Spark

the night continues on, although something is different

silently, projectiles make their way across the dark stage

suddenly the spectrum erupts with a satisfying crack

the dull canvas of the world now is enveloped by vibrant cascades of color

suddenly, the neon performance turns to a silence, soon devoured by applause

fire and spirit consume the hour

Keys- The Pianist

The pianist walks towards his instrument, his mind abuzz; notes tumbling alongside his thoughts. Then, finally, he settles upon his perch. The pianist begins after one, subtle cough. His hands run on the smooth black and white staircase of the piano. Marvelously, a tune erupts. It caresses the audience’s ears with the unmatchable beauty of sound. The hands of the pianist continue their movement, sometimes jumping angrily and sometimes making small graceful hops on the glistening staircase of keys. The pianist’s feet come down on the golden pedals as if to add emphasis to the unspoken words of the music.
Then, as the beat slows and the music is almost finished, notes gloriously pronounce the end. The pianist stands and bows.

D-day - The Hands of War

The boat stopped, our stomachs churned, just like the waves in front of us

We ran, our legs beneath the tide, our guns clutched. We ran, our prayers hung in mid sentence. We ran.

They shot, their guns rattled, spewing empty cartridges like an active volcano. They shot, their shells thumping flinging dirt and blood from the ground. They shot.

We prayed knowing deep in our hearts that God was now out of the question- “Will we live?” We prayed even though we knew God could not hear us in this bloody racket. We prayed.

They tore our army as if we were worthless papers. They tore our flesh and will from our bodies with their never-ending cascade of metal. They tore.

We ran and prayed, knowing that we had been torn from the hands of hope and had been put into new hands.

We had run into the ruthless, unforgiving hands of war.

Germany, Post World War II

Alfred Müller sat on his porch motionless. Motionless, but not dead. He was an old man, staring lifelessly into the night sky. He seemed at peace. Alfred had a problem. It was not a common dilemma, but was something else. He constantly remembered. Again and again painful memories erupted from his brain. Memories of the war, memories of his family. The memories were invincible forces, triggered by random events that could occur at any time. Maybe it was the fact that he had survived the war and his son hadn’t that haunted him. His son had been recruited at age fourteen by Nazis with Iron Crosses gleaming on their lapels, grasping equally gleaming weapons almost as big as themselves. For a reason unknown, a mist always covered parts of his memories. As crickets rang the alarm to announce it was night, a cool breeze blew over the small town.

Alfred rose to the sound of laughter and footsteps. He silently peered out of his window. His son stood outside. Not an adolescent as Alfred had last seen him but a young man! Tears fell like rain from Müller’s eyes. He quickly descended from the stairs and looked outside. His son, his dear son…was gone. A snowflake in the sun. A few minutes passed and Alfred returned to his home. “Why?” he asked quietly to himself in his mother tongue of German. He poured himself a cold cup of tea and slammed his fist on the table. “Why?!” he repeated, this time more loudly. “My son was there!” he said, tears now flowing freely down his wrinkled cheeks. Müller again went through his door and outside. He sat on his chair and held his cup to his lips with frail, trembling hands. As a man walked by Alfred asked him, “My son,” he stopped to clear his throat, “Rudolfo. Have you seen…him?”

“Rudolfo? I…Uh… Shouldn’t you know? Rudolfo…has been gone for years.” the man responded slowly. Alfred looked at the man with blood hound eyes and responded meekly, “No. I do not know. Not any more.” Looking slightly sad for Alfred, the man walked away slowly, humming a quiet tune.

Thunder shook the ground and rain tested the roof’s strength. Alfred was haunted by another memory. He couldn’t hold them back, the memories of the planes. The memories of bombs cascading from the sky erupted into Müller’s brain. Alfred shut the blinds and blew out the candle on the table. “Rudolfo! Come!” he yelled. “Come! The bombs!” Confused, Alfred fell to his knees on the scratched wooden floor. He couldn’t stop the memories; they came flooding in. He couldn’t stop the sound of planes overhead and the sound of bombs destroying innocent lives. “Rudolfo!” he screamed.

Alfred woke to the sound of light rain tapping on his roof. He unclenched his hand and staggered outside. For no reason, his heart rate doubled, then stopped. He stumbled into his chair. Alfred Müller sat on his porch motionless. Motionless. He stared lifelessly into the morning clouds. He seemed at peace. Birds rang the alarm to announce it was morning.

Alfred Müller had found his solution.

What yesterday was fiction today manifests truly.

A rather poetic way of putting it, but I believe that the momentous occasion this article pertains to deserves it. This is a moment that future historians and students will look back on. Whether their rearward glances will contain regret or admiration, only time will tell. But for now, we’ve got this to chew on:

Man has become God.

Or at least a certain group of men have. On May 20, Craig Venter and a team of top scientists made an announcement: the world’s first synthetic life form – a bacterium with a genome that is completely man made – has been created. The cell, dubbed Mycoplasma laboratorium, has been worked on by Venter’s crew for almost fifteen years, and it’s finally here. The cell, which takes physical components from a preexisting cell, but has a genome that is completely man made, has already replicated itself over a billion times.

Before this achievement, the longest synthesized sequence numbered about 30,000 pairs. The first chromosome attempted by his crew, that of the Mycoplasma genitalium genus, the smallest naturally occurring genome: 580,000 pairs. The final product: over 1,000,000 base pairs.

And that’s still a comparatively tiny genome. Damn, nature, you scary.

So how did they do it?

Venter’s group started with a very basic genome, that of the Mycoplasma genome. They began to eliminate genes, figuring out which ones were absolutely necessary to life. And after determining the Minimal Genome, they began to create the world’s first man-made functional DNA sequence. The team used machines that produced DNA sequences up to 80 nucleotides long, but seeing as they eventually produced a genome 1,000,000 nucleotides long, you can see why this process took upwards of a decade. Venter explains the attitude his team took towards the process: “When we look at life forms, we see them as fixed entities. But they change from second to second. And life is basically a software process; our genetic code is our software, and our cells are dynamically, constantly, reading that code.” In a way, what Venter’s group did was change the operating system of the cell when they replaced its natural DNA with their own hand-crafted stuff.

And speaking of hand-crafted, this man-made genome is built to order. When working with such small bacteria, contamination is a big issue; someone sneezes in the lab, and you’ve got ten thousand new lifeforms, ready to be misidentified as your man-made masterpiece. So the crew over at Venter’s included a couple of “easter eggs”, including a functional html website in code, names, and even philosophical quotes in the code. These “watermarks,” as Venter calls them, make misidentification almost impossible.

But what’s really astounding is what this project means to us. The institute plans to use this achievement in producing biofuels, food on a larger scale, and even vaccines and medicines, much like E. Coli is altered to produce insulin and human growth hormone. These achievements have prevented disease and death in thousands suffering from diabetes or growth instability patterns. Since the genome for this kind of organism is completely artificial, it would be much simpler to simply include DNA that produces these kinds of necessities instead of having to inject it into plasmids and hoping that bacteria incorporate it when they undergo cell division. Geneticist Vyacheslav Tarantul said that this kind of cell would probably be more efficient than current bacteria used to do these kind of jobs, as it would have a genome geared to do only one thing. In this way, the man-made genome may prove to be a saving grace for mankind.

Deoxyribose is a sugar!

Unfortunately, Mycoplasma lboratorium may have negative effects as well. Among these are claims that because it is now possible to create completely synthetic genomes, governments and terrorists may create biological weapons, like cells that produce hydrogen cyanide or even sarin. The National Farmers Union also say that the cell may have a negative impact on the food industry, and that “the synthetic life form poses a risk to humankind and the environment.”

For now, though, the cell only subsists on extremely rich substances where it is grown, and since it hasn’t been subject to millions of years of evolution and can only infect goats, it poses no real threat to mankind as of yet. Critics say, however, that future man-made genomes can easily be tweaked to replicate behavior of parasites and infectious bacteria.

Deadly disease or answer to pleas, the changes brought about by Venter’s team will be monumental. According to Venter, creating single celled eukaryotes is very viable, as chromosomes can be transferred “across kingdoms”, but creating life on the scale of animals, even insects, will not happen within his lifetime. Sorry to all of you Jurassic Park fans out there, but dinosaurs are out of the question. As for the rest, we’ll just have to see.

This was President Obama’s take on the crisis which has dominated news billboards for the past week and may be dominating the coast in a couple of days.

It all started on April 20, when a massive explosion in the Gulf of Mexico destroyed an oil rig owned by British Petroleum, killing eleven workers and starting one of the worst oil slicks in history. The pipe, ruptured in three places, began to pour out huge amounts of crude oil into the Gulf, and, here we are. The slick is now 30 miles long, and up to 210,000 gallons are pouring out each day.

Oil Slick!!

Oil is slowly accumulating, and will soon reach the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and possibly even Florida. It is estimated that these huge amounts of crude oil will completely devastate wildlife and sealife, hurting the economy in a deadly barrage of ways:

-Waste of huge amounts of oil
-Need for huge amounts of money spent to fix up the hole
-Death of sea life and wildlife raising prices of food
-Lack of tourism along the coast
-Possible need of evacuation or further water filtration
-Complete screwage of the American People

Not only this, but the ecology of the area is in no fine shape either; scientists estimate that local fish and birds will be devastated more than during the ’89 Valdez spill, and some of the hundreds of species on the Gulf Coast may even go extinct.

If that weren’t bad enough, scientists are also considering the possibility of a total wellhead failure, in which case the amount of oil spilled per day could hit 100,000 barrels, or 4.2 Million Gallons. They’re also saying that it might take up to 90 days to fix this problem
So, if someone up there is really ticked off, we could be looking at 378,000,000 gallons of oil spilled before this is fixed. That’s 1,512,000,000 quarts. That’s 6,048,000,000 cups. That’s a LOT.

I’m thinking the man at the White House has hit the nail right on the head.

It’s been nice.

Watermelon Man (Herbie Hancock)

Caravan (Duke Ellington)