Joe_NoOne (Slashdot reader #48,818) shares this update from Nature: The DNA of life on Earth naturally stores its information in just four key chemicals -- guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, commonly referred to as G, C, A and T, respectively. Now scientists have doubled this number of life's building blocks, creating for the first time a synthetic, eight-letter genetic language that seems to store and transcribe information just like natural DNA.

In a study published on 22 February in Science, a consortium of researchers led by Steven Benner, founder of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida, suggests that an expanded genetic alphabet could, in theory, also support life. "It's a real landmark," says Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. The study implies that there is nothing particularly "magic" or special about those four chemicals that evolved on Earth, says Romesberg. "That's a conceptual breakthrough," he adds... Benner says that the work shows that life could potentially be supported by DNA bases with different structures from the four that we know, which could be relevant in the search for signatures of life elsewhere in the Universe...

The researchers call the resulting eight-letter language 'hachimoji' after the Japanese words for 'eight' and 'letter'. The additional bases are each similar in shape to one of the natural four, but have variations in their bonding patterns. The researchers then conducted a series of experiments that showed that their synthetic sequences shares properties with natural DNA that are essential for supporting life... Benner's group previously showed that strands of DNA that included Z and P were better at binding to cancer cells than sequences with just the standard four bases. And Benner has set up a company which commercialises synthetic DNA for use in medical diagnostics.

"SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, its first spacecraft designed to carry humans, took flight for the first time Saturday," reports CNN.

Slashdot reader Applehu Akbar calls it "a perfect launch," noting the test flight is hauling a sensor-loaded dummy named "Ripley" -- plus a 400-pound cargo of essentials for the International Space Station. Crew Dragon will dock on Sunday, CNN reports, then return to earth five days later. "SpaceX's capsule is now en route to the International Space Station, which flies about 254 miles above Earth at tremendous speeds: about 10 times faster than a bullet."
The successful launch puts SpaceX one step closer to a historic landmark: Crew Dragon could be the first commercially built spacecraft to carry NASA astronauts to orbit. And Crew Dragon -- along with a capsule called Starliner built by Boeing -- could end the United States' decade-long reliance on Russia for human spaceflight...

This marks the first and only demo mission that Crew Dragon will fly without humans on board. If all goes well, the capsule design will undergo a few more reviews and safety checks, and it could be ready to fly two NASA astronauts to the space station in July, based on the space agency's current timeline.
Space.com reports that the reusable rocket also landed safely back on earth about 10 minutes after the liftoff, "acing a touchdown on the SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You, which was stationed off the Florida coast."

the_newsbeagle writes: In newborn intensive care units (NICUs) today, tiny fragile babies lie in incubators, wired to a variety of monitors that track their vital signs. This mess of wires makes it complicated for nurses to pick up the babies for routine tasks like diaper changes, and makes it hard for new parents to pick up their infants for cuddling. Skin-to-skin contact between parents and infants has been proven not only to help with bonding, but also to have a host of medical benefits for the infants, so the wires that tether babies to their beds are a real problem. At Northwestern University, an electrical engineer who works on flexible, stretchable electronics teamed up with a pediatric dermatologist to invent a solution. They devised a system of stick-on wireless biosensors (with a gentle adhesive that's safe even for thin preemie skin) that actually provide more information than today's standard setup. The system "is composed of two sensors, one that sticks to the chest to record electrocardiograms (providing heart rate), another that sticks to the foot to record photoplethysmograms (measuring blood oxygenation) and skin temperature," reports IEEE Spectrum. "The foot sensor required the engineering team to create software that could compensate for movement artifacts in the data. Time-syncing these two sensors also provides a continuous measurement of blood pressure; the system knows when the heart pumps out a pulse of blood and when it arrives at the foot, and that time measurement correlates well with blood pressure."

"The sensors use near-field communication (NFC) to connect to a module that can be attached to the baby's bed, and which both receives the data and sends wireless power to the sensors," the report adds. "That module transmits the data via bluetooth to a mobile phone or tablet."

The Economist tells the story of how French chemist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier came to publish the first putatively comprehensive list of chemical elements -- substances incapable of being broken down by chemical reactions into other substances -- known today as the periodic table. It was Lavoisier and his wife Marie-Anne who pioneered the technique of measuring quantitatively what went into and came out of a chemical reaction, as a way of getting to the heart of what such a reaction really is. "Where the story of the periodic table of the elements really starts is debatable," reports The Economist, "but Lavoisier's laboratory is as good a place as any to begin..." Here's an excerpt from the report: Lavoisier's list of elements, published in 1789, five years before his execution, had 33 entries. Of those, 23 -- a fifth of the total now recognized -- have stood the test of time. Some, like gold, iron and sulphur, had been known since ancient days. Others, like manganese, molybdenum and tungsten, were recent discoveries. What the list did not have was a structure. It was, avant la lettre, a stamp collection. But the album was missing.

Creating that album, filling it and understanding why it is the way it is took a century and a half. It is now, though, a familiar feature of every high-school science laboratory. Its rows and columns of rectangles, each containing a one- or two-letter abbreviation of the name of an element, together with its sequential atomic number, represent an order and underlying structure to the universe that would have astonished Lavoisier. It is little exaggeration to say that almost everything in modern science is connected, usually at only one or two removes, to the periodic table.