Popular Science Update

This is a new thing that I will be adding to the blog, hopefully, everyday, but at least twice a week. It just covers some of the most interesting information put up on www.popsci.com. Alright, each time I will talk about three interesting articles.

The First Synthetic Life: Today, scientists announced that they have made the first ever synthetic life. This is self-replicating life whose parent is a computer. The scientists took chromosomes from a certain bacteria and used yeast to make the whole genome, then further "watermarked" it so that it would not be mistaken for the natural species. Think about it. Life, real life, being made from a computer! Amazing!

Psychological Disorders Linked to Physiology: For many years, scientists have known that psychological disorders have some root is physiology. But recently, it was found that a psychological disorder similar to obsessive compulsive disorder was found to be cured or lessened in mice through bone marrow transplants. Sick mice, given healthy bone marrow, were cured. Health mice, given sick bone marrow, were made sick. Although this does not give a sure way of how to cure psychological disorders, it will certainly help in the future.

Fruit Flies Can Smell Light: It was found recently that fruit flies have the ability to smell light. When their brains were stimulated in a certain way through certain neurons, the olfactory nerves were used, and the flies went over to a blue light. Scientists know that it was the olfactory nerves at use because they imaged how the signal traveled through the brains of the flies, and it went right to the smell part of the brain.

I hope this was interesting to you. If you want more information on any of these articles, or want to see some more cool ones, visit the Popular Science website! I will be bringing another one of these to the blog either tomorrow or Monday!