Welcome to the Friday edition of your semi-daily open thread. I’ve been out of the loop this week since I was attending a conference. All I know is that there’s a thread that just won’t die. Anyway, we welcome your thoughts and discussion right here. Type away!
Here’s something exciting from the world of science: the first artificially-produced living organism:
A chemically synthesised chromosome has for the first time been transplanted into a cell to produce a synthetic bacterium. The advance provides a basis for making organisms designed from scratch and represents a major step towards applications in biofuels and chemical synthesis through synthetic biology.
The man-made microbe is the work of a team led by Dan Gibson and genome sequencing pioneer Craig Venter, at Venter’s institutes in Rockville, Maryland and San Diego, California, US. Besides a few genetic ‘watermarks’ encoded by the team, its genome largely duplicates that of a goat parasite called Mycoplasma mycoides. Grown in a dish, the synthetic version looks much like the original and, like its natural counterparts, is capable of self-replicating.
Hopefully soon they’ll produce a bacteria that eats carbon dioxide and poops diamonds. I think we have a way to go before we see that.
I’m going to talk about Sue Lowden for the third day in a row because it looks like in a few weeks we won’t have her to kick around anymore. Her once-commanding poll lead has disappeared.
The Chicken/Barter story hit on April 12th. The two polls prior to that date — from mid-February and early April — had Lowden at 47% and 45% of the vote, respectively, in the coming GOP primary.
So that’s the pre-barter baseline — mid-40s.
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Two more polls came out in late April — those had Lowden down to 41% and 38%. Then a poll came out on May 11th that had her at 30%. And the most recent poll, completed four days ago, has her down to 26%. In other words, about a 20 point drop in a month.
The new leader in the polls in Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle. I wonder if Angle will be as much fun as Rand Paul.