A team from the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., announced on Thursday it had created a synthetic bacterial genome that is a copy of an existing genome. The scientists then transplanted the synthetic genome into a different bacterium cell to create what they call a synthetic cell, although technically only its genome is synthetic.

The new genome then "booted up" the recipient bacterium's cell in much the same way that a computer's operating system makes the computer work.

The scientists say the eventual goal is to build new organisms that act in ways that differ from what nature intended, such as custom-made bacteria designed for biofuel production or environmental cleanup.

Jonah Lehrer pegs slot machine addiction to the brain's love of pattern recognition:

[I]t helps to think about the slot machine from the perspective of your dopamine neurons. While you are losing money, your neurons are struggling to decipher the patterns inside the machine. They want to understand the game, to decode the logic of luck, to find the events that predict a payout.

But here's the catch: slot machines can't be solved. They use random number generators to determine their payout. There are no patterns or algorithms to uncover; studying our near-misses won't tell us how to win. There is only a stupid little microchip, churning out arbitrary digits. At this point, our dopamine neurons should just surrender: the slot machine is a waste of mental energy. But this isn't what happens. Instead of getting bored by the haphazard payouts, our dopamine neurons become obsessed. When we pull the lever and get a lucky reward, we experience a rush of pleasurable dopamine precisely because the reward was so unexpected.

Salon interviews Tara Parker-Pope, the author of a new book on marriage:

The 50 percent divorce rate is really a myth. The 20-year divorce rate for couples who got married in the 1980s is actually around 19 percent. Everyone thinks marriage is such a struggle and it’s shocking to hear that marriage is actually going strong today. It has to do with how you look at the statistic. If the variables were constant, then a simple equation might work to come up with the divorce rate. But a lot of things are changing. And it is true that there are groups of people who have a 50 percent divorce rate: college dropouts who marry under the age of 25, for example. Couples married in the 1970s have a 30-year divorce rate of about 47 percent. A person who got married in the 1970s had a completely different upbringing and experience in life from someone who got married in the 1990s. It's been very clear that divorce rates peaked in the 1970s and has been going down ever since.

The full international team of mock astronauts that will be locked in a pretend spaceship complex for a record 520 days in a simulated mission to Mars is all set for their endurance trial, Russia's Federal Space Agency announced Wednesday.

The volunteer 6-man crew, made up of three Russians, two Europeans and a Chinese astronaut instructor, will enter an 18,800 square-foot (1,750 square-meter), five-module complex on June 3, and live like Mars-bound astronauts, as part of the elaborate Mars500 simulated mission to the red planet.

On one hand, there’s an urge to feel bad for you. You really are getting screwed here. On the other hand, you really did it to yourselves.

…

You also screwed yourselves several years ago, when you couldn’t have possibly known you were doing it. To quote a passage from Jeffrey Young and William Simon’s 2005 book iCon Steve Jobs:

“When Steve returned to Apple in 1997 he invited the executives of Adobe over and asked them to help him create a version of their video editing software for Mac. Even though it had been Steve and Apple that put the company on the map twenty years before, they now refused.“

Whoops. You then followed that move up with nearly a decade worth of under-supporting (or simply not supporting) the Mac. I’m hardly the only one who has noticed this.

Sure, you had your reasons. The Mac had tiny market share and the focus was on Windows. But a decision was made, and now you have to live with it. And you can’t pretend none of that happened and write things today like:

“We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs.”

Um, where were you in 1997 for the Mac? What about 1998? 1999? And so on. There were plenty of Mac users out there that weren’t able to “freely access their favorite content and applications” — because of you.

The whole thing is pure gold.

NBC announced Friday that the original version show would end May 24, after a run of 20 years. Law & Order was on the verge of becoming the longest-running drama in prime-time television history, surpassing Gunsmoke, but it will have to settle for a tie with the 1960s western.

NBC also said Friday that it had renewed Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and is adding a spinoff: Law & Order: Los Angeles.

One isn’t such a lonely number. All life on Earth shares a single common ancestor, a new statistical analysis confirms.

The idea that life forms share a common ancestor is “a central pillar of evolutionary theory,” says Douglas Theobald, a biochemist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. “But recently there has been some mumbling, especially from microbiologists, that it may not be so cut-and-dried.”

Because microorganisms of different species often swap genes, some scientists have proposed that multiple primordial life forms could have tossed their genetic material into life’s mix, creating a web, rather than a tree of life.

To determine which hypothesis is more likely correct, Theobald put various evolutionary ancestry models through rigorous statistical tests. The results, published in the May 13 Nature, come down overwhelmingly on the side of a single ancestor.

A universal common ancestor is at least 102,860 times more probable than having multiple ancestors, Theobald calculates.

Journal references:

• Theobald, D. L. 2010. A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry. Nature 465 (May 13): 219-223.
• Steel, M. and Penny, D. 2010. Common ancestry put to the test. Nature, 465 (May 13): 168-169.
• DOI:10.1038/nature09014

Video game designer John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace will be battling Burt Rutan and Richard Branson in the fight to make space travel affordable.

Space Adventures is going to use an Armadillo Technologies rocket to launch amateur astronauts 62 miles into the sky. Nothing new, except that they will do it at half the price of Virgin Galactic's ticket, and in a real rocket!

Neil Armstrong has renewed his criticism of Barack Obama's space vision, insisting that the president's decision to scrap Constellation and head off to Mars was "poorly advised".

Speaking yesterday to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Armstrong said: "I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement.

"A plan that was invisible to so many was likely contrived by a very small group in secret who persuaded the president that this was a unique opportunity to put his stamp on a new and innovative program. I believe the President was poorly advised."

Armstrong went on to insist that the US was effectively throwing away half a century of work which had allowed it to "acquire a position of leadership in space". He lamented: "If the leadership we have acquired through our investment is allowed simply to fade away, other nations will surely step in where we have faltered. I do not believe that this would be in our best interests."

Given the lengths to which Mr. Armstrong has gone to stay out of the public spotlight, his throwing down of the proverbial gauntlet should warrant our attention.

"That bad boy south equatorial belt (SEB) has completely faded away. Point your scope at the planet any morning soon and you'll see only one obvious dark stripe, the North Equatorial Belt," he says on his blog.

"Jupiter with only one belt is almost like seeing Saturn when its rings are edge-on and invisible for a time - it just doesn't look right."

Forty photos of the slowly unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Austrian researchers have concluded that listening to the music of Mozart does not make children and adolescents more intelligent. After reviewing 15 years of research into the so-called Mozart effect, a team at Vienna University's faculty of psychology found no proof of the phenomenon.