Giant Freakin Robot

The promise of the Information Age is to have the world’s data at your fingertips at any given moment, but scientists are trying to turn that saying into a literal truth with the aid of genetic engineering. That’s right, where cyberpunk always prophesized that we would have electronic hard drives wired into our bodies, now the new dream is to turn the building blocks of the human body itself into a hard drive. While we haven’t quite reached the point where we can store large amounts of data in our own DNA just yet, a team of scientists has successfully encoded an entire genetics textbook into less than one trillionth of a gram of DNA on a specially designed microchip.

The problem with storing data on DNA has always been that DNA dies, and also mutates in successive generations. While that works great in the grand scheme of evolution, it’s not so good at keeping an error-free storage system over time. As reported by the Huffington Post, synthetic biologist George Church and his team have created an archival system using DNA chips that creates multiple redundant backups of the information coded with the four-letter alphabet of DNA’s A’s, C’s, G’s and T’s. The system also includes a sort of genetic barcode that points back to the source of the file, and a computer compares the information against multiple copies of itself to check for accuracy.

It’s not your fault if you don’t know who Nikola Tesla is, but you really should. Tesla was the creator of the alternating current generator and an all-around pioneer in the field of electrical engineering. Unfortunately, his importance and contributions to science are overshadowed by his contemporary/rival/former boss Thomas Edison. Now, the site of Tesla’s old lab in New York is up for sale and one web personality is doing his best to save it.

The original site of the lab in New York was home to one of Tesla’s more far-reaching projects that fell through due to lack of funding, Wardenclyffe Tower. The tower was Tesla’s effort to make a wireless electricity transmission system to power large areas and would have made our current system of power lines looked like a Stone Age relic, even if the excessive amounts of lightning bolts shooting off of it made it look more like a giant Cancer generator. Matt Inman, creator of The Oatmeal, found out about the sale of Nikola Tesla’s old property, which had most recently been used as a paper and film plant, and decided to save it for posterity. The property is for sale at $1.6 Million dollars. Inman got a grant from New York that would give him $850 thousand in matching funds to buy the site if he could raise the rest, so he has started a fund over at indiegogo.com to come up with $850K through crowd-funding with a project aptly named Operation Let’s Build A Goddamn Tesla Museum.

Are you tired of the rocky red vistas of Mars already? Well, that was quick, but never fear: here is a truly glorious pic of a planet that is green and blue and some even think is host to lifeforms intelligent enough to have a space-faring capability. There is always a downside though, and this particular blue marble is also home to politics, war, and something the natives call Kardashians.

It’s been an ongoing talking point for a while now that we don’t have enough women pursuing careers in scientific or technical fields. Every talking head you’ll come across has a theory. Maybe it’s because our society, in spite of our advances toward equality, still sometimes thinks of those fields as “man’s work,” and instills that thought — consciously or otherwise — in little girls as they grow up. Or maybe it’s simply the fact that our public education system has devolved into an assembly line of rote memorization and standardized testing. Either way, it’s obviously a problem not limited to here in the States, because the European Commission decided to remedy the problem by creating a new video to try and convince young girls that science can be a “girl thing.” The results: the stomach-wrenchingly terrible video below.