Came across this the other day.

Climate engineering may happen but it seems like the energies available to control the weather/climate is not nearly enough (not even the same magnitude) to make this a stable plant. Frankly it seems like a bad idea at this stage of technological development. On the other hand, it is a valid point to say that the climate is already being engineered anyway (more and more) just by the very fact that we take input and commit output to the system. It doesn’t much matter that we still don’t know what we’ve been doing.

In this sense, I think the entire argument about whether global warming is happening or not or is the model believable or not or is it actually global cooling is beside the point. The actual effect doesn’t matter as much as the fact that we’re engineering any system beyond our capability to understand it, much less to control it. One day there may be a way to engineer the climate in a controllable, stable fashion. Before that, it is prudent to be paranoid about the inputs driving the system unless there is proof that said inputs do not drive one of the unstable modes of the system.

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all over the news today.

Scientists have built the first synthetic genome by stringing together 147 pages of letters representing the building blocks of DNA.

The researchers used yeast to stitch together four long strands of DNA into the genome of a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium. They said it’s more than an order of magnitude longer than any previous synthetic DNA creation. Leading synthetic biologists said with the new work, published Thursday in the journal Science, the first synthetic life could be just months away — if it hasn’t been created already.

“We consider this the second in our three-step process to create the first synthetic organism,” said J. Craig Venter, president of the J. Craig Venter Institute where scientists performed the study, on Thursday during a teleconference. “What remains now that we have this complete synthetic chromosome … is to boot this up in a cell.”

This is what they actually did. Looks like an interesting application of TAR cloning in yeast (another link) — normally used for sequence selection — which itself is a significant extension of the YAC toolset.

I guess small artificial genomes are a practical reality now, but TAR cloning is really the key here, allowing a less restrictive abstraction of the join operation to be implemented. Nice.

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