Wildlife Conservation Society

The promise and peril of synthetic biology for wildlife conservation and biodiversity will be the subject of an international conference in England this month.

Conservationists say it's high time to consider whether synthetic biology will solve some of the huge problems that beset endangered species, or bring new problems. It just might do both.

"Synthetic biology brings with it a powerful attraction, causing biology to veer towards engineering with its inherent approach of human problem solving," three experts on biodiversity and conservation say in this week's issue of PLOS Biology. "It may prove to be a cure for certain wicked problems. But we suggest that now is the time to consider whether synthetic biology may be a wicked solution, creating problems of its own, some of which may be undesirable or even unacceptable in the area of biodiversity conservation."

The PLOS Biology essay was written by Kent Redford of Archipelago Consulting, William Adams of the University of Cambridge, and Georgina Mace of University College London's Center for Biodiversity and Environment Research. The three conservationists are the organizers of a conference on synthetic biology, due to take place next week in Cambridge, England.

What is synthetic biology?
Synthetic biology takes advantage of genetic engineering to tweak existing organisms for new purposes — for example, strains of E. coli bacteria that live on coffee, or produce better biofuels.

More recently, researchers have talked about reshaping the genome of one species so that it reflects the traits of a closely related extinct or disappearing species — such as the American chestnut, the passenger pigeon, the Tasmanian thylacine or the Siberian woolly mammoth. Last month, that kind of de-extinction was discussed during a widely watched conference in Washington.

This month's conference takes a closer look at the scientific and ethical issues relating to conservation. Would de-extinction truly bring back the species that were wiped out, or will they actually be novel species, even alien species? How will revived species interact with the other species that have taken their place? Will we actually value the "natural" world less, because we assume de-extinction can bring back our favorites? What happens if synthetic life evolves in unforeseen ways? What's the implication of having patented life forms in the wild?

"A serious need exists for wider discussion of the relationship between synthetic biology and biodiversity conservation, and what choices society can and should make," the three experts say. But that poses a huge challenge, because many people haven't even heard of synthetic biology yet.

Plateau in awareness
The latest in a series of surveys conducted for the Synthetic Biology Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars suggests that public awareness about the issue is plateauing. Forty-five percent of those surveyed said that they had heard nothing at all about synthetic biology, which is about the same level of non-awareness found during the center's previous survey in 2010.

Lack of public awareness makes it difficult to conduct a wide-ranging debate over a technology's pros and cons, said Eleonore Pauwels, a research associate at the Wilson Center. "It is still at the stage of hype, and promises, and new funding coming in," she told NBC News. "When you don't have a lot of information, you only have the buzz or the hype."

The survey also found that 61 percent supported continuing research in synthetic biology, while 34 percent wanted such research banned until its implications and risks were better understood. "The more information you give to people, the more questions they're going to ask, and the debate becomes more complex," Pauwels said.

The situation is likely to change once synthetic-biology applications actually start hitting the market. Among the first applications are methods to produce flavors such as vanilla and saffron using genetically modified microbes. Another high-profile example is a project that uses genetically engineered yeast to produce artemisinic acid, the key ingredient for an anti-malaria drug.

"If they get the antimalarial drug out of clinical trial soon, it's going to refuel the interest in synthetic biology as a new way of manufacturing drugs," Pauwels said.

What about manufacturing mammoths? Is synthetic biology a technology whose time has come? Or should experiments on the bleeding edge of genetic engineering be put on hold for a while, as they were in the 1970s? Feel free to cast your vote in our unscientific survey, and voice your opinion in the comment space below.

More about synthetic biology:

• How synthetic biology will change us
• What to do about synthetic life?
• Cosmic Log archive on synthetic biology

The Wilson Center's 2013 nationwide telephone survey on awareness and impressions of synthetic biology was conducted by Hart Research Associates from Jan. 10 to 14. Hart Research surveyed 804 adults, including 243 who use only a cell phone. At the 95 percent confidence level, the data's margin of error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The ASSET Program / Cornell

An image produced by a scanning electron microscope shows two Tetrahymena cells in the act of mating.

Biologists have known for decades that there are up to seven sexes of the single-celled organism known as Tetrahymena thermophila — but they didn't know exactly how those different sexes "did it." Until now.

When it's time for Tetrahymena to mate, two organisms of different mating types recognize each other and get together to swap DNA. The results of the hookup are totally random. One critter may be mating type No. 1, the other may be mating type No. 3, and the two resulting progeny may turn out to be, um, mating type No. 6. How do they do that?

In the journal PLOS Biology, researchers report that the hooked-up organisms almost literally roll the genetic dice to determine what the sex of the progeny will be.

The researchers say the key to Tetrahymena's sexual proclivities lies in its double genome: Every cell has a "somatic" genome that manages its everyday life, plus a "germline" genome that serves a function similar to that of the ovaries or testes in humans. The germline genome contains incomplete gene pairs for each of six or seven sexes, depending on the cell line. (In this case, the cells came in six sexual flavors.)

Random sex
When two microbes hook up, the progeny's newly created somatic genome latches onto one of those incomplete gene pairs, producing one complete sex-specific gene pair. The other sexy bits from the germline genome are wiped out. The random rearrangement leaves the resulting cells with exactly one complete sex-specific gene pair — and one mating type.

"It's completely random, as if they had a roulette wheel with six numbers, and wherever the marble ends up is what they get," senior researcher Eduardo Orias, a research professor emeritus at the University of California at Santa Barbara, explained in a news release. "By chance they may have the same mating type as the parents — but it's only by chance. It's a fascinating system."

Most of the time, Tetrahymena reproduces asexually, simply by having a parent cell divide into two progeny cells. But the organisms tend to pair up sexually when food is scarce, apparently as part of an evolutionary mechanism that takes advantage of genetic diversity. Sex-specific proteins on the surface of the cells serve as a signal that mating is likely to result in more diverse progeny. That's how two cells of the same mating type avoid pairing up with each other.

This type of mating process doesn't by itself increase the Tetrahymena population: Two cells hook up, and after recombining DNA, two cells separate again. "This is sex without reproduction," Orias said during a telephone interview. After mating, the recombined genetic information is passed down from parents to progeny through asexual reproduction — until it's time for the next hookup.

What it means for humans
Although the process sounds totally alien to us two-sex types, the lessons from Tetrahymena could have implications for human health.

"Tetrahymena has about as many genes as the human genome," Orias said in the news release. "For thousands of those genes, you can recognize the sequence similarity to corresponding genes in the human genome with the same biological function. That's what makes it a valuable organism to investigate important biological questions."

For example, Tetrahymena may reveal new tricks relating to the methods that cells use to recognize friend vs. foe. That could have implications for studying human immune response. Also, the way that the organisms rearrange their DNA may point to new strategies for fighting cancer, which often results from the faulty rearrangement of genetic material.

"The hope is that at some point, there may be useful applications for medicine," Orias told NBC News.

More about microbial marvels:

• No sex for 40 million years? No problem!
• Single-celled giant upends early evolution
• Strange organism has unique roots in tree of life

In addition to Orias, the authors of "Selecting One of Several Mating Types Through Gene Segment Joining and Deletion in Tetrahymena Thermophila" include Marcella D. Cervantes, Eileen P. Hamilton, Jie Xiong, Michael J. Lawson, Dongxia Yuan, Michalis Hadjitomas and Wei Miao.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Dognition

Duke neuroscientist Brian Hare tests a dog's cognition using a simple set of toys.

Is your dog an Einstein or a Charmer? For $60 (woof!!), a new business venture called Dognition will help you put your pooch through a series of fun playtime activities to find out how your dog thinks. The metrics generated by those experiments … I mean, fun playtime activities … are being fed into a research project that could for the first time determine how the cognitive traits of various breeds differ.

"Dognition.com is ultimately about people's dogs, and finding out about your dog," Duke University neuroscientist Brian Hare, one of the venture's co-founders, told NBC News. "That's what you're paying for. I buy fancy dog food for my dog, and just like I want to take care of his stomach, I want to take care of his mind, too. Skip the next couple of chew toys, and your dog and you will really enjoy doing something a little different."

The business venture builds on Hare's work as the director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center and an associate professor in evolutionary anthropology at Duke's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. It also meshes with a newly published book by Hare and his wife, Vanessa Woods, titled "The Genius of Dogs."

How smart are dogs?
Don't expect Dognition's cognitive assessment to measure your pet's IQ: Hare says a dog's intelligence can't be described with a single number. (Come to think of it, the same caveat should apply to humans.)

"Because we use standardized testing in all walks of life, it leads you to believe that there's just one measure of intelligence, and there's a number, and that's it," Hare said. "But when you start studying cognitive science, and look at other species, that all starts to crumble."

It's also fruitless to try calculating whether dogs are smarter than cats, or chimps, or bonobos. "That's like trying to answer the question, 'Is a hammer better than a screwdriver?'" Hare said. Instead, he and his colleagues look at how dogs and other species address problem-solving challenges and communicate with humans. It turns out that dogs are geniuses when it comes to figuring out what humans are trying to tell them — which suggests that our world is truly going to the dogs.

"Dogs are bizarrely successful," Hare said. "They have more jobs than ever in this age of the Internet and the International Space Station."

Researchers have even argued that humans and dogs are locked in a co-evolutionary embrace that began tens of thousands of years ago. Last month, for example, one research team determined that canine digestive systems have adapted to the relatively starchy diet served up by modern humans.

How it works
Hare's research into dog cognition began back in 1995, with studies of how dogs looked for hidden treats when humans tried giving them hints. Those experiments, which are done using simple household items such as plastic cups (plus tons of treats), are laid out in Dognition's Canine Assessment Toolkit.

After you plunk your money down, Dognition's website takes you through a personality questionnaire about your dog: For example, how excited does your dog get around other dogs, grown-ups, children? Do fireworks scare your pup? Then, Dognition guides you through a battery of tests that are as fun as playing fetch, or hide-and-seek. The results are uploaded to Dognition HQ, and you get back a detailed profile of your dog's mental habits, based on where Fido's performance ends up on a chart of independent vs. social problem-solving skills.

Different areas of the chart are associated with nine different canine archetypes: Ace, Stargazer, Maverick, Charmer, Socialite, Protodog, Einstein, Expert or Renaissance Dog. That can give you something to brag about on Dognition's Facebook page, but it also can shed new light on why dogs do the things they do, or how you can get through to them better. "We've got a bunch of really fantastic trainers who have signed up to help," Hare said.

Researchers get a reward as well: The data from hundreds of Canine Assessment Tests can be correlated with breed, age and other factors. "To collect the amount of data we've taken in during our month-long beta program would have taken us a couple of years," Hare said.

Eventually, Hare and his colleagues hope to map out the substantive cognitive differences between dog breeds — differences that have not yet been studied scientifically. "The reason we don't know anything about breed differences is that we currently don't have the tools available to look at the number of dogs that would allow us to answer the interesting questions," Hare said.

Dognition could fix that. And it also could open up new possibilities for some of humanity's best friends.

"One of the things we're hoping to do is, suppose there's that dog that may not be the most attractive dog physically, but the dog is wonderfully behaved," Hare said. "What Dognition.com can do is help people understand more about what's inside that dog, and not just its physical appearance — and see that, wow, this dog is amazing."

More about dog intelligence:

• Dog's vocabulary makes her a star
• Gallery: Cat vs. dog intelligence
• The world's 10 most intelligent animals
• How smart is your dog? Give him an IQ test

Dognition offers a $59.95 Canine Assessment Toolkit as well as a $129.95 annual membership bundle that includes enhanced games and other goodies.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

WISSARD Project via Antarctic Sun

A laptop screen shows a video view of the borehole drilled through Antarctica's ice down to Lake Whillans.

The first signs of potentially exotic life have been spotted in a sample of water drawn from Antarctica's hidden Lake Whillans, a half-mile beneath the surface, according to reports from the scene.

The telltale green glow of cells stained with a DNA-sensitive dye could be seen when water from the lake was put under the microscope on Monday, Discover Magazine's Crux blog reported. "It was the first evidence of life in an Antarctic subglacial lake," science journalist Douglas Fox reported for The Crux. Fox is an embedded journalist reporting from Lake Whillans under the auspices of a National Science Foundation program.

The U.S. scientists in charge of the project to drill into Lake Whillans — known as the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling, or WISSARD — will be more circumspect: They'll have to demonstrate that the green-glowing cells are truly alive and capable of growing in culture. They'll also conduct tests to make sure that the microbes are indigenous to the lake, rather than the result of contamination from the drilling operation.

Last year, Russian scientists analyzed water from Lake Vostok, an even deeper and bigger subglacial lake beneath Antarctica's Vostok Station, but the only microbes they found in the sample were surface-dwelling species that may have come from contaminated drilling chemicals rather than the lake itself.

During the current Antarctic research season, the Russians resumed their drilling at Vostok. They said earlier this month that they had reached transparent lake ice at a depth of 3.4 kilometers (2.1 miles). Since then, they've reported retrieving "fresh frozen" ice cores from slightly deeper levels.

The Russian and U.S. teams are drilling into the lakes in hopes of finding evidence of life forms that could have been living in the dark for thousands of years, or even millions of years. Theoretically, such organisms could live off the minerals in deep-buried rock, plus oxygen dissolved in the lake water.

The Whillans Ice Stream is a glacial river that pushes ice from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet into the Ross Ice Shelf. Lake Whillans lies about 800 meters (0.5 miles) beneath the ice, less than 400 miles (640 kilometers) from the South Pole. Just this past weekend, the WISSARD team reported that their borehole connected with the lake after several days of drilling. 

Fox quoted scientists as saying that Lake Whillans is just 5 to 6 feet (1.5 to 2 meters) deep, as opposed to the 20 to 30 feet (6 to 9 meters) that was expected. The first water samples that were brought up contained the ancient fossils of dead diatoms — tiny marine creatures that are thought to have been pushed down into the lake from West Antarctica.

The study of Lake Whillans and other subglacial lakes should shed light on Antarctica's climate history, as well as the long-term interaction between the continent's ice and the water and rocks that lie beneath. The discovery of novel life forms could open up an entirely new frontier for biologists. And even if the organisms found in the lakes aren't all that unusual, the drilling operations could set the stage for future missions to the ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn, where similarly challenging conditions for subsurface life are thought to exist.

More about the mysteries beneath the ice:

• Saturnian moon Enceladus eyed for sample return mission
• Underground ocean goes deep on Jovian moon Europa
• Mission to drill into Antarctica's Lake Ellsworth suspended

For more about the WISSARD project at Lake Whillans, check out this report from The Antarctic Sun.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Dacke et al. / Current Biology

You might expect dung beetles to keep their "noses to the ground," but they are actually incredibly attuned to the sky. A report published in Current Biology shows that even on the darkest of nights, African ball-rolling insects are guided by the soft glow of the Milky Way.

When dung beetles roll their tiny balls of poop across the sands of South Africa on a moonless night, they look to the glow of our Milky Way galaxy as a navigational aid, researchers report.

"Even on clear, moonless nights, many dung beetles still manage to orientate along straight paths," Marie Dacke, a biologist at Sweden's Lund University, said in a news release. "This led us to suspect that the beetles exploit the starry sky for orientation — a feat that had, to our knowledge, never before been demonstrated in an insect."

That's an amazing claim. But what's just as amazing are the lengths to which the researchers went to make their case.

First, they built a 10-foot-wide (3-meter-wide) circular arena in a South African game reserve and watched what troops of nocturnal dung beetles did on moonlit nights, moonless nights and cloudy nights. They fitted the bugs with little cardboard caps to block their view of the sky. They even fitted some of the bugs with transparent plastic caps, just to make sure that any differences they saw were due to the sky blockage rather than the presence of the caps.

Then the scientists took their dung-beetle arena into the Johannesburg Planetarium and ran the same experiment, to eliminate the possibility that the beetles were using terrestrial landmarks to plot their course in the dark. The planetarium was programmed to show the night sky with the Milky Way, or the Milky Way without the brightest stars in the sky, or the brightest stars without the Milky Way, or just the diffuse glow of the Milky Way with no stars at all.

The bottom line was clear: Those bugs could keep track of how the fuzzy streak of the Milky Way was oriented in the sky, to make sure they rolled their balls of dung in a suitably straight line.

Why is that so important? Without the proper orientation, the beetles might circle back to the dung pile, where they'd have to face all the other beetles trying to steal away their tiny balls of poop. That would put the bugs' intended meal at risk. "The dung beetles don't care which direction they're going in; they just need to get away from the bun fight at the poo pile," Marcus Byrne of South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand explained in a news release.

Marcus Byrne

Dung beetles were fitted with tiny cardboard caps to see how well they could navigate when the night sky was blocked out. When they were wearing the caps, the bugs were more prone to go around in circles.

Dacke, Byrne and their colleagues describe their latest dung-beetle adventure in this week's issue of Current Biology. Researchers have previously chronicled the bugs' other peculiarities: how the insects do a "dance" on top of their dung balls to get themselves oriented (and keep cool as well) ... how they monitor the sun and the moon for poop-ball navigation ... and how they discriminate between different flavors of dung (the smellier, the better).

Byrne said the idea of checking the bugs' celestial compass came up during an earlier series of South African experiments with the bugs. "We were sitting out in Vryburg, and the Milky Way was this massive light source," he recalled. "We thought, they have to be able to use this — they just have to!"

The latest experiments show that for the nocturnal beetles (Scarabaeus satyrus), the moon is the most reliable guide. It took about 20 seconds, on average, for the bugs to make their way out of the arena under moonlit conditions. On a moonless, starry night, it took about 40 seconds. But it took three times as long on a cloudy night, or when the bugs were wearing those cardboard caps. The planetarium tests came up with similar results: The bugs were quickest when they could look up at the dome and see the full, starry sky (43 seconds), or even the Milky Way's bright, diffuse band without the stars (53 seconds). When the planetarium dome was totally dark, the average time rose to 120 seconds.

Before this study, only birds, humans and seals were known to use the stars for orientation. The compound eyes of a dung beetle may not be all that great — but they're good enough to make out the Milky Way's glowing band in a dark sky.

"This study shows that some insects can use the starry sky for orientation, even though they might not necessarily be able to discriminate the individual stars," the researchers wrote. "In theory, insects could use any large and dense group of bright stars for orientation or nocturnal migration."

Scientists have long suspected that celestial orientation is used by still more species, ranging from moths and spiders to newts and frogs. This latest batch of meticulous experiments with poop-rolling beetles may well point the way to confirming those suspicions.

More beetle mania:

• Meet the world's strongest bug
• Weird beetle's sperm teams up
• Gallery: Eight insects with the 'ick' factor

In addition to Dacke and Byrne, the authors of "Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation" include Emily Baird, Clarke H. Scholtz and Eric J. Warrant.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

U.S. Navy

The white whale known as NOC used its nasal passages to make humanlike sounds.

The noise sounds like the kind of "dum-diddy-dah" tune folks might sing to themselves while they're strolling along the beach — but it's actually the voice of a white beluga whale, mimicking human conversation by blurping air through its blowhole. The strange case of the whale named NOC marks the first time that scientists could study a marine mammal in the very act of "talking" like a human, using a most unhuman method.

"I think he was looking for feedback," Sam Ridgway, president of the National Marine Mammal Foundation, told me. "These animals make a lot of sound, and they like feedback."

For years, NOC was part of the U.S. Navy's Marine Mammal Program in San Diego, which was aimed at studying whether whales, dolphins, seals and other marine mammals could do underwater reconnaissance or perhaps even disable mines. NOC was captured in 1977 in Canada's Hudson Bay and brought down to California to work with researchers and divers. (He was the smallest of the pack, and Ridgway says that led to the nickname "no-see-um," or NO-C for short.)

Seven years later, the researchers noticed that NOC spontaneously started making unusual sounds — "as if two people were conversing in the distance just out of range for our understanding," they reported in the journal Current Biology. One time, a diver came to the surface outside NOC's enclosure and asked his colleagues, "Who told me to get out?" They soon concluded it was the whale, which must have been saying "Out, out, out."

That led Ridgway and other researchers to make a series of recordings of NOC's sounds, at the surface and underwater. They found that the pitch and the amplitude rhythm was similar to human speech. "Whale voice prints were similar to human voice and unlike the whale's usual sounds," Ridgway said in a news release. "The sounds we heard were clearly an example of vocal learning by the white whale."

Although this was way out of the norm for whales, it's not unheard of: Back in the 1940s, biologists reported that whale calls could occasionally sound like the voices of children shouting in the distance. In the 1970s, there was a beluga whale at the Vancouver Aquarium that could reportedly make sounds like garbled Russian or Chinese, and even say his name ("Lugosi"). However, NOC afforded the first opportunity to study scientifically how a whale could make such sounds.

The San Diego researchers hooked up pressure sensors inside and just above NOC's nasal cavity. The readings suggested that the whale varied the air pressure inside the nasal tract, expelling air through vibrating phonic lips to make the kinds of sounds that come from a human's vocal cords. In short, the whale had figured out an alien way to talk like a human.

"We do not claim that our whale was a good mimic compared to such well-known mimics as parrots or mynah birds," the researchers write. "However, the sonic behavior we observed is an example of vocal learning by the white whale. It seems likely that NOC's close association with humans played a role in how often he employed his human voice, as well as in its quality."

About four years after NOC started talking like a human, he stopped. The whale continued to vocalize, but those sounds were just the typical whistles, squawks, rasps, yelps and barks. In 1999, NOC died. "We never got his best speech imitation" on tape, Ridgway said — but the existing recordings were more than enough to set the researcher thinking about the potential.

"Whether or not the whale knows what he's saying, other than mimicking what he heard, probably should be explored further," Ridgway told me. "Certainly I think there's a lot we could learn about their sound production. What we'd like, primarily, is for them to tell us how they interact with their ocean environment. How deep can you dive? How long can you stay underwater? What frequencies can you hear? Can you hear the same sounds at the surface and at depth? Describe what you observe with your sonar."

Japanese researchers are already working on a dolphin speech translator. Maybe a talking whale isn't that far behind. But what would the dolphins and the whales tell us? "Thanks for all the fish"? Or "thanks for nothing, you damn dirty humans"?

More about animal intelligence:

• Audio: Listen to the whale that talked like a human
• Dolphins appear to do nonlinear mathematics
• Studies focus on what animals are thinking
• There's more than one path to intelligence
• Gallery: The world's 10 smartest species
• Flash interactive: All about whales

In addition to Ridgway, the authors of "Spontaneous Human Speech Mimicry by a Cetacean" include Donald Carder, Michelle Jeffries and Mark Todd.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Florida Fish and Wildife via Flickr

The eyeball that caused a sensation was cut from a swordfish's head, apparently by a fisherman, scientists say.

The giant eyeball from Florida that captured the world's attention came from a swordfish, scientists reported today. They said straight-line slashes on the softball-sized orb suggest that it was freshly cut out of the fish's head by a fisherman and tossed overboard. The fact that it washed ashore and was found by a beachcomber so quickly contributed to a rare string of circumstances that sparked last week's collective "ewws" and "ahhs."

"It's definitely been unusual to have a situation quite like this," Kevin Baxter, a spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, told me today. The commission has been fielding tons of inquiries ever since pictures of the eerie eyeball turned up on Thursday. If you haven't seen them yet, be sure to check out the commission's Facebook page and Flickr gallery.

Observers had speculated that the eye might have come from a large fish, or a giant squid, or even a whale — but in retrospect, the scenario involving a swordfish caught at sea seems to make the most sense. Genetic testing is being conducted to confirm the hypothesis.

Here's the explanation from the commission's news release:

"After examining an eye found on a south Florida beach this week, researchers from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission believe the specimen came from a swordfish. Genetic testing will be done to confirm the identification.

"'Experts on site and remotely have viewed and analyzed the eye, and based on its color, size and structure, along with the presence of bone around it, we believe the eye came from a swordfish,' said Joan Herrera, curator of collections at the FWC’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg. 'Based on straight-line cuts visible around the eye, we believe it was removed by a fisherman and discarded.'

"The approximately softball-size eye was recovered by a citizen in Pompano Beach on Wednesday. FWC staff received the eye later that day. Swordfish are commonly fished in the Florida Straits offshore of south Florida at this time of year.

"A highly migratory fish, swordfish can be found from the surface to as deep as 2,000 feet. Swordfish in the Atlantic can reach a maximum size of over 1,100 pounds, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Swordfish feed on a wide variety of fish and invertebrates."

More sea marvels:

• Florida fishermen pick up dying giant squid
• Hawaiian squid carries a built-in light
• Boy finds a bonanza in whale vomit
• Gallery: 10 deep-sea secrets revealed

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Carli Segelson / Fla. FWCC via AP

A photo from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission shows a giant eyeball from a mysterious sea creature that washed ashore and was found by a man walking the beach in Pompano Beach, Fla., on Wednesday. The eyeball will be sent to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

A giant eyeball that washed ashore and was found by a beachcomber in Pompano Beach, Fla., is mystifying wildlife officials — but probably not for long.

The softball-sized eyeball was reported to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission on Wednesday, and wildlife officers put the specimen on ice. It will be preserved and sent to the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., for analysis.

Marine biologists couldn't immediately identify which species of sea creature would be associated with the eye, but researchers will use genetic testing if necessary to solve the mystery, said Carli Segelson, a spokeswoman for the commission. "I shouldn't say this, but they may be able to eyeball it," she told me today.

Segelson said she's been fielding tons of inquiries about the case, especially since a picture of "THE MYSTERY EYEBALL" was posted to the commission's Facebook page. "It's just gone viral," she said. There are more pictures in the commission's Flickr photo gallery.

Some have suggested that the eye came from a monster fish, a giant squid or even a whale. It does look a bit like this picture of an eye from a giant squid, but Segelson said wildlife officers are leaning toward a different scenario.

"The primary suspect right now is that it would be a large fish," she said. Among the possibilities are a swordfish, or a tuna, or some sort of deep-water fish species.

What do you think it is? Feel free to give it your best shot a comment below, and keep your eyes peeled for the answer.

More sea marvels:

• Florida fishermen pick up dying giant squid
• Hawaiian squid carries a built-in light
• Boy finds a bonanza in whale vomit
• Gallery: 10 deep-sea secrets revealed

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Hyungwon Kang / Reuters file

Genomics pioneer Craig Venter, seen here during a congressional hearing in 2010, says his team is working on a system to convert genetic code into a digital file that could be sent via email.

Someday, genetic code may be as downloadable and potentially shareable as email, thanks to devices that can translate biological material into digital files, and vice versa. That's the vision that J. Craig Venter, a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology, laid out last week at Trinity College Dublin as part of Euroscience Open Forum 2012.

Venter's talk — titled "What Is Life?" — was intended as a follow up on physicist Erwin Schrödinger's 1943 lecture in Dublin on the same topic. That earlier lecture was seen as foreshadowing the age of genetics and the discovery of DNA's double-helix structure a decade later. Venter's talk sketched out a 21st-century vision in which the code of life is seen as merely another kind of software.

"All living cells that we know of on this planet are 'DNA software'-driven biological machines comprised of hundreds of thousands of protein robots, coded for by the DNA, that carry out precise functions," New Scientist quoted Venter as saying. "We are now using computer software to design new DNA software."

Venter said he and his colleagues are now designing the software for three different types of microbial organisms. Once the digital designs are finished, they'll be fed into DNA sequencing machines to create the corresponding chemical code. The genetic software would then be inserted into hollowed-out cells to kick-start the machinery of life. "I am hoping it will happen this year," the Irish Times quoted Venter as saying.

His aim is to produce microbes that are custom-designed create biofuel, foodstuffs or pharmaceuticals. Using today's technology, researchers can collaborate on genetic design by converting the four-base code of a DNA molecule into a standardized digital file and then sending the file to another lab, where it's converting back into DNA molecules. Venter talked of developing a miniaturized digital-biological converter that could do the trick, Forbes India reported. The concept could lead to technologies that streamline the creation of synthetic organisms, just as 3-D printers are streamlining the creation of synthetic shapes. 

"This is biology moving at the speed of light," Venter said.

Can policymakers keep pace? A progress report from the Synthetic Biology Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars suggests that's debatable. Today the project updated its "Synthetic Biology Scorecard," saying that federal agencies have started taking steps to address a set of policy recommendations issued 18 months ago — but haven't yet fully addressed any of those recommendations.

On the plus side, federal officials have set up an interagency working group on synthetic biology, have participated in international meetings on the issues surrounding synthetic biology, and have drawn up a National Bioeconomy Blueprint. But the project says there's been no federal activity to review public funding for synthetic biology research, assess the risks associated with releasing synthetic organisms outside the lab, or evaluate moral objections to the technology.

Will synthetic biology open the door to a brave new world? An ethical and environmental morass? Both, or neither? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about synthetic biology:

• Singularity U. seeks to accelerate synthetic biology
• One third of Americans back ban on synthetic life 
• Synthetic life could help humans colonize Mars
• What is to be done about synthetic life?

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Elizabeth Brill

A Caribbean fish known as the French grunt is infested with gnathiid isopods.

The late Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley is the latest celebrity to be honored with a scientific species name. It's not the most glamorous species — in fact, it's a blood-feeding fish parasite — but there's no question that Gnathia marleyi knows how to "stir it up" in Caribbean coral reefs.

It's the Caribbean connection that prompted the name, which is listed along with a description of the species in the June 6 issue of the journal Zootaxa.

"I named this species, which is truly a natural wonder, after Marley because of my respect and admiration for Marley's music," Paul Sikkel, a marine biologist at Arkansas State University, said in a news release from the National Science Foundation. "Plus, this species is as uniquely Caribbean as was Marley."

G. marleyi is a type of gnathiid isopod, a small crustacean that hides in corners of eastern Caribbean coral reefs. When the right kinds of fish come by, the juveniles jump out and attach themselves to suck their blood. But when they grow into adults, they stop feeding. "We believe that adults subsist for two to three weeks on the last feedings they had as juveniles and then die, hopefully after they have reproduced," Sikkel said.

Sikkel and his colleagues found specimens of the tiny isopods about 10 years ago in the U.S. Virgin Islands. They're so common there that Sikkel assumed that the species had already been described — but after he sent a specimen to another member of his research team, Nico J. Smit of South Africa's North-West University, he received word that the critter hadn't been written up in the literature.

John Artim / Arkansas State Univ.

This close-up shows an adult male gnathiid. The adult males look entirely different from the juveniles and are used by taxonomists to identify species.

Researchers went through the laborious process of raising the juvenile isopods up to adulthood so they could be properly described. Specimens of G. marleyi will be housed indefinitely at the American Museum of Natural History in New York for reference.

The reason why Sikkel and his colleagues have been spending so time with Caribbean coral-reef parasites is because they suspect that such species may serve as an indicator of coral-reef health. Coral degradation may create habitats more conducive for parasites to attack their fishy hosts. Those parasites, in turn, may transmit blood-borne diseases and accelerate the decline of fish communities.

That's not to say that G. marleyi is all bad: Sikkel points out that they are "the most important food item for cleaner fishes, and thus key to understanding marine cleaning symbioses." (It's worth noting that other breeds of isopods can grow to horror-movie dimensions.)

Bob Marley died of cancer in 1981, at the age of 36, and it's an open question whether he would have welcomed having a parasite named in his honor. As cartoonist Gary Larson said after a species of louse was named Strigiphilus garylarsoni, "You have to grab these opportunities when they come along." But even if Marley fans are not also fans of gnathiid isopods, they can take heart in the fact that Marley has other critters named after him — such as the "Bob Marley sponge" (Pipestela candelabra), which is found in Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

More about celebrity species names:

• The Hoff just loves his crabs
• What's in a scientific name? (Scroll down)
• One way to get a species named after you
• Rename Homo sapiens? The idea seems unwise

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Marine biologists say the spooky "Cascade Creature" seen drifting through the deep sea in a viral video isn't a whale placenta, a parachute, a plastic bag or an alien visitor: It's a type of jellyfish known as a Deepstaria enigmatica.

The video, which was apparently captured by a remotely operated vehicle near an underwater drilling site, caused a bit of a stir over the past couple of weeks among weird-science fans. Now it looks as if the truth is out there, thanks to assessments from experts such as Steven Haddock at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Craig McClain at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.

"This bag-like jelly is not that rare, but is large, so rarely seen intact," Haddock and his colleagues write on the JellyWatch Facebook page. "In the video, the swirling from the sub makes the medusa appear to undulate, and it even turns inside-out." They provide a helpful picture of a more typical specimen.

McClain is even more helpful in his posting at Deep Sea News. He provides citations on previous sightings of the beast, including explanations for the jellyfish's weirdly collapsed shape. And he shows through photographs and drawings that the strange appendage and whitish lumps seen in the video are D. enigmatica's gonads. TMI, Craig ... TMI.

For a third opinion, look no further than Australia's Nine News, which quotes Daniel Bucher, a marine biologist at Southern Cross University, as saying that the gonads were the giveaway.

Now that we've settled that, bring on the next sea monster.

More sea monsters:

• Iceland's monster unmasked
• Monster bug? It's no joke!
• Nessie-like monster filmed in Alaska
• Why giant squid have basketball eyes
• Fishermen pick up dying giant squid

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Nicolle Rager Fuller / NSF

An artist's conception shows an RNA molecule, which may have served as an early form of life on Earth.

The debate over the definition of life is getting messier and messier, but one of the pioneers on the biochemical frontier is suggesting a method to tell whether scientists are actually looking at a new form of life: Follow the bits of information that are contained in the chemistry.

"How many heritable 'bits' of information are involved, and where did they come from?" Scripps Research Institute biologist Gerald Joyce asks in an essay published today by the journal PLoS Biology. "A genetic system that contains more bits than the number that were required to initiate its operation might reasonably be considered a new form of life."

By that definition, we're not yet close to identifying alien life, in the lab or in the cosmos, Joyce told me today. "The fact is, there is only one known form of life, and we're part of it. Someday, maybe there'll be something that's off the grid, but everything we know is part of the tree of life."

Joyce says that verdict applies to microbes with artificially constructed DNA, such as the bacteria that were built in a lab two years ago, as well as to the arsenic-tolerant bacteria that were at one time touted as a form of alien life. He worries that all these claims about creating or finding alien life could backfire.

"We've had enough of these false alarms that I'm getting a little nervous that the public is going to perceive it as 'crying wolf,'" he said. "There have been enough examples that we need to just cool it a little."

Joyce applies the same rule of thumb to his own research, which focuses on RNA enzymes that can be combined to create a synthetic genome. In the essay, he notes that the RNA enzymes can "evolve" into new forms, but contain only 24 bits of their own heritable information in the form of chemical base pairs. The molecules need another 60 bits of information that are provided at the outset and are not subject to mutation and selection.

"Thus, of the 84 total bits required for the system to replicate and evolve, only about one-fourth can be counted as part of the system's molecular memory," he writes. "The synthetic genetic system is not a new life form because it operates mostly on borrowed bits."

Creating or remaking life in the lab
Is it even possible to come up with a life form from scratch? That's one of the key reasons for having a working definition, so that scientists know alien life when they see it ... or make it. The synthetic bacteria created by J. Craig Venter and his colleagues wouldn't qualify because those microbes are merely using a computerized genetic code that was tweaked from nature. "Craig Venter knows that he didn't make a new life form. He remade Mycoplasma," Joyce said.

But if RNA enzymes — or another class of synthetic molecules known as xenonucleic acid polymers or XNA — could be developed into stand-alone genetic systems, with more than half of the information passed along through an alternate chemistry, that just might lead to a truly new form of life.

"That's definitely knocking on the door ... What you'd need is an XNA molecule that has the function of copying XNA parent molecules to produce XNA progeny with pretty good fidelity," Joyce said. Right now, the XNA bits have to be swapped into DNA for amplification, he noted.

Life on other worlds
Joyce said alien life could be created in the lab, or its fingerprints could be detected far from our solar system. "About a decade from now, we're going to start seeing the atmospheric composition of extrasolar planets," he said. If future telescopes pick up the signs of unusual chemistry — say, an unexpected excess of ozone — that could point to potential life processes. But to clinch the case, scientists would need to learn enough about the mechanism behind the chemistry, and how that chemistry preserves "molecular memory" from one generation to the next.

"To me, in a slogan, biology is chemistry plus history," Joyce said. "There's a special class of chemistry that has memory, that has history built in. It's a kind of chemistry that learns from experience."

Confirming the existence of biological-style chemistry on Mars, or in some other environment in our own solar system, presents a special case. "Now we're really in the game," Joyce said. "We're talking about 'spit-carrying molecules.' Maybe we can get little snippets of information and start stitching that together, and have enough to say, 'OK, is it on the tree of life or not?' If the sequence is just off the tree, was it a deep branch, or did it become its own thing?"

Joyce said the alien-life debate could well be reignited by developments right here on Earth, such as the analysis of samples brought up from Lake Vostok, a freshwater lake hidden beneath a miles-thick layer of Antarctic ice. "I won't be surprised, when the samples come up from James Cameron's deep dive to the Mariana Trench, that someone starts thinking that there's something weird down there," he said in a PLoS Biology podcast. "Maybe it's an alternative life form."  

One thing's for sure: Until another truly alien form of life is created or discovered, it's impossible to make a meaningful estimate of how common life might be in the universe, or arrive at the answer to one of life's ultimate questions: Are we alone?

"I think humans are lonely, and long for another form of life in the universe, preferably one that is intelligent and benevolent," Joyce said in a PLoS news release. "But wishing upon a star does not make it so. We must either discover alternative life or construct it in the laboratory. Someday it may be discovered by a Columbus who travels to a distant world or, more likely in my opinion, invented by a Geppetto who toils at the workbench."

More about life, the universe and everything:

• Can scientists define 'life' ... using just three words?
• What should society do about synthetic life?
• Gallery: Six signs that aliens might actually exist
• What exactly is life?

In the PLoS Biology podcast, Joyce discusses the search for new life forms and synthetic biology. Joyce's work was supported by NASA and the National Science Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.