Reddit’s just had a Q&A with the CEO of a company dedicated to 3D printing edible meat:

At Modern Meadow we’re developing technology to 3D-bioprint meat and leather. In fact, we’ve already made some, which you can see my co-founder and father eat in his TED talk here (at 5:33).

Why are we doing this? Meat is one of [...]

Laboratory Equipment goes all comic book superhero with a medical story on researchers taking the power of regeneration from tadpole tails:

For several years Prof. Enrique Amaya and his team at The Healing Foundation Centre in the Faculty of Life Sciences have been trying to better understand the regeneration process, in the hope of eventually using this information to [...]

Well, maybe not *directly*… but Science Daily explains how scientists are watching Arabidopsis thaliana, a fast-growing, globally found weed known as mouse-eared cress, to learn how plants can produce even in tough growing conditions:

Unlike crops, which for millennia have been selectively refined to express certain traits, Arabidopsis has not been cultivated and thus has not suffered the same loss [...]

Michigan State University biochemists (and science artists!) have made a germy philosopher’s stone:

“Microbial alchemy is what we’re doing – transforming gold from something that has no value into a solid, precious metal that’s valuable,” said Kazem Kashefi, assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics.

He and Adam Brown, associate professor of electronic art and intermedia, found the metal-tolerant bacteria [...]

The Daily Galaxy says Saturn’s big moon, Titan, could be a life-making machine:

Saturn’s moon Titan has many of the components for life without liquid water. But the orange hydrocarbon haze that shrouds the planet’s largest moon could be creating the molecules that make up DNA without the help of water – an ingredient widely thought to be necessary for [...]

That’s the tempting pitch made by a team from the University of Adelaide and University of Colorado, who’ve come up with a way to block opioid addiction in the brain:

Laboratory studies have shown that the drug (+)-naloxone will selectively block the immune-addiction response.

The results – which could eventually lead to new co-formulated drugs that assist patients with severe [...]

Scientists have come one step closer to creating artificial life by building a cell membrane from scratch:

“We don’t understand this really fundamental step in our existence, which is how non-living matter went to living matter,” [Neal Devaraj, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego] said. “So this is a really ripe area to try to [...]

SONG: “Bioluminescence at the Dragon Vent.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: Squid Pro Crow.

SOURCE: Based on “Exotic creatures discovered living at deep-sea vent in Indian Ocean”, Guardian, 28 Dec 2011, as used in the post “Creatures of the Dragon Vent”.

ABSTRACT: This song was a result of a thing that I found [...]

This is more covering-the-coverage than flogging a new discovery, but the New York Times is keeping tabs on the process of turning pond scum into an industrial fuel source:

Foreign genes are being spliced into algae and native genes are being tweaked.

Different strains of algae are pitted against one another in survival-of-the-fittest contests in an effort to accelerate the [...]