Religious right fights corporate right in patent stoush

Religious right fights corporate right in patent stoush

Good news of sorts on the patent front. After decades of expansive interpretations of patent law to include patents on pretty much anything, including life, knowledge and ideas; after decades of governments supporting expansion of intellectual property protections for...
Glow in the dark synbio plants

Glow in the dark synbio plants

In April 2013, a group of ‘bio-hackers’ from California used the social media fund-raising website Kickstarter to raise almost half a million dollars to commercialise a synthetic biology plant that glows in the dark. In exchange for seed funding the ‘glowing plant...
Spraying sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere

Spraying sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere

Human inaction on climate change has led to some crazy ideas and suggestions − most notably geoengineering − the large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract climate change. Geoengineering ideas include seeding blooms of ocean algae with iron...
Carbon nanotubes in agriculture

Carbon nanotubes in agriculture

Scientists have discovered that carbon nanotubes can boost plant growth if they are treated to be more soluble and are absorbed by plants. One research group has even produced ‘bionic plants’ by inserting carbon nanotubes into plant chloroplasts, suggesting that this...