AceNik's Portal

No, this top isn’t woven from human skin but something potentially even more gross: Bacteria.

Using a bathtub mixture of yeast, bacteria and sweetened green tea, designer Suzanne Lee produces extremely thin sheets of bacterial cellulose. When wet, they’re pliable, and can be shaped into clothing.

DNA-based logic gates that could carry out calculations inside the body have been constructed for the first time. The work brings the prospect of injectable biocomputers programmed to target diseases as they arise.

“The biocomputer would sense biomarkers and immediately react by releasing counter-agents for the disease,” says Itamar Willner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, who led the work.

Could playing in the dirt make you smarter? Mice given peanut butter laced with a common, harmless soil bacterium ran through mazes twice as fast and enjoyed doing so.

So says Dorothy Matthews of the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York state, who presented her results at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego, California, this week.

For the first time, scientists have created life from scratch – well, sort of. Craig Venter’s team has made a bacterial genome from smaller DNA subunits and then transplanted the whole thing into another cell.

What did Venter’s team do?

The cell was created by stitching together the genome of a goat pathogen called Mycoplasma mycoides from smaller stretches of DNA synthesised in the lab, and inserting the genome into the empty cytoplasm of a related bacterium.

You might think that fresh air would be essential for a sewage treatment plant, but some bacteria cannot stand the stuff. These bugs could clean waste water so efficiently that the process could generate power rather than consume it.