www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIJINiK9azc

Via the New Zealand Herald:

Harvard scientists are hoping to turn chickens into mini-dinosaurs, according to the Daily Mail.

Scientists at the Ivy League university have ‘rewound’ evolution with chicken DNA to create embryos with alligator-like snouts instead of beaks.

By altering the DNA of chicken embryos in the early stage of their development, the team were able to ‘undo’ evolutionary progress and give the creatures snouts which are thought to have been lost in the cretaceous period millions of years ago.

Wow. Nice. Good job, science.

Although the eggs cannot be hatched due to ethical restrictions,

Wait, WHAT? BULLSHIT! I CALL SHENANIGANS.

Yale? Are you going to just sit there and let Harvard have all the glory, or are you going to hatch a Dinochicken?

Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.

In a paper published July 27 in the journal PLoS One, the researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them — including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever.

This could be epic; utopian and dystopian in equal amounts. One one hand, never have a cold again. On the other, instructing cells to kill each other is the kind of world-building conceit that drives a near-future action/thriller. The GM in me knows how I’d handle it if a character in my campaign came up with this. We’ll see how Sum of All Things deals with it.

First Jeopardy, and now this?

From Discovery.com (emphasis mine):

A team of researchers lead by Lulu Qian from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have for the first developed an artificial neural network — that is, the beginnings of a brain — out of DNA molecules. And when quizzed, the brain answered the questions correctly.

How could this ever become a problem? I really should have named my boy John Connor Kennedy.

Rumors of our impending doom were true, according to theChicago Sun Times:

Microsoft is buying Skype, the one video chat service that’s become ubiquitous enough to have forced an update to the classic lament: all over the world, retired women complain to their hairdressers that their kids never Skype them any more.

Skype + Microsoft?

Did I mention Eric wanted me to name my boy John Connor Kennedy? I thought about it, and realize now that I totally should have. Sorry humanity, you’re doomed and it’s my fault for liking this guy.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tieA5wfcgH4

Tricksy Jesus.

(Except for Missouri)

Edited to add: