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Are the bacterial cells created in J Craig Venter’s laboratories in the US actually synthetic life? After the hype and hoopla over the announcement of the world’s first “manmade living cells”, scientists are getting down to answering that question. And this is what most of them have to say: “Venter’s team has achieved a stupendous technical feat, but the cells cannot be called synthetic. Using an analogy from everyday life, what the team did is akin to completely reprogramming a computer, but not building one from scratch. Here’s why.

As the first step in the decade long work, Venter and his researchers mapped the genome of a simple bacteria, Mycoplasma mycoides. Genome is the ‘brain’ of any cell and contains sequences of DNA which carry all the genetic information needed for the cell - and by extension, the organism - to function. Like all living matter, the genome is made of chemicals. What Venter’s team did next is being hailed as a tour de force. It manufactured the M mycoides’ genome, step by step in the lab, using, in Venter’s words, “four bottles of chemicals”. This synthetic genome, identical in every way to the ‘original’ except for certain harmles ’signatures’ the team put in to mark it as a built-in-the-lab version, was then inserted into another type of bacteria after the bacteria’s own genome had been sucked out.

Venter describes what happened next: “As soon as the genome goes into the cell, it starts making new proteins encoded in its DNA and converts it into a new synthetic cell now, it has replicated over a billion times. The only DNA it has now is the synthetic one that we made.” Nobel-winning British biologist Paul Nurse elaborates the point. In an conversation with BBC, he says, “Venter’s work is a major advance. But it is not a creation of a synthetic life…Creation of a synthetic life would be to make an entire bacterial cell through chemicals.”

Here’s what happened in summary: 1. Craig Venter’s team created the genome of an M mycoides bacteria in the lab and inserted it into another type of bacteria. 2. The recipient bacteria started behaving like an M mycoides. Its offspring too carried copies of the man-made genome. 3.Venter says the cells are synthetic since they are controlled by gens made in lab. 4. Other experts say that for any cell to be called synthetic, all its components should have been created artificially - perhaps possible in theory, but as yet technically impossible.

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Climb Everest? Old hat. Explore the Amazon? Too many loggers. Race to the South Pole? You would probably bump into a TV presenter. So, in search of a big challenge in a small world, Dan Martin has a suitably lunatic idea: a triathlon around the world. An extreme adventurer from England, Martin’s plan for glory is to swim across the Atlantic from the US to France; cycle from Europe through Russia to the Berling Strait; either sledge across the frozen strait or swim further south; and then trek and run to New York.

Martin’s global ambition reflects just how much the traditional frontiers of the world have shrunk. Last week Jordan Romero made a satellite phone call to his mother in California and said: “Mom, I am calling you from the top of the world.” Romero, an American, was on the summit of Everest. He is 13. Thanks to all the support and modern equipment that money can buy, he had become the youngest person to climb the world’s highest mountain.

Bonita Norris, 22, also reached the summit last week, becoming the youngest British woman to climb the Everes t even though, two years ago, she had done no mountaineering. Although Everest remains a serious proposition, the numbers that now crowd the peak symbolise the dilemna for those seeking to boldly go where no man has gone before. Are there any real challenges left on Earth? Leaving aside space, what frontiers remain?

Plenty, is the answer - if you are determined and crazy enough. As Ben Saunders, the British polar explorer, says: “There is this kind of myth that it’s all been done before and every man and his dog has been to the North Pole. Yes, it has become more accessible, but there are still some big challenges out there.” In 2004 Saunders became one of only three people to have made it to the North Pole alone and unsupported. Since then nobody else has succeeded. To some, the key to modern challenges lies in how objectives are achieved: solo, unsupported or faster, lighter, more stylishly than ever before. For others the challenge lies in exploring not unknown lands but the limits of endurance.

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Want to lose weight without dieting or exercising? Add an extra helping of human gut bugs, researchers say. Gut bacteria play a vital role in digestion. Last year, researchers found that replacing the bacteria in mouse intestines with human gut flora decreased the amount of fat absorbed by the gut. Japanese researchers have found that supplementing the diets of overweight people with one type of human gut microbe makes them lose weight.

“The bacteria may cause weight loss by inhibiting fat absorption in the intestine,” lead author Yukio Kadooka said. During the study, the team gave 87 overweight volunteers 100 grams of fermented milk, which is used to make yoghurt, twice a day, while they continued with their normal diets. The milk drunk by half of the group was enriched with Lactobacillus gasseri. After 12 weeks, these volunteers had lost an average of 1kg, while their counterparts showed no change in weight.

Scans revealed that they had lost 4.6% of their “bad”, visceral fat, which surrounds internal organs and is implicated in metabolic syndrome, and 3.3% of their subcutaneous fat, the New Scientist website reported. Hip and waist circumference also went down by an average of 1.7 and 1.5 cm respectively. “For doing absolutely nothing, that’s a lot,” says Matthew Digby, who researchers dietary milk proteins at the University of Melbourne in Australia and was not involved in the study. The bacteria may cause weight loss by inhibiting fat absorption in the intestine, said Kadooka.

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Plenty of people download music from the Internet every day, but illegal downloading has a huge economic impact and could put more than one million people out of work by 2015, experts say. A study into Internet piracy by Paris-based consultancy published on Wednesday showed that 1.2 million jobs in the European Union could be lost over the next five years if more is not done to clamp down on illegal downloading. The study by TERA Consultants for the International Chamber of Commerce focused on piracy in Europe’s music, film, television, and software industries.

Those industries generated 860 billion euros ($1.186 trillion) and employed 14.4 million people in 2008. But in the same year, 10 billion euros and 186,000 jobs were lost to piracy, the study found. If that trend continues - and the rapid increase in illegal downloads and advanced techniques suggest it will - then up to 1.2 million jobs and 240 billion euros worth of European commerce could be wiped out by 2015.

“In the near future and even today in 2010, we observe increasing bandwidth, increasing penetration rate in terms of the Internet,” said TERA Consultant’s Patrice Geoffron, explaining that piracy was only likely to escalate. “If we combine all those elements, obviously the impact in a few years won’t remain stable compared to what it was in 2008.” The bulk of illegal downloading targets music, television and video sites, with consumers using “peer-to-peer” formats to download songs and video clips onto their laptops and home computers from websites without paying a fee. In that respect, it has a disproportionate impact on the creative industries, with musicians, actors and artists standing to lose the most unfettered downloading, experts say.

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Vatican officials moved to stem the rising tide of anger as details emerged of separate paedophilia scandals involving Catholic priests in several European countries. Spokesman Federico Lombardi defended the response of churches to paedophile priest scandals emerging in Austria, Germany, The Netherlands and elsewhere, saying Roman Catholic leaders had reacted swiftly and decisively. He also sought to put the issue into perspective, saying the sexual abuse of children went far beyond church of walls.

Church leaders in the countries affected “have faced the emergence of problem with timely and decisive action”. Lombardi said in a statement read out on Vatican Radio. “They have demonstrated their desire for transparency and, in a certain sense, accelerated the emergence of the problem by inviting victims to speak out, even when the cases involved date from many years ago,” he said. Lombardi acknowledged that the Church’s moral responsibility made errors by clergy particularly reprehensible. But he added “All objective and well-informed people know that the question is much broader, and concentrating accusations against the Church alone gives a false perspective.”

For example, he said, data showed that during the period of the scandal in Austria, there had been 17 cases in Church institutions, compared with 510 in other settings. Lombardi’s remarks came as the head of an Austrian monastery lost his job Tuesday over allegations that he abused a boy while he was a trainee priest. The victim, now 53, told Austrian national radio Oe1 that after years of silence he confronted Bruno Becker, abbot of Sankt Peter monastery in the northern city of Salzburg, last November. The abbot admitted the abuse and offered him $6,790 to take no further action, he said. The money was meant as compensation rather than hush money, Salzburg’s Archbishop Alois Kothgasser told Oe1 radio.

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Back in the dark ages of personal computing, if you wanted to look through the programs on your machine and, say, open a Microsoft Word document from the floppy drive, you would need to type a list of arcane commands that went something like this:

DIR * EXE

MSWORD.EXE A:  \REPORT.DOC

In an effort to win over less technical users, both Apple and Microsoft dumped that command-line interface for personal computers more than two decades ago, replacing it with visual icons for files, folders and applications. Over the years, they added animations and search technology and other features to make navigating a Mac or Windows PC even easier.

Yet all of the gloss and glitter does not hide the fact that both operating systems are still pretty geeky and difficult for many computer users to navigate. I frequently get calls from family members asking why the font size on their Web browser suddenly changed or where they should look for the photos they have just downloaded from their digital camera. I never get that kind of call Apple’s iPhone.

The iPhone, although locked and frustratingly placed in to a walled garden, is the epitome of simplicity. You control it by touching the screen - an intuitive interface that even a toddler can figure out. It is virtually impossible to change key settings by accident. And if you do somehow mess things up, it is a cinch to reset the machine back to its pristine, out-of-the-box state. Why cannot PCs work that way?

There are, of course, all sorts of legacy reasons why the front-end design of computer operating systems is so complicated. Microsoft, for example, strives to make each new version of Windows familiar to customers of earlier versions. But Apple’s iPhone and computer operating systems are both based on the Unix operating system. Why not use the iPhone interface as the basis for a new round of Apple computers? And in Microsoft’s case, what if the company scrapped the front end of Windows 7 and the troubled Vista OS and moved to the new, elegant interface it is using for its Windows Phone 7 Series mobile phones? Would users really be upset?

From a technology perspective, the transition would not be as simple as copying the OS from the phone and pasting it onto a computer system, but it would give these companies the opportunity to simplify their computers and create commonality between the phone and desktop interfaces. And it would allow them to capitalize on the predicted mass migration of users from PCs to mobile devices. Putting a simple and easy-to-use mobile OS onto desktops and laptops would limit errors by users and simplify existing file-based computing. Users would not forced to figure out where their iTunes music sits or even have to learn separate operating systems for their phones and desktops.

To some extent, the industry is already moving in this direction of simplified operating systems. Google’s Android’s user interface, originally aimed at smartphones, is being used in the small, basic laptops known as netbooks. Apple is using the iPhone OS in its iPad tablet computer. As Brian Chen of Wired predicted after Apple unveiled the iPad last month, “With the iPad and the horde of tablets that will follow it, we can expect computing to become much easier than what we are accustomed to today.”

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Hollywood director JJ Abrams is going where man has gone before, with his 2009 Star Trek movie blasting the sci-fi franchise back into the spotlight and online, uniting new and older generation fans. Videogame publisher Atari and developer Cryptic Studios hope to capitalize on the $385 million global box office that the Paramount Pictures movie raked in last year with the first multiplayer online (MMO) game set in Gene Roddenberry’s science fiction universe that dates back to 1996.

“Star Trek Online was released for PCs, allowing fans from the original TV series s well as the moviegoers who enjoyed Abrams’ reboot, to create a virtual character and explore apace, the final frontier. I think this game has an opportunity to unify the Star Trek fans, many of whom really are serious gaming fans, with those who aren’t,” said Zachary Quinto, who played Spock in Abbram’s movie and voices a hologram medical doctor in the game. “I think it is great to unify these two groups and give people the opportunity to engage each other and play with each other online and have the experience of the game together.”

While Quinto’s character guides players through a tutorial that covers the game, the original Spock, Leonard Nimoy, narrates the online game, the original Spock, Leonard Nimoy, narrates the online game. “There are a lot of young people who never saw Star Trek before who went to see the movie who are now interested in Star Trek,” said Nimoy. “I think there will be a number of them who will be interested in a video game and a number of them who will be going back to the original episodes to take a look to see what the roots of all this is all about.”

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US regulators launched a preliminary investigation into reported steering problems on the Corolla sedan on Wednesday as Toyota Motor Corp faced questions from US lawmakers on whether it had ignored red flags on safety before a wave of vehicle recalls. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHT -SA) has received more than 150 complaints about possible steering problems in 2009 Corolla models, a US government official said. The agency began reviewing complaints about the Corolla models last week and on Wednesday determined the evidence warranted opening a preliminary evaluation, according to the official who asked not to be named because the plan has not been announced. The Corolla is Toyota’s second most popular model in the US market, behind the Camry.

Such preliminary investigations are a common step by NHTSA and are often closed before being upgraded to a second-step investigation or prompting a vehicle recall. Toyota spokeswoman Cindy Knight said the automaker was aware of the Corolla steering complaints that would “cooperate fully with NHTSA’s investigation.” Toyota’s quality chief, Shinichi Sasaki, said at a briefing in Tokyo on Wednesday that it was not yet clear if the problem is due to the steering, tires or another part, and that there would only be a recall if the issue was deemed to be a safety breach. “Our internal studies have shown that drivers have complained about a change in steering response versus the older Corollas possibly due to a switch from a hydraulic power steering system to an electronic one,” Sasaki said.

But the move comes at a time when Toyota and US safety regulators are under intense scrutiny for their handling of safety complaints related to unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles going back a decade. Toyota is being challenged by US lawmakers to answer the criticism that the company’s practice of tightly controlling key decisions in Japan had contributed to its deepening problems in the US market and criticism that it has not been forthcoming with safety regulators. In a move that raised the stakes for a pair of congressional hearings next week, Toyota president Akio Toyoda said he would send North America chief Yoshimi Inaba to testify instead of making an appearance himself. Toyoda, grandson of the 77-year old automaker’s founder, said he believed Inaba was the logical choice to testify.

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Indians figure among the first 10 in the list of the most attractive-looking people in the world while Americans tol the chart, a new survey has found.  While the US, home to Hollywood hunk George Clooney and actress Angelina Jolie among others, has come first, the second position is occupied by Brazil in the poll of more than 5,000 globe-trotting Britons. Spain, which boasts Hollywood actress Penelope Cruz as one of its natives, has come third. Blonde, tanned surfers of Australia saw it voted into fourth place, while Italy came fifth, according to the survey.

Sweden, which have models like Victoria Silvstedt, help the Scandinavian country into sixth spot, while England made it to the seventh place in the poll. India, home to Bollywood beauties Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Kareena Kapoor and Katrina Kaif, and heartthrob Salman Khan, among others, has come eighth, while France came ninth and Canada finished off the top 10. Other countries to feature in the top 20 include Portugal, Japan and Netherlands with Germany completing the top 20 list.

A spokeswoman for www.OnePoll.com which carried out the survey, was quoted by The Daily Telegraph as saying, “America has got a lot on offer and boasts some of the sexiest people on the planet. The likes of the Jessica Alba, Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt all help America’s image as a hot bed of good looking people. But with a population of more than 300 million, they do have an unfair advantage. But in fairness, when you think of good looking countries, Sweden, Italy, France and Brazil talent all spring to mind before us lazy, pale Brits. If you are looking for some fun in the sun you know where to head on holiday.”

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