Month: May 2017

Enlarge (credit: Georges Méliès)

To ensure the long-term survival of humankind, we might as well shoot for the Moon.

In 2013, Japanese researchers did just that by launching freeze-dried mouse sperm into space. The goal was to see if mammalian swimmers can maintain their spunk amid harsh cosmic radiation—which they’ll undoubtedly have to endure for humans to thrive in the coming space age. The result: after nine months on the International Space Station (ISS), sperm did show signs of DNA damage, but they were still able to produce healthy, fertile offspring.

This is good news, the authors explain in PNAS. “In the future, humans likely will live on large-scale space stations or in other space habitats for several years or even over many generations,” they write. To maintain genetic diversity in small colonies, treat infertility, and breed domestic animals in our future interstellar homes, preserved sperm and eggs may be critical.

Enlarge / A male C. elegans, with the pharynx in the end that’s on the left. (credit: University of Wisconsin)

Remember that part in Casino Royale when Bond sips his martini, realizes he has been poisoned, then rushes out to his Aston Martin to inject himself with the antidote that Q thoughtfully stashed beforehand? This is exactly like that. Except, instead of Daniel Craig (*sigh*), it’s with worm larvae.

The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans is a favorite laboratory model organism of geneticists and developmental biologists, mainly because it is simple, transparent, and easy to grow in bulk. Most worm researchers use the standard N2 strain, typically called the Bristol strain because it was isolated from mushroom compost in Bristol, England, in 1951.

Having a common reference strain like this is undoubtedly useful for labs spread across the world. But, like all species, C. elegans harbors genetic variability. Studies of wild strains can yield insights that would be missed if we assumed that N2 represented the entirety of worm genetics.

The Amiga computer was a legend in its time. Back when the Macintosh had only a monochrome 9-inch screen, and the PC managed just four colors and monotone beeps, the Amiga boasted a 32-bit graphical operating system in full color with stereo-sampled sound and preemptive multitasking. It was like a machine from the future. But the Amiga’s parent company, Commodore, suffered from terminal mismanagement and folded in 1994, just as PCs and Macintoshes were catching up technologically. The platform, like many others before it, seemed to be at an end.

So when a brand new Amiga computer arrived at my doorstep in 2017, you can imagine it was quite a surprise. Accordingly, the Amiga X5000 is a curious beast. In some respects, it's more closely related to its predecessors than either modern PCs or Macintoshes. Yet this is a fully current machine capable of taking on modern workloads. How such a device came to be is a fascinating story, but that's not our goal today—let’s dive into what the experience of using the X5000 is like.

The X5000 was developed by A-EON, a company formed by Trevor Dickinson in 2009 to develop new PowerPC-based Amiga computers. It is powered by a custom PowerPC motherboard, supporting a dual-core Freescale CPU at various clock speeds up to 2.5GHz. The Amiga has a long history of PowerPC support, starting with add-on accelerator cards released in 1997 using the old Motorola 603 and 604 chips. And since the release of Amiga OS 4.0 in 2007, the operating system itself was recompiled to be PowerPC-native, and many Amiga applications have been rewritten to support this architecture.