I thought I'd try a new theme for Saturday - a series of threads where I link to interesting science stories. Well interesting to me anyway.

Artificial Life

The big story of the week is of course how Craig Venter and team have created a "synthetic cell".

On May 20th, J. Craig Venter and his team at J.C Venter Institute announced the creation of a cell controlled by a synthetic genome in a paper published in SCIENCE. As science historian George Dyson points out, "from the point of view of technology, a code generated within a digital computer is now self-replicating as the genome of a line of living cells. From the point of view of biology, a code generated by a living organism has been translated into a digital representation for replication, editing, and transmission to other cells."

Ethics aside, this is a pretty amazing achievement.

Foucault's Pendulum

The pendulum that has swung a model of Foucault's has been permanently damaged.

The cable holding a model of Foucault’s pendulum snapped last month at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, sending the 60-pound ball crashing to the ground. It was permanently dented in the fall.

Sad news - I always love seeing the pendulum when I visit Paris.

Nova Supernova

A new type of supernova has been discovered that could be the source of the calcium that we have in our bones (well, not me, my calcium levels are low because of my Hyperparathyroidism) .

The exploding star or supernova – one of the biggest explosions in space – was first detected in 2005 in the nearby spiral galaxy of NGC1032, but more recent studies have revealed that it is different to any other known supernovae. Supernova SN 2005E, as it is called, is rich in calcium, said Professor Alex Filippenko, an astronomer that the University of California, Berkeley.

So - I am a star after all.

For those with a techie/geeky bent, the article in The Atlantic on the Conflicker Worm is a fascinating - and scary - insight into the world of the virus-creator.

When the Conficker computer “worm” was unleashed on the world in November 2008, cyber-security experts didn’t know what to make of it. It infiltrated millions of computers around the globe. It constantly checks in with its unknown creators. It uses an encryption code so sophisticated that only a very few people could have deployed it. For the first time ever, the cyber-security elites of the world have joined forces in a high-tech game of cops and robbers, trying to find Conficker’s creators and defeat them. The cops are failing. And now the worm lies there, waiting …

Read the whole article, it shows how the good guys catch up with the bad guys, to only find that the bad guys have moved on. I found the section on encryption is the scariest part.

So when the new version of Conficker appeared, and its new method of encrypting its communication employed MD-6, Rivest’s proposal for SHA-3, the cabal’s collective mind was blown.

MD-6 is/was the proposed new "highest-level standard" for public-key encryption - the bad guys already were using it.

If the worm is ever activated in a nefarious way the innnertubes could be in for some real trouble.