Author: Ben Michaels

According to a new book by Ben Mezrich, Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive one of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures,  well known Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel invested. $100,000 in an effort to resurrect the woolly mammoth.  The book itself chronicles efforts by Harvard University genomics expert George Church to genetically modify Asian elephant cells with DNA retrieved from frozen mammoths.   The goal is the modified Asian elephants will have Woolly Mammoth babies.  According to the book, progress has been limited to getting mammoth fur to grow on the side of a mouse grafted with some...

  An article entitled “A general strategy to synthesize chemically and topologically anisotropic Janus particles” was recently published in the journal Science Advances.  Researchers from the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently developed a general emulsion interfacial polymerization approach to synthesizing a large variety of Janus particles with controllable topological and chemical anisotropy.   With this technique the researchers produced a particle nucleus inside oil droplets and the particle nucleus naturally moves toward the oil/water interface.  The  general emulsion interfacial polymerization approach, overcomes the limitation of surface tension.  Surface tension usually leads to the...