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Shell programing

Research. Science Documentary Films. The Scale of the Universe 2. Bio-Hackers, Get Ready. When I speak to technical founders, they often look back with fondness to days of tinkering with a Commodore 64 or Hypercard.

Bio-Hackers, Get Ready

But perhaps tomorrow’s founders will experiment with a very different kind of code — the genetic code that underlies how everything from one-celled organisms to humans develop and behave. A pair of companies in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood and Tel Aviv are positioning themselves as the “Wintel” of the bio-hacking era. One company, called Genome Compiler, builds software for designing synthetic life forms, while the other, Cambrian Genomics, is experimenting with ways to cheaply laser print DNA. 'Time Crystals' Could Upend Physicists' Theory of Time. Physicists plan to create a “time crystal” — a theoretical object that moves in a repeating pattern without using energy — inside a device called an ion trap.

'Time Crystals' Could Upend Physicists' Theory of Time

Image: Hartmut Häffner In February 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek decided to go public with a strange and, he worried, somewhat embarrassing idea. Impossible as it seemed, Wilczek had developed an apparent proof of “time crystals” — physical structures that move in a repeating pattern, like minute hands rounding clocks, without expending energy or ever winding down. Unlike clocks or any other known objects, time crystals derive their movement not from stored energy but from a break in the symmetry of time, enabling a special form of perpetual motion.