Monday, April 8, 2002

Life on Mars hopes raised. Tentative evidence of chlorophyll, which some Earth lifeforms use to absorb sunlight, is found in the Red Planet's soil. [BBC News: sci/tech] It's early, but if shown to be true would be a big deal. Proving that there is life on another planet would force many people to reexamine their beliefs. 12:49:19 PM

Doubts over Mexican GM maize report. The journal Nature disowns an earlier report that GM crops had contaminated wild maize in Mexico. [BBC News: sci/tech] This is an important controvery. The authors are using a technique call i-PCR. This technique can amplify very small concentrations of a region of DNA in a sample. What they did was take samples of corn from remote regions and use i-PCR to detect genetically modified corn DNA within the genome of the wild corn. They obtained PCR products and concluded that the GM DNA has cross polinated the wild corn. The problem is that i-PCR is subject to false positives. Sequences in the wild corn that sort of look like the GM sequence will be amplified and be detected if the conditions are correct. This needs to be shown not to be the case, which in fact should be pretty simple using other techniques. The reason I have doubts about the research is that there is very little GM corn in Mexico. They banned its use in 1998. So where did the GM DNA come from? Also, the authors report a large contamination of wild corn by GM DNA over a wide area, which seems unlikely given the small amount of GM corn in Mexico. I will keep an open mind and see what happens. 12:46:01 PM

Solar Solutions. These new types of cells are very cheap to make. The catch is they are pretty inefficient right now using only 1.7% of the sunlight they absorb. Conventional solar cells can use up to 35%. This is new technology and should advance quickly. 12:24:54 PM

Computer crime 'soaring'. Virtually all US big businesses and government agencies have been the victim of computer crime, researchers say. [BBC News: sci/tech] Much of this was virus attacks or web page defacement. It is serious and needs to be thought about before the criminals figure out how to really cause problems. One this the survery also looked at was not following corporate use policies -- downloading pornography or pirated software. Some of the crime is coming from within. 11:57:49 AM