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This book proposes a new model for linking our synthetic world to the natural one, the key being supply chain innovation. It presents five market-based solutions that will allow consumers to continue to use plastic while addressing its unchecked proliferation. It also considers how the material itself might be adapted for a sustainable future

SummaryThis paper explores a unique new source of social valuation: a market for bodies. The internet hosts a number of large synthetic worlds which users can visit by piloting a computer‐generated body, known as an avatar. Avatars can have an asset value, in that users can spend time to increase their skills; these asset values can be directly observed in online markets. Auction data for avatars from the synthetic fantasy world of EverQuest are used here to explore a number of questions involving the relative value of different body characteristics. Hedonic analysis of the auction price data suggests that the 'level', a game‐design metric that indicates the overall functionality or power of the avatar, is by far the most important attribute of the body. Other attributes that show significant price effects include: sex and class (i.e. being a wizard rather than warrior type of character). The male‐female price difference is interesting because there are actually no sex‐based differences in the abilities of the avatar bodies, by design. Price differences here must be caused by some other aspect of buyer preferences, ones unrelated to power or functionality of the avatar itself.

Decarbonising the world economy with synthetic biology
Macquarie University Distinguished Professor Ian Paulsen, discusses how synthetic biology can be used to decarbonise the global economy. Addressing atmospheric carbon from human activities is paramount to tackling climate change. Synthetic biology offers a likely way to accelerate this decarbonisation of the global economy while simultaneously building new industries and jobs. At the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology (CoESB), our researchers play a pivotal role in creating a pathway for this possible future.

Today, more and more efforts are devoted to promoting an open network environment (Libicki 2000). This growing enthusiasm for interoperability is understandable, given the economics of networks. (Shapiro and Varian, 1998; Varian, Shapiro, and Farrell, 2005). To make the most of interconnection today, businesses must enhance their services by adding a variety of functions (Blumenthal and Clark 2000). For these purposes, they are seeking higher-level standards in support of middleware and software applications. While supporting the overall goal of interoperability, this paper sounds a cautionary note. It argues that the value of standards is contextual. Thus, while interoperability may be highly beneficial in a purely economic context, and with respect to the lower levels of the network, it might engender unintended consequences at higher levels where the network is intertwined with political and cultural realms. This paper contends that, as standards efforts become increasingly focused on the upper layers of the Internet, a broader set of evaluative criteria will be required to determine their true costs and benefits. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this paper takes a first step in exploring these issues. Focusing on the highest–level applications in particular, it examines recent calls to create standards across virtual worlds, using the MPEG-V working group as a case study. Advocates for these standards foresee clear economic benefits for producers and maintainers of virtual worlds, as well as for their inhabitants (Sivan). We argue that such faith in the predictable outcomes of standards betrays a tendency both to think of virtual worlds as the intentional outcome of rational design, as well as to misapprehend the roles of diversity and play in discrete environments. We question this narrow economic perspective. Arguing that a metaverse—like all worlds—is highly complex, we contend that virtual world standards—ranging from EULAs to the software code itself—can only beget unpredictable outcomes, which will not only affect relationships between worlds, but inevitably within communities. Definitions and standards, whether integral to a world or positioned "between" worlds, nonetheless comprise its finite bounds and become part of what Steinkuehler calls "the mangle of play:" Inhabitants of synthetic worlds habitually "amplify, enhance, negate, accommodate, complement, and at times even ignore" even hard-coded rules (200). To identify the costs and benefits of standards in these complex environments, all of these relationships must be considered (Steinkuehler, 2004). As importantly, we argue that virtual diversity, like biological variety, is inherently beneficial to users of synthetic worlds. Inherently arbitrary, virtual worlds are de facto sites of playful activity: This is the source of corporate and individual interest in them as sites of innovation. To realize the benefits of what Sutton-Smith calls "the potentiation of adaptive variability," we contend that what is needed is not standards across virtual worlds but rather a broad diversity of synthetic, discrete ecosystems. To make our case we briefly identify the economic rationale for network interoperability; next, characterize the metaverse as a complex environment, and describe the role that standards might play within it; and finally, we examine the case of the MPEG-V Working Group to determine the evaluative criteria being used to develop standards, employing a rhetorical analysis of the documents, both formal and informal, associated with this process.

First principles, physics-based models help organizations developing new remote sensing instruments anticipate sensor performance by enabling the ability to create synthetic imagery for proposed sensor before a sensor is built. One of the largest challenges in modeling realistic synthetic imagery, however, is generating the spectrally attributed, three-dimensional scenes on which the models are based in a timely and affordable fashion. Additionally, manual and semi-automated approaches to synthetic scene construction which rely on spectral libraries may not adequately capture the spectral variability of real-world sites especially when the libraries consist of measurements made in other locations or in a lab. This dissertation presents a method to fully automate the generation of synthetic scenes when coincident lidar, Hyperspectral Imagery (HSI), and high-resolution imagery of a real-world site are available. The method, called the Lidar/HSI Direct (LHD) method, greatly reduces the time and manpower needed to generate a synthetic scene while also matching the modeled scene as closely as possible to a real-world site both spatially and spectrally. Furthermore, the LHD method enables the generation of synthetic scenes over sites in which ground access is not available providing the potential for improved military mission planning and increased ability to fuse information from multiple modalities and look angles. The LHD method quickly and accurately generates three-dimensional scenes providing the community with a tool to expand the library of synthetic scenes and therefore expand the potential applications of physics-based synthetic imagery modeling.

Yes ; Marrying synthetic biology with synthetic chemistry provides a powerful approach toward natural product diversification, combining the best of both worlds: expediency and synthetic capability of biogenic pathways and chemical diversity enabled by organic synthesis. Biosynthetic pathway engineering can be employed to insert a chemically orthogonal tag into a complex natural scaffold affording the possibility of site-selective modification without employing protecting group strategies. Here we show that, by installing a sufficiently reactive handle (e.g., a C–Br bond) and developing compatible mild aqueous chemistries, synchronous biosynthesis of the tagged metabolite and its subsequent chemical modification in living culture can be achieved. This approach can potentially enable many new applications: for example, assay of directed evolution of enzymes catalyzing halo-metabolite biosynthesis in living cells or generating and following the fate of tagged metabolites and biomolecules in living systems. We report synthetic biological access to new-to-nature bromo-metabolites and the concomitant biorthogonal cross-coupling of halo-metabolites in living cultures. ; European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013/ERC consolidator grant GCGXC grant agreement no 614779) and ERAIB (Grant no. 031A338A) and H2020-MSCA-IF-2014 Grant no. 659399

In olden days, biological weapons were evil and awful. Now, the 21st century ability to design, build, and evolve new contagious pathogens threatens to kill us all. The rise of AI makes this threat yet more threatening. We hope to muddle through.

We thank the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013/ERC consolidator grant GCGXC grant agreement no 614779) and ERAIB (Grant no. 031A338A) and H2020-MSCA-IF-2014 Grant no. 659399 for generous financial support. ; Marrying synthetic biology with synthetic chemistry provides a powerful approach toward natural product diversification, combining the best of both worlds: expediency and synthetic capability of biogenic pathways and chemical diversity enabled by organic synthesis. Biosynthetic pathway engineering can be employed to insert a chemically orthogonal tag into a complex natural scaffold affording the possibility of site-selective modification without employing protecting group strategies. Here we show that, by installing a sufficiently reactive handle (e.g., a C-Br bond) and developing compatible mild aqueous chemistries, synchronous biosynthesis of the tagged metabolite and its subsequent chemical modification in living culture can be achieved. This approach can potentially enable many new applications: for example, assay of directed evolution of enzymes catalyzing halo-metabolite biosynthesis in living cells or generating and following the fate of tagged metabolites and biomolecules in living systems. We report synthetic biological access to new-to-nature bromo-metabolites and the concomitant biorthogonal cross-coupling of halo-metabolites in living cultures. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed

Making new matter -- Repositioned atoms -- DNA on demand -- Artificial organisms -- Ecosystems to order -- Relocating and resurrecting species -- The evolutionary power of cities -- How to turn back the sun -- Re-mixing the atmosphere -- Synthetic humanity -- The transitional moment