News Aggregate: Moonshots!

So in the last post I mentioned that the BioGenome Project was called a "moonshot", turns out there's more moonshots. Quite a few! Makes me wonder how many moons do we have... Am I on Jupiter??

Chemistry

Martin Burke is moonshooting for automated chemistry synthesis. Most chemicals are made very inflexibly. Basically, chemists start with a chemical to synthesize, then do a bunch of trials and errors until they get a synthesis receipe that is just cheap and with a high enough yield to be useful.

Human chemists planning a synthesis tend to use a technique called retrosynthetic analysis. They draw the finished molecule and then pick it apart, erasing bonds that would be easy to form and leaving fragments of molecule that are stable or readily available. 

Example: synthesis of Ibuprofen

Current state of the art on genomics projects and technology - Dec 2018

Gene sequencing has its own kind of Moore's Law, but with more cliffs and plateaus.

Technology: The $1,000 genome (2014), Nature News

This was plotted in 2014, back then a human genome costed \$5000. In 2015 it dropped suddenly to $1000 and that's where it's at now, according to NIH.

3 great ways to humanely produce meat that probably won't sell well

Warning: this is like a Cracked.com list article, but try to take it more seriously.

1. Cancer lab meat. 

It might be a good idea to make lab meat out of cow cancer muscle cells.

Think about it, cancer cells are made to reproduce like crazy, so it might be a lot easier to make lab meat from cancer muscle cells, compared to using healthy muscle cells. And there has been precedence: the HeLa cells, famous for reproducing easily, are cancerous.

But when I searched, I cannot find any prior art on this. All that I could find were like "does steak cause cancer" and irrelevant.

Why it won't sell well: As rapid and cheap as cancer cell reproduction might be, it's almost certain that they won't make any structure. Tumors tend to be highly disorganized globs, completely different from healthy muscle tissue. As such, it would probably not taste like steaks. The only use would be for meat sludge, as used in meat nuggets, meatloafs, and meat stuffings.

Also, because of how consumers would be scared that eating cancer would give them cancer... even if they don't know that cancer isn't infectious, and they drink secretions from female cow's mammary glands without fearing of turning into calves themselves...