Name: Norman Anthony Aguero Currently a student at FIU. My major is chemistry and my minor is physics. My goal is to hopefully earn a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry.
This is an example of the email I recieved from a giirl-friend of mine today:
The Why's of Men
1. WHY DO MEN BECOME SMARTER DURING SEX
(because they are plugged into a genius)
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2. WHY DON'T WOMEN BLINK DURING SEX?
(they don't have enough time)
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3. WHY DOES IT TAKE 1 MILLION SPERM TO FERTILIZE ONE EGG?
(they don't stop to ask directions)
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4. WHY DO MEN SNORE WHEN THEY LIE ON THEIR BACKS?
(because their balls fall over their butt-hole and they vapor lock)
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(You're laughing, aren't you?!?!)
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5. WHY WERE MEN GIVEN LARGER BRAINS THAN DOGS?
(so they won't hump women 's legs at cocktails parties)
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6. WHY DID GOD MAKE MEN BEFORE WOMEN?
( you need a rough draft before you make a final copy)
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7. HOW MANY MEN DOES IT TAKE TO PUT A TOILET SEAT DOWN?
(don't know.....it never happened)
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( C'mon guys, we laugh at your blonde jokes!)
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And the personal favorite:
8. WHY DID GOD PUT MEN ON EARTH?
(because a vibrator can't mow the lawn)
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Remember, if you haven't got a smile on your face and laughter in your heart...Then you are just an old sour fart!
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One day my housework-challenged husband decided to wash his sweat-shirt seconds after he stepped into the laundry room, he shouted to me,
'What setting do I use on the washing machine?'
'It depends,' I replied. 'What does it say on your shirt?'
He yelled back, ' University of Oklahoma '
And they say blonde s are dumb...
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A couple is lying in bed. The man says, 'I am going to make you the happiest woman in the world.'
The woman replies, 'I'll miss you...'
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'It's just too hot to wear clothes today,' Jack says as he stepped out of the shower, 'honey, what do you think the neighbors would think if I mowed the lawn like this?'
'Probably that I married you for your money,' she replied.
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Q: What do you call an intelligent, good looking, sensitive man?
A: A rumor
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Dear Lord, I pray for Wisdom to understand my man; Love to forgive him; And Patience for his moods. Because, Lord, if I pray for Strength, I'll beat him to death. AMEN
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Q: Why do little boys whine?
A: They are practicing to be men.
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Q: What does it mean when a man is in your bed gasping for breath and calling your name?
A: You did not hold the pillow down long enough.
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Q: How do you keep your husband from reading your e-mail?
A: Rename the mail folder 'Instruction Manual.'
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Send this to at least five bright, funny women you know and make their day! And send this to five bright men who have enough sense of humor to take it!
Ten Things You Didn't Know About the Apollo 11 Moon Landing
By Craig NelsonPosted 07.13.2009 at 12:09 pm
Camera Shy: Neil Armstrong's reflection in Buzz Aldrin's visor is one of the few photos of Armstrong on the moonNASA
This month marks the 40th anniversary of humankind's first steps on the moon. Auspiciously timed is Craig Nelson's new book, Rocket Men--one of the most detailed accounts of the period leading up to the first manned moon mission. Here, we have ten little-known Apollo 11 facts unearthed by Nelson during his research.
1. The Apollo’s Saturn rockets were packed with enough fuel to throw 100-pound shrapnel three miles, and NASA couldn’t rule out the possibility that they might explode on takeoff. NASA seated its VIP spectators three and a half miles from the launchpad.
2. The Apollo computers had less processing power than a cellphone.
3. Drinking water was a fuel-cell by-product, but Apollo 11’s hydrogen-gas filters didn’t work, making every drink bubbly. Urinating and defecating in zero gravity, meanwhile, had not been figured out; the latter was so troublesome that at least one astronaut spent his entire mission on an anti-diarrhea drug to avoid it.
4. When Apollo 11’s lunar lander, the Eagle, separated from the orbiter, the cabin wasn’t fully depressurized, resulting in a burst of gas equivalent to popping a champagne cork. It threw the module’s landing four miles off-target.
5. Pilot Neil Armstrong nearly ran out of fuel landing the Eagle, and many at mission control worried he might crash. Apollo engineer Milton Silveira, however, was relieved: His tests had shown that there was a small chance the exhaust could shoot back into the rocket as it landed and ignite the remaining propellant.
6. The "one small step for man" wasn’t actually that small. Armstrong set the ship down so gently that its shock absorbers didn’t compress. He had to hop 3.5 feet from the Eagle’s ladder to the surface.
7. When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle's door because there was no outer handle.
8. The toughest moonwalk task? Planting the flag. NASA’s studies suggested that the lunar soil was soft, but Armstrong and Aldrin found the surface to be a thin wisp of dust over hard rock. They managed to drive the flagpole a few inches into the ground and film it for broadcast, and then took care not to accidentally knock it over.
9. The flag was made by Sears, but NASA refused to acknowledge this because they didn’t want "another Tang."
10. The inner bladder of the space suits—the airtight liner that keeps the astronaut’s body under Earth-like pressure—and the ship’s computer’s ROM chips were handmade by teams of “little old ladies.”
Craig Nelson uncovered these facts in various NASA archives while researching his new book, Rocket Men (Viking; $28).
By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News
A metre-long section of the fossil shows the size of the hadrosaur's scales
A remarkably well-preserved fossil of a dinosaur has been analysed by scientists writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
They describe how the fossil's soft tissues were spared from decay by fine sediments that formed a mineral cast.
Tests have shown that the fossil still holds cell-like structures - but their constituent proteins have decayed.
The team says the cellular structure of the dinosaur's skin was similar to that of dinosaurs' modern-day descendants.
A member of the duck-billed hadrosaur family, the fossil was found in North Dakota in the US and has been nicknamed "Dakota".
Phil Manning of the University of Manchester and his collaborators have been employing a number of techniques to tease out as much information as they can from the fossil.
'Clean science'
They believe that the dinosaur fell into a watery grave, with little oxygen present to speed along the decay process. Meanwhile, very fine sediments reacted with the soft tissues of the animal, forming a kind of cement.
You slice through this and you're looking at the cell structure of dinosaur skin. That is absolutely gobsmacking
Phil Manning
University of Manchester
As a result, the 66 million-year-old fossil still retains some of the organic matter of the original dinosaur, mixed in with the minerals.
The team found that although the proteins that made up the hadrosaur's skin had degraded, the amino acid building blocks that once made up the proteins were still present.
"We're looking at the altered products of proteins from the skin of this animal, locked within the three dimensional mineralised skin," Dr Manning told BBC News.
"You're looking at cell-like structures; you slice through this and you're looking at the cell structure of dinosaur skin. That is absolutely gobsmacking."
A study of the cell structures show that, like modern-day crocodiles and birds, the skin was made up of two layers: a surface epidermis against a deeper dermis layer made up of dense connective tissue.
Although that finding is what might have been expected based on the presumed lineage of the modern animals, Dr Manning said it is "clean science".
"If you've got a hypothesis and you can't test it, it remains a hypothesis. Now we've had an exceptionally preserved dinosaur which has allowed us to ask that question and answer it for the first time," he said.
Microprobe studies showed tendon structure, preserved with silicon
Studies of the skin from across the fossil show that the skin was thinner toward the flanks, between the tail and the hips, where other hadrosaur fossils have shown bite marks. Dr Manning said that region may have been the dinosaur's "Achilles heel".
"If you understand the distribution of these structures in the skin of a prey animal, you can understand something about predator-prey interactions, and it might explain some of the hadrosaur fossils we see with these bite marks," he said.
Derek Briggs, a palaeontologist at Yale University and an expert in exceptionally preserved fossils, praised the work, saying that the important step was elucidating the mechanism by which such fossils could be preserved.
"One can't be certain, but I suspect that in many cases these kinds of skin impressions have gone unnoticed and people have gone after the skeleton, which is of course what you'd expect to be preserved," he told BBC News.
"This kind of discovery just demonstrates very clearly that soft tissue does survive, that the processes involved are unusual but not absolutely extraordinary - so there's no reason why this kind of material won't be discovered again."
Dr Manning said that studies on Dakota were continuing apace on a fossil he described as a pleasure to work with.
"Whereas most of us have to deal with disjointed sentences and occasional fractured words to reconstruct the volumes of the fossil record, you've got a whole chapter lying there and you can flick through the pages at your leisure," he said.
What lies beneath the surface of New York Harbor? For starters, a 350-foot steamship, 1,600 bars of silver, a freight train, and four-foot-long cement-eating worms.
Commercial diver Lenny Speregen and NYPD detective John Drzal. Illustrations by Mark Nerys
(Photo: Matt Hoyle)
The steady transformation of New York’s waterfront from wasteland to playground means more of us are spending time along the city’s edge. That can lead a person to wonder: What, exactly, is down there? Until recently, we had patchy knowledge of what lies beneath the surface of one of the world’s busiest harbors. What we did know came largely from random anecdotes, and depth soundings done the way Henry Hudson did them—by rope and lead sinker. This first GPS-era picture comes from the team at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who have methodically swept the lower Hudson with state-of-the-art sonar. LDEO’s Dr. Frank Nitsche stitched together their data, along with several other researchers’ work, into this elegant color-keyed map, which we’ve supplemented by talking with sea captains, historians, and the divers pictured above. There’s a whole other city down there. Here and on the following pages is your guide.
1. A New Main Stream
The Hudson’s main current has, for all of recorded history, clung to lower Manhattan’s edge, skimming along the West Side. Battery Park City, built in the seventies, juts out into that flow, and since then, the current has been cutting a new channel, out toward the center of the river. That current is scraping mud off the top of the Lincoln Tunnel where it never did before; the underwater traffic tubes have lost 25 percent of their soil coverage in some spots. If the tubes ever became exposed, they would be at risk for shifting, cracking, and terrorist threats. The Port Authority is studying solutions.
2. Teredos and Gribbles
Two kinds of hungry pests gnaw away at the pilings that hold up structures like the FDR Drive, the U.N. school on East 25th Street, and the Con Ed plant at 14th. Teredos, which start life looking like tiny clams, grow up to be worms “as big around as your thumb, and nearly four feet long, with little triangular teeth,” says commercial diver Lenny Speregen. Like underwater termites, they devour wood. And Limnoria tripunctata, a.k.a. “gribbles,” are bugs about the size of a pencil dot that look like tiny armadillos, and eat not only wood but also concrete. Speregen says he’s seen fifteen-inch-diameter columns that have been gnawed down, hourglass style, to three inches. The city has tried jacketing pilings in heavy plastic to keep the critters out, but it hasn’t worked well: Floating ice tears up the jackets in winter. “I never said this wasn’t a war,” says Speregen.
Illustration by Mark Nerys
3. A 10,500-Mile Gas Main
That groove on the riverbed is a pair of 24-inch gas mains, laid down in the fifties, that—believe it or not—constitute the business end of a network of pipes that runs all the way from the Gulf of Mexico. (Gas takes roughly a week to make the trip.) This pipeline and another at 134th Street supplied 367 billion cubic feet of gas last year—about half of what we used. Since 9/11, the points where it comes ashore have been patrolled daily.
4. A Pair of Piggybacked Shipwrecks
The LDEO researchers know of at least 300 wrecks in the lower Hudson below Troy, but they won’t tell you where most of them are. “They’re archaeological sites,” says William Ryan, one of the group’s senior scientists, and the state (which funds his research) has concerns about amateur treasure-hunters who can’t handle the currents. One notable wreck, which Ryan will place only “near Yonkers,” includes not one ship but two: A cabin cruiser sits atop the flattened remains of a much older vessel, probably a nineteenth-century sailing ship.
Illustration by Mark Nerys
5. A Freight Train
It was carrying passenger baggage one afternoon in 1865, and failed to stop at the Peekskill drawbridge, which was open. Two men were killed.
Illustration by Mark Nerys
6. Dead Bodies
When homicides and suicides end up in the river during winter, they often stay underwater until April, when decomposition speeds up, bloating them with gases. They then bob up, and currents have been known to drive them to nooks near the Seaport and Manhattan Bridge. “The worst one I ever saw was half in the mud, half out,” says John Drzal, a veteran of the NYPD scuba team. “The skin was peeling back.” He scuttles his fingers up his arm. “The critters were eating it.”
7. Surveillance Systems
The U.S. Coast Guard operates anti-swimmer sonar systems, which are moved around as they’re needed in the harbor. The gear pings signals out, and displays hits—indicating unidentified people or boats—on a video screen. The Coast Guard also does pier sweeps: “If someone puts something on a piling”—say, an electronic device—“we find it,” says USCG gunner’s mate Dave Boles. In 2007, near Liberty Island, he recalls, “someone was spotted in a black Zodiac at night, and we had to check it out.” The mystery boater was never identified.
8. State Secrets
A couple of years ago, “at Kings Point Maritime Academy,” says Boles, “someone dropped a coding device, a piece of secret equipment, and we had to recover it.” (Yes, the guy who dropped it was on our side, and yes, they got it back.)
Illustration by Mark Nerys
9. Stripped Cars
In the bad old high-crime days, a virtual fleet of auto carcasses ended up in the East River, near the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. One police diver has said that he would tell his partner, “Go to the Chevy, make a left, and if you come to the Dodge you’ve gone too far.” Most were carted away during a cleanup in the eighties, but a number are still down there. Speregen says that the last time he dived nearby, “to be honest, I thought I saw a cement mixer.”
10. Rebar, and a Lot of It
As the coastal beaches and mud flats became docks and roads, the water’s edge has been sharply defined with concrete. Where it cracks, the coast bristles with rusting steel reinforcement bars. Harbor divers have to watch themselves to avoid getting snagged or injured. Random junk tends to collect in and around it: old tires, garbage cans, busted-up bicycles.
Illustration by Mark Nerys
11. A Formica Dinette
“In the East River, at about 16th Street, there’s one of those old dining-room tables, the kind with a Formica top and the grooved metal bands around the edge,” says Speregen. “It’s standing upright, totally free and clear. It makes me want to go down there with teacups and set it up.”
12. Another Shipwreck
Unidentified, at 37 feet.
13. Hudson River Alligators
The quaint wooden pilings you see at the edge of Manhattan, the ones that trace the outlines of long-gone piers, are a hazard in the making. When a storm knocks one of them loose, the resultant floater—a “Hudson River alligator”—becomes a twenty-foot battering ram. Army Corps of Engineers patrols scoop them up, but they can’t spot every one. “You’ve seen a SeaStreak, those fast commuter ferries that serve Wall Street?” says Speregen. “One’s gonna get impaled one of these days.”
Illustration by Mark Nerys
14. A Piano and a Dead Giraffe
The Army Corps of Engineers, charged with the task of scooping up floating debris, once fished out a grand piano. Another time, they found the corpse of a giraffe that had fled a circus.
15. A 1968 Lincoln Continental
A group of commercial divers spotted the vehicle in 1978 off Coney Island, where it lay, belly-up, twenty feet off the end of the old Steeplechase Pier. “It was probably a polluter for the first twenty years—oil coming up and all that,” says Lenny Speregen. It’s rotting, but “the frame is still there, and the engine block. And the tires, believe it or not.”
16. A 350-foot Steamship
The Princess Anne, a steamship of the Old Dominion line, ran aground off Rockaway Point in February 1920, snapped in half, and sank. Since then, enough sand has shifted that the ship’s remains are mostly buried under the beach.
17. Rats
“One time, I was coming up under a pier,” says Speregen, “and I heard a crash and then something scratching on my helmet. And the guys were saying Go down! Go down! It was a wharf rat, about twelve inches long. It scuttled off. If you get a bite through your glove, you’ve gotta bring the rat up. Even though you’re gonna get the rabies shots either way, you want to know that the rat died.”
18. Less Water Than You Think
This whole bright-red section of the map is less than ten feet deep. Much of it is five feet deep or less—shallow enough to stand in. Yellow and green areas are deeper; dark blue is deepest.
19. The Abyss
The deepest spot in this part of the river—96 feet to the bottom—is found here, just south of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
20. 2,200 Tons of Silt
The harbor’s water is brownish, but not chiefly because of pollution. It’s brown because the Hudson carries an average of 2,200 tons of sediment per day from upstate (more in the autumn and spring, much less in the summer). For divers, all that silt obscures almost everything. “I always say, gimme a foot of viz”—visibility—“and that’s a great day,” says the NYPD’s John Drzal. “Even with a light, you can see just enough to gauge how much air you have left.” It’s a lot like going into a fire, adds Frederick Ill III, a diver from the FDNY’s Rescue Company No. 1. “Except that when you’re on the bottom, and you’ve gotta get out, you’re on your own.”
Illustration by Mark Nerys
21. Toilet Paper, and All That Goes With It
When there’s a rainstorm, far more water goes into our drainage system than sewage-treatment plants can handle. So the overflow pipes open wide, and all our wastewater—including the untreated effluvia of 8 million people—goes straight into the ocean. The day after a storm, the harbor is brown and thick with stirred-up silt that is shot through with human waste. Sometimes you can see shreds of toilet paper. When divers emerge from the harbor on those days, their suits have to be scrubbed down with bleach or kerosene before the men can strip them off.
22. Out-of-Date Channels
This groove in the harbor bottom is Ambrose Channel, which is the main shipping route into New York Harbor. It’s maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers at a depth of 45 feet. That’s not enough for the biggest new super-container ships, which require 60-foot clearance, and the Corps is finishing up a decadelong project to deepen the channels and tap those ships’ estimated $20 billion worth of commerce. Some of our dredged material contains a century’s worth of pollutants, from mercury to DDT—substances not a lot of places want. At one point, mud was being hauled to a dump in Utah, at the cost of $118 per cubic yard (plain old dumping is about $5 per). Some of it now goes to Texas; some becomes the sandy fill in concrete.
Illustration by Mark Nerys
23. 1,600 Bars of Silver, Weighing 100 Pounds Apiece
In 1903, a barge in the Arthur Kill—the oily, mucky arm of the harbor between Staten Island and New Jersey—capsized, spilling its cargo of silver ingots. It carried 7,678 bars; about 6,000 were recovered soon after. The rest are still down there. At today’s prices, they’re worth about $26 million. Every now and then, someone tries to find them. So far, no luck.
Illustration by Mark Nerys
24. Ice-cream Trucks
Reefs, because they are good places for edible plants and small animals, attract schools of fish. In 1969, in order to build a new artificial reef, the Department of Environmental Conservation dumped a bargeload of scrapped Good Humor trucks off Atlantic Beach, where they were eventually joined by (according to the DEC) “30,000 tires in three-tire units; 404 auto bodies; nine barges; the tug Fran S; a steel lifeboat; steel crane and boom; surplus armored vehicles; concrete slabs, pipes, culvert, decking and rubble; 530,000 cubic yards of rock from a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers excavation project.” The pile is now known as a good spot for lobstering, and for catching black sea bass, blackfish, porgy, bergall, hake, and cod.
25. Appetizers
There are millions of hard-shell clams on the harbor bottom, but pollutants and bacteria can make the shellfish dangerous to eat, especially raw. Some are okay for “relay,” a process whereby tainted shellfish are moved to a clean spot for a few weeks so they purge themselves and can be safely consumed. Most high-end suppliers and restaurants shy away from such clams, but because they’re much cheaper, some establishments inconspicuously serve them.
26. Oil That’s So Heavy It Sinks
Among the nastiness on the bottom of the Gowanus Canal is a layer of silt mixed with coal tar. Whereas lighter oils like gasoline float away, this goo, which looks like black motor oil, settles in. “When you’re raking along the bottom with your hands,” explains NYPD veteran diver John Drzal, “plumes of it still come up.”
Illustration by Mark Nerys
27. More Fish Than You Think
As the water has become cleaner, the shad runs have slowly returned to the Hudson. Striped bass are increasing in number, though their flesh contains PCB contaminants, and eating them regularly isn’t a good idea. A herring called the mossbunker swims in huge schools, and is caught by the ton, ground up, and fed to farmed salmon. There are four-foot-long stingrays down by the Rockaways and off Coney Island, and they’re hard to see when they’re flat against the bottom. A diver will be going about his business when he encounters a section of mud the size of a coffee table that suddenly—zooomp!—up and swims away.
Illustration by Mark Nerys
28. The Last Remnants of Dreamland
One of Coney Island’s great early theme parks, Dreamland existed for only a few years before it burned down in 1911. Nothing survives of it aboveground, but a group that Speregen co-founded, called Cultural Research Divers, found the lampposts underwater, melted and deformed from the fire.
Additional data from Dr. Roger Flood, of Stony Brook University, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Dan and Sara Bell of Dallas found a Jesus-shaped Cheeto while on a road trip last week. They have since nicknamed the figure "Cheesus." Related Slideshows
Many people have seen and heard about the likeness of Jesus turning up in unlikely places. Now, one North Texas family says they found Jesus in a cheese snack.
Dan Bell found his vision of Jesus last week at the gas station. "We were leaving town. I stopped by to fill up with gas and bought some snacks."
Inside a 99-cent bag of Cheetos brand cheese snacks, Dan and his wife Sara found something unique.
Sara recalls the discovery. "I was putting them in my hand and I had eaten most of the ones in my hand, and one was left lying there. And I said, 'Oh my gosh, look at this. It really looks like a person in a robe praying.'"
Dan looked over. "I said, 'Wow, it does look like a praying Jesus.'"
The couple nicknamed it "Cheesus."
"Cheesus" is about two inches tall. Despite missing a right arm, the Bells see a body, hair, robe and even a tiny face.
They say it is a reminder of their blessings from God; but primarily they think it's a funny Cheeto.
Various incarnations of "Cheesus" have shown up before; in Houston, Missouri and on the internet site YouTube.
The Bells' Cheeto ended up on the front page of the Preston Hollow newspaper. The big question, what to do with it now?
Dan says his first reaction was, "Let's put this on eBay. How much do you think we should ask for it? It could be 25 cents, could be 25 dollars. If it's only 25 cents, we're just going to eat it."
For now, they are keeping "Cheesus" in a plastic box.
Believe it or not, I know how to do this and have done it in bio lab many moons ago:
In Massachusetts, a young woman makes genetically modified E. coli in a closet she converted into a home lab. A part-time DJ in Berkeley, Calif., works in his attic to cultivate viruses extracted from sewage. In Seattle, a grad-school dropout wants to breed algae in a personal biology lab.
These hobbyists represent a growing strain of geekdom known as biohacking, in which do-it-yourselfers tinker with the building blocks of life in the comfort of their own homes. Some of them buy DNA online, then fiddle with it in hopes of curing diseases or finding new biofuels.
Katherine Aull
Katherine's Aull's closet laboratory in her apartment.
But are biohackers a threat to national security?
That was the question lurking behind a phone call that Katherine Aull got earlier this year. Ms. Aull, 23 years old, is designing a customized E. coli in the closet of her Cambridge, Mass., apartment, hoping to help with cancer research.
She's got a DNA "thermocycler" bought on eBay for $59, and an incubator made by combining a styrofoam box with a heating device meant for an iguana cage. A few months ago, she talked about her hobby on DIY Bio, a Web site frequented by biohackers, and her work was noted in New Scientist magazine.
That's when the phone rang. A man saying he was doing research for the U.S. government called with a few polite, pointed questions: How did she build that lab? Did she know other people creating new life forms at home?
The caller said the agency he represented is "used to thinking about rogue states and threats from that," recalls Ms. Aull, a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate.
The man on the other end of the line was Nils Gilman, a researcher with Monitor 360, a San Francisco company that provides "geo-strategic" research. Mr. Gilman declined to identify his client, saying only that it's a branch of the U.S. government involved in biosecurity. "I think they want to know, is this something we need to worry about?" he said -- particularly, could the biohackers' gadgets and methods, in the wrong hands, create dangerous pathogens?
Mr. Gilman's claim that he is working for the U.S. government couldn't be verified. A Department of Homeland Security official said "it does not appear that we contract with Monitor 360." A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to comment, and a Department of Defense official said he couldn't find any record of the department hiring Monitor 360 or its parent company, Monitor Group. But he said another arm of Monitor Group has done work for the department in recent years.
Try This at Home
Below, some of the experiments people are trying at home.
Glow, Melamine
In her dining room lab, Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop a bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine; read more.
Strawberries' DNA
This home experiment for extracting DNA from strawberries uses a zip-lock bag, a glass, detergent and some strawberries; watch video.
Lab in the Closet
Read more about Katherine Aull's experiment in her closet lab here.
Sharing Resources
DIYbio Group co-founder Mackenzie Cowell explains some of the initiatives, and the community lab the group is setting up in Cambridge, Mass.; watch video.
Previously, some researchers and law-enforcement officials have raised red flags. In a paper published in Nature Biotechnology in 2007, a group of scientists and FBI officials called for better oversight of so-called synthetic DNA, an ingredient widely used by professional biologists and hobbyists, saying it could theoretically lead to the creation of harmful viruses like Ebola or smallpox, since their genomes are available online. "Current government oversight of the DNA-synthesis industry falls short of addressing this unfortunate reality," the paper said.
Ms. Aull, who lives with a cat and three roommates who are "a little bit weirded out" by her experiments, says the worries are overblown. DIY biologists are trying to "build a slingshot," she says, "and there are people out there talking about, oh, no, what happens if they move on to nuclear weapons?"
Other biohackers argue that Mother Nature is more likely than any home hobbyist to create dangerous new pathogens. They cite the current A/H1N1 "swine flu" virus, which is a made-in-the-wild brew of human, bird and pig influenzas. Mackenzie Cowell, a founder of DIY Bio, says members aim to do good and are committed to working safely.
The movement has made big strides recently thanks to the commercial availability of synthetic DNA. This genetic material, normally found inside the nucleus of cells, can now easily be purchased online. That provides any amateur with the ingredients for constructing an organism.
Dan Heidel, a 32-year-old aerospace employee and former molecular biology student in Seattle, has rented a 300-square-foot space in an old warehouse to make genetically modified algae that he thinks might be useful in producing cheap biofuels. The space is stuffed with $20,000 worth of secondhand lab equipment he bought on eBay, including, he says, centrifuges, a liquid-nitrogen storage unit and "a bunch of stuff for water purification."
"It's frankly a run-down, piece-of-crap warehouse, half falling apart," says Mr. Heidel. But "the landlord basically stays out of everyone's hair as long as they don't burn the building down, which is really pretty ideal."
DNA
The easy availability of synthetic DNA is at the heart of some scientists' concerns. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, a government body, has recommended that companies selling DNA be required to screen all orders for signs that the buyers might have nefarious intent. Some biologists argue that anyone wishing to custom-make new organisms, even if it's just glow-in-the-dark bacteria (a popular trick among biohackers), should have to get a license first.
Currently, regulation of labs like these is murky. It's unclear what agency, if any, is responsible.
So far, most garage biologists playing around with synthetic DNA are simply adding a gene or two to an existing organism, a fairly standard scientific practice involving some test-tube mixing, and not something biosecurity experts are very worried about. But technology promises to allow the creation of entire organisms from scratch -- something academics are aiming to do in university labs -- and that has some experts worried.
A senior official in the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate says the bureau is working with academia and industry to raise awareness about biosecurity, "particularly in light of the expansion of affordable molecular biology equipment" and genetic databases.
George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, says anyone using synthetic DNA should have to have a license, including garage biologists. But he says he's not too concerned by the current home hobbyists. "The younger generation need something they feel they can do, in the same sense that my generation was inspired by NASA and home chemistry kits," he said.
Phil Holtzman, a college student and part-time DJ at dance parties in Berkeley, Calif., is growing viruses in his attic that he thinks could be useful in medicine someday. Using pipettes and other equipment borrowed from his community college, he extracts viruses called bacteriophage from sewage and grows them in petri dishes. Mr. Holtzman's goal: Breed them to survive the high temperatures of the human body, where he thinks they might be useful in killing bad bacteria.
He collects partly treated sewage water from a network of underground tunnels in the Berkeley area, jumping a chain-link fence to get to the source. But Mr. Holtzman says his roommates are "really uncomfortable" with him working with sewage water, so he's trying to find another source of bacteriophage.
Internet forums are full of chatter about the picture, taken by a panoramic NASA camera known as Spirit.
One alien-spotter speculated: "The skull is 15 cm with binocular eyes 5 cm apart. The cranial capacity is approximately 1400 cc.
"There appears to be a narrow pointed small mouth, so this creature most likely is a carnivore."
Another joked: "The coronal ridge shows ample structure to support the musculature of antennae, although none are visible in this view.
"The nose area is broad and blunted as you would expect to see in a cold and windy landscape. Is he decapitated or is he buried up to his neck?"
Previous images of a skull spotted on Mars in 2006 were believed to have been the result of tampering.
The famous Face on Mars, snapped by the Viking 1 spacecraft in 1976, which showed the shadowy likeness of a human face was late, was found to be a trick of the light when the area was re-photographed in 1998.
You slice through this and you're looking at the cell structure of dinosaur skin. That is absolutely gobsmacking 
![[Katherine's Aull's closet laboratory in her apartment.]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AP877_Biohac_DV_20090511174337.jpg)
Katherine Aull
![[DNA Strand]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/HC-GN724_DNA_St_BV_20090511180506.gif)
