In the wake of new programs that produce artwork derived from existing media, ChatGPT, and even algorithms that can predict protein folding, it is evident that the age of artificial intelligence (AI) is upon us. In many cases, the AI programs and tools are far more advanced than we have previously seen, to the point where humanity can derive great benefit from AI while fearing how it may affect our society and livelihoods. While it is unlikely that we will be subjugated by our new robot overlords, it is still important to explore what has been done and remains possible through AI, and our considerations for its ethical usage.

My wife put her studies on hold while I completed my PhD in cancer biology to take care of our son, but is now on the verge of getting her art history degree! One of her current classes is discussing the role of technology in art, and she stumbled across this older article that addresses the field of "bio-art," or art that represents a crossover between art and the biological sciences. I never really considered this as a contemporary art form, but I guess, separate from the illustrators or photographers who produce content for textbooks and science magazines, as well as the graphic designers who make the signal transduction diagrams and informational graphics for our references, bioscience has advanced to a point where we can manipulate cells in culture and living organisms to produce works of art that could be easily recognizable or more abstract. Since we are talking about living tissues being employed in the display of art, there are ethical considerations in play that we will explore in this article.

In 2022, Science Magazine awarded their Science Breakthrough of the Year to the NASA JW Space Telescope. In the time since, we have been mesmerized by the many new picture of our vast cosmos. Since ancient humans gazed up into the stars, we have always wondered what was out there in the universe, and we can find our fascination with the final frontier in our mythology, both from ages past and in contemporary science fiction. As humanity looks to return to the moon and establish further presence on Mars and beyond, let's take a look at our search for extraterrestrial life, if it is out there...or should I say, it's most likely out there!

I am immensely proud of being an alumnus of the University of California at Berkeley, where I was able to get a world class education and have opportunities to meet with and learn from superb professors, some of whom have since earned Nobel Prizes. Those were some of the most fun years of my life and I also appreciated the beautiful, sprawling campus with lots of fantastic architecture and wide-open green spaces to lounge around on and play catch with my friend every now and then. It is mere coincidence that the day this article published is also Marian Koshland's birthday, and it got me thinking about Koshland Hall, one of the newer (now old, because so am I) buildings when I started college, and which Koshland it was actually named after.

It has been a very trying time for all of us across the planet, with COVID-19 still lurking around as new variants pop up, while having to also deal with the growing spread of monkeypox. As for me, I’ve had a couple of bad colds since the start of the pandemic, but one was before commercial testing was available (maybe COVID? But probably not!), and the other was more recent and was definitely not COVID (lucky me!). In fact, I have to say that because of certain choices I have made to avoid the big bad disease as well as other preventable diseases, this has been the least I’ve experienced illness in quite some time.

As we try to come back to some level of normalcy after a couple of long, stressful years of pandemic, science has been continuing to chug along to improve the human condition. In celebration of this, we had silly achievements that made us laugh, then think, in the form of the Ig Nobel prizes, and this week, the cream of the crop was recognized with the three science Nobel Prizes. We wanted to highlight the Physiology and Medicine prize separately since ABclonal is a bioscience reagents company, but as we said before, every field of science is important to the pursuit of not just biological advancement, but the betterment of all humanity. So while you can also read about the achievements of the Medicine winner, Dr. Svante Pääbo, in the previous entry, here are the science prize winners in all the glory we can give them in this blog space!