NASA’s Pluto probe is heading for the Kuiper belt

It’s been over a month since the New Horizons spacecraft flew as near as possible to Pluto and took the closest photos of the dwarf planet we’ve ever seen. Now, NASA has decided on its next destination: a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) called 2014 MU69. Since the probe was always meant to go beyond the once-ninth planet from the start, it was loaded with more fuel than needed and equipped with a communications system that works even in the Kuiper region. However, it still took a while for NASA to find an object near enough to explore. It was only when the Hubble telescope discovered KBOs in the probe’s flight path in 2014 that the agency found the perfect target.

2014 MU69, now known as “Potential Target 1” or PT 1, has around one percent the mass of Pluto and is under 30 miles across. Scientists believe small KBOs like the PT1 are similar to the building blocks that created the dwarf planet. And, since the sun barely reaches that region, it’s a well-preserved, frozen sample of the outer solar system from the time of its birth around 4.6 billion years ago.

By the way, it’s still called a “potential” target, because the New Horizons team still has to turn in a proposal and get it approved by 2016. Nevertheless, the spacecraft will have to perform a series of maneuvers in October and November to make sure it’s not wasting fuel and to get it ready for the journey. If the proposal gets approved, New Horizons will take off for the Kuiper belt and reach the object by January 1st, 2019.

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NASA

Tags: nasa, newhorizons, space

Researchers make a living circuit out of bacteria

Under the right circumstances, bacteria can be quite cooperative — both with each other and the organism they’re living in. A research team at Rice University has managed to exploit that natural congeniality to, for the first time, create a biological circuit that works much like a conventional computer chip. But the goal of the researchers’ work isn’t to build better biocomputers, it’s to help them more fully understand how these organisms interact within our guts.

“They naturally form a large consortium,” Rice synthetic biologist Matthew Bennett said in a statement. “One thought is that when we engineer bacteria to be placed into guts, they should also be part of a consortium. Working together allows them to effect more change than if they worked in isolation.” To that end, the team’s proof-of-concept model employs two species of genetically engineered bacteria (both variants of the common E. Coli) that that regulate each other’s production of a specific protein via intercellular signaling pathways.

Rice University’s cooperative bacterial colonies – Image Credit: Rice University

Specifically, one population, the “activators”, was tasked with increasing the expression of one set of genes while the others, the “repressors,” acted to down-regulate other genes. Taken together, the circuit generated rhythmic gene transcription oscillations across the entire population. This coordination allows each species to produce the proteins more efficiently than if they did so individually. In turn, that could lead to greater bacterial biofuel production yields. “The main push in synthetic biology has been to engineer single cells,” Bennett said. “But now we’re moving toward multicellular systems. We want cells to coordinate their behaviors in order to elicit a populational response, just the way our bodies do.”

Eventually, these systems could even help us regulate our own internal chemistries. “One idea is to create a yogurt using engineered bacteria,” Bennett continued. “The patient eats it and the physician controls the bacteria through the patient’s diet. Certain combinations of molecules in your food can turn systems within the synthetic bacteria on and off, and then these systems can communicate with each other to effect change within your gut.” The team recently published their findings in the journal Science.

[Image Credit: Getty Images]

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Rice University, Science

Tags: bacteria, biology, bionics, E. Coli, livingcircuit, riceuniversity