The big bane of so-called advanced biofuels is that while they can be produced readily in the lab, building factories of meaningful size is extraordinarily difficult.
Craig Venter, who mapped the genome back in 1995, talked about his latest project: ushering in the "Jurassic Park" era of combinatorial genomics, where scientists will create life by typing out DNA. He predicts his team will be able to produce a single-cell eurkaryote--and eventually gasoline--in the lab from cellular building blocks within ten years.
As such, much of the lab itself will be virtual, but IBM is building a series of physical spaces within its research facilities to facilitate the collaboration the lab is meant to encourage.
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That is doubtless true, but there is a twist: the extra costs involve not just building and running the lab, but also defending it.
The VR Lab at Stanford is doing far more than building neat helmets or VR worlds.
Experiments like the one he'll perform later this month or Lifton's Shadow Lab could let outsiders track the movement of a building's inhabitants and follow their behavior.
The Southold Town Board last week considered zoning rules that would split the island into two parts: a research district, encompassing the current lab campus, and a sprawling conservation district where building would be all but prohibited.
But in a research building at the complex, where thousands of lab mice were kept, the story had a sadder ending.
Today, nearly 1, 500 students are educated in the school, which boasts an eight-building campus with 16 classrooms, a science lab and library.
The proposed new structure, known as Building 20, was going to be the biggest lab yet, comprising two hundred and fifty thousand square feet, on three floors.
When Jerrold Zacharias was developing the first atomic clock, working in Building 20, he removed two floors in his lab to make room for a three-story metal cylinder.
So Smolyaniov and Hung took the logical step of building a miniature simulation of the Big Bang in their lab.
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For starters, Luan and Zhu are tackling the world of biotech labs, building a benchtop robot that will help coordinate and automate lab tasks.
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The missions themselves are fun, and a mix of broad base-building exercises and more personal encounters with say, Kerrigan storming through a genetic research lab by herself.
Christopher Collins was on his way to work at a nearby microbiology lab when the bus dropped him off earlier than usual because the area around the Empire State Building was roped off.
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