] After a seven-year, 2.2 billion-mile journey, the Cassini
] spacecraft will fire its engine Wednesday night to slow
] down, allowing itself to be captured by Saturn's gravity.
] The maneuver will inaugurate a four-year, 76-orbit tour
] of the giant planet and some of its 31 known moons,
] including huge Titan

CNN.com - Saturn mission to reveal mysterious planet - Jun 28, 2004

Decius wrote:
] Check out this coin design...

Thats awesome

The technologies, if approved by the Food and Drug Administration, would not only find cancers in their earliest stages before they can do damage or spread, but also deliver a small amount of a drug targeted directly at tumors, which would cause little or no side effects.

Pretty neat.

Wired News: Nano Killers Aim at Mini Tumors

Scientists have performed successful teleportation on atoms for the first time, the journal Nature reports.

Teleportation breakthrough made

A must-have for mad science laboratories everywhere.

Only you can prevent Gray Goo

] Leaders of a new movement are kicking
] off the first Synthetic Biology 1.0 conference at the
] Massachussets Institute of Technology this week.
] "Synthetic biology" is the blanket term for a
] multidisciplinary attempt to identify a class of standard
] operational components that can be assembled into
] functioning molecular machines.
]
] Central to that effort is the ability to isolate discrete
] biomolecular mechanisms and define standard interfaces
] for them so that they can be assembled in much the same
] way as electronic circuits. This confluence of computer
] science and biology is so remarkable that this new
] movement rises to the level of moon shot initiatives: to
] reverse-engineer life itself.

] "Biology is the nanotechnology that works."

EE Times -BioBricks to help reverse-engineer life

I passed my quals!!!!! w00t!!!!!!!!!

] The discovery was made by chance by two biochemists
] conducting research into drugs for cancer and Alzheimer's
] in a medical laboratory at Vanderbilt University,
] Nashville, Tennessee.

Thought this was neat that two guys at vandy in nashville may have found a way to make a blue rose.

Telegraph | News

] It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a
] grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS.
] And that scares them.
]
] That's because the therapy itself is a virus. The
] Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory assistant
] professors created a virus altered to latch onto HIV and
] mute its ability to become AIDS. They've tested the
] theory in a computer model, and in cells in a dish. The
] results have been promising, and if they continue in that
] vein, the researchers could begin animal testing by the
] end of this year

Amazing....great idea. Of course, this has the potential to go horribly wrong once it hits a real mammalian system...but the fact that it worked on cultured cells is a start. Of course, this is gene therapy using a retrovirus...something that is *really* not supported at this time after the whole SCIDS fiasco. There was a SCIDS gene therapy using a retrovirus a few years back that made it to human trials - unfortunately, they found that althought the SCIDS (bubble boy syndrome) cleared up, the patients subsequently contracted leukemia due to the retrovirus affecting the expression of an oncogene. Needless to say, gene therapy using retroviruses is unfortunately, risky buisness.

Wired News: Designer Virus Stalks HIV

] Cattle brains and other remains that may carry the deadly
] mad cow disease would be turned into biofuels under a
] plan announced on Monday by the U.S. Department of
] Agriculture.

Now this is killing two birds with one stone - make a biofuel out of hazardous cow parts

Wired News: Don't Flush Brains Down the Drain