too (though if the rate is really high, you'd have to wonder why the hotspot doesn't show up in the infrared). Sushil Atreya will be looking into some of the possibilities at the same session of the meeting. Interestingly, Atreya's abstract suggests that some of Mumma's data show a significantly higher level than PFS or the Krasnopolsky team reported.

Also interestingly the Mars Express PFS team (of which Atreya is a member) has no abstracts at the meeting reporting any more methane data, or indeed any trace gas data at all. That said Vittorio Formisano is part of the team reporting on Cassini's intriguing bright spot on Titan.

I'm looking forward to September 6th quite a lot right now.

For anyone needing a refresher, the summary from the end of last year's methane excitement on this blog is here, and the most recent take on the PFS work was here. (And if anyone knows why some of my archives seem to be in a strange blue format, I'd be grateful for the info). There's been a recent series of articles on astrobio.net, including this one on possible methane sources.

David's blog

As those who read the comments may have noticed my friend David Chandler, Mars Underground veteran and all round good egg, currently covering NASAish stuff and much more for New Scientist, is now also blogging under his own flag.

At the same time, it's worth noting that New Scientist now has a space site all of its own. In one story JPL is claiming that the loss of MTO will have no effect whatsoever on the data returned from MSL. My memory is that until recently some people were talking about MTO as so crucial to MSL's success that it might be worth launching it early just to make sure it was working and delaying MSL if it wasn't. My suspicion is that the "MSL not affected" line is tenable only with a minimalistic definition of what MSL is meant to do. It may be a bit like saying that nothing would have been lost from the MER mission if both rovers had blown up on sol 91, since their defined mission was just 90 sols long. True to the letter of the contract, perhaps, but not to the spirit of inquiry.