Scientists Talk Privately About Creating a Synthetic Human Genome and other top stories.

• Scientists Talk Privately About Creating a Synthetic Human Genome

  

  George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and an organizer of the proposed project, said there had been a misunderstanding. The project was not aimed at creating people, just cells, and would not be restricted to human genomes, he said. Rather it would aim to improve the ability to synthesize DNA in general, which could be applied to various animals, plants and microbes.“They’re painting a picture which I don’t think represents the project,” Dr. Church said in an intervie..

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• Microsoft's Project Spark becomes free-to-nobody on August 12

  

  We hardly knew ye, Project Spark... because you were confusing, and now because you're about to be shut down.Microsoft Studios Your chance to play with Microsoft's curious Project Spark "game" and/or creativity engine is all but done, thanks to a late-Friday announcement. An official blog post declared that the game's download and store sites had immediately been taken offline. Anybody who currently owns or plays the game has until August 12 to access the online game before its content serve..

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• Ancient tools and bone found in Florida could help rewrite the story of the first Americans

  

  The researchers say the find is unequivocal proof that people were in Florida more than 1,000 years earlier than anyone had imagined. (FloridaState/YouTube) Thousands of years ago, some of the first Americans knelt beside a pond in what is now Florida. Clutching sharp stone knives, they hacked at the tusk of a slain mastodon, slicing meat away from the long bone. Then, with their work completed, they got up and walked away, leaving behind some tools and the stripped carcass . Centuries pas..

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• Microsoft is closing down Sunrise calendar app on August 31

  

  Microsoft is shutting down its Sunrise calendar app on August 31, according to a Sunrise blog post. Sunrise was acquired by Microsoft in February 2015 for $100 million, and the Redmond-based tech giant incorporated the technology into its Outlook for iOS and Android products. The plan going ahead is for Sunrise to remove its app from all app stores in the next few days and render the app useless by August 31. The reasoning behind this is that without support and updates, Sunrise would become "a..

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• NASA is funding a deep sleep chamber and other crazy concepts

  

  NASA is setting aside money to fund the most ambitious and odd-but-interesting projects that made it through NIAC's first phase. NIAC or NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is the agency's annual program that welcomes submissions from forward-thinking scientists. The agency has chosen eight from the 13 phase 1 concepts, including a deep sleep chamber that astronauts can use for missions to Mars, the moon and places much farther than Earth's orbit.

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• NASA Probes Witness Powerful Magnetic Storms near Earth

  

  Explosive storms spawned by interactions between the magnetic fields of Earth and the sun can endanger satellites, spacecraft and astronauts in space, as well as power grids on Earth. Now, a fleet of NASA spacecraft has for the first time directly witnessed the mysterious way in which these magnetic explosions occur. This work could help shed light on dangerous solar outbursts and help improve the design of advanced nuclear reactors, researchers said. The discovery was made using NASA's  Magneto..

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• Press Amazon's IRL Button to Call a Cab, Brew Coffee, or Whatever

  

  Tom Siebel has a history of placing winning bets. He was an early employee at Oracle, which is still the most widely used enterprise database in the world. He later founded Siebel Systems, a business software company that inspired followers such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. He sold that company to Oracle in 2006 for $5.8 billion. His latest bet is that the much-hyped Internet of Things is finally going to take off. But he’s not interested in the plethora of “smart” gadgets aimed at co..

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• Facebook scrambles to contain fallout

  

  Facebook is scrambling to contain the fallout from allegations that it has suppressed right-leaning political content on its powerful platform — a charge that hits at the social network’s image of neutrality.CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg promised Thursday to meet with top conservatives about the allegations, a sign of how damaging any perception of political bias could be to the company.“To serve our diverse community, we are committed to building a platform for all ideas,” Zuckerberg said ..

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• Natural regeneration of tropical forests reaps benefits

  

  The importance of forest conservation and forest regrowth in climate mitigation and carbon sequestration - capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere - has long been recognized by climate scientists. But, detailed information needed to make ...

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