Science: November 2008 Archives

“The world is solar powered and it works.” With these inspiring words, Oliver Morton closed his keynote address at the Fourth Conference on Clean Energy, which Bostonist was fortunate enough to be invited to yesterday morning. Morton, the author of the recently released Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet (stay tuned next week for a review and perhaps an interview!) shared his belief that photosynthesis has the potential to inspire new sources of energy in the 21st century. In addition to all of the numerous......

As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, we were able to talk to a handful of the iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) teams during their poster presentations last Saturday evening. Here’s the (slightly) distilled version of what we found. The locals: Both Harvard and MIT sent teams to hold home field advantage for this year’s competition, and both took on an additional challenge right out of the gate. Generally, iGEM teams use either E.coli or brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, because they are commonly studied and react......