The Earth is host to some 20,000 known edible plant species out of an estimated quarter million species in total. Of that 20,000 a mere 10 per cent are grown in any volume by farmers. And just three account for the bulk of the biomass we actually eat, says Haseloff: rice; corn; and wheat.

Genetically, there is not very much difference between wild corn and what farmers plant today, even after the revolution in yields provided by hybrid corn and other crops developed during the Green Revolution of the mid-20th Century. It may seem churlish to make this point but plants are quite inefficient at converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into the carbon skeleton needed to grow roots and leaves. RuBisCO, a protein complex that lies at the heart of the photosynthesis process, is notoriously inefficient as an enzyme, although some researchers argue that RuBisCO is about as good as it can get.

The boyfriend buster is no more than software running on a cellular basestation designed for the home. Being a basestation, this femtocell - named because it covers a smaller range than the picocells used in shopping centres and microcells in city streets - notices which phones come into range and if they are allowed to register, lets those phones make calls through it. The femtocell can, potentially, do more with that information, possibly letting the concerned dad know by text message or email that the wrong cellphone has turned up at the house or that, with 30 strong signals in the house, the family pile may be home to a Facebook party.

The boyfriend buster is just one service that people such as Nowicki think will consumers will use. There will be femtocells that synchronise users' phones as they arrive home, transferring contacts and diary appointments between their handsets and their home computers. Or the unit may turn the hallway lights on as you walk up the garden path on the way home.

It should probably be called the Moore-Noyce Law because it was Bob Noyce, Moore's colleague at Fairchild and then Intel, who came up with the pricing model that meant Moore's Law became the key to predicting a market sector driven by deflation. But if that pricing model - which has typically meant close to a halving in production cost with each generation shift - begins to fail, then the reasons for pushing ahead on scaling also break down.

For the past 70 years, the Olympic organisers have slowly brought more and more technology to try to make sure the gold medal goes to the right person.

It used to be so simple. In the 1930s, a technician from the Swiss watchmaker Omega turned up with 27 stopwatches that had to be used for all the Games. To time the cross-country skiing event, judges had to synchronise two timers and then send one of the judges off on their skis to the start line to write down the time each contestant started off.

Not even in existence when the last European elections took place, the Pirate party managed to secure 7% of the national vote in Sweden, beating the country's Eurosceptic party, June List, which suffered a collapse in its vote.

Two events have taken copyright to the fore in Sweden, which has the highest penetration of high-speed broadband-fibre connections in Europe. In April, the Swedish government brought into force the EU's intellectual property (IP) enforcement directive, which demands that internet service providers turn over traffic data to copyright holders who are trying to track down filesharers. Later that month, a court sentenced The Pirate Bay's owners to a year in jail on top of awarding damages of SKr30m (£2.5m).

Following the case, the Pirate party, which campaigns for patents to be scrapped and copyright to last just five years instead of 70, trebled its membership to more than 45,000.

You can read the rest at the Guardian website.

Ellington is a little embarrassed to have his own image recorded by a landmark experiment in synthetic biology and points to one of Charles Darwin made using the same technique later on. "In the US, we actually celebrate Darwin Day because we have to. Our picture of Chuck is a kind of homage," Ellington explains, referring to the running battle between creationists and devotees of intelligent design against the "evilutionists".

But to create a generation of cars that would run on water with some sludge in the back, we need to learn how to design our own bacteria and enzymes that can co-opt natural processes for our ends.

Natural hydrogen-producing enzymes are complex, often using metal atoms to help them work. "For many of the enzymes related to energy production, people have no idea how they are actually organised," says Giovanna Ghirlanda, a protein-design researcher at the University of Arizona. In some cases, no one knows where the metal atoms lie within the protein, she says.

Natural enzymes won't work too well in future fuel cells; they need to be modified, as the best hydrogen producers are poisoned by oxygen. "But oxygen is one of the main products of photosynthesis," says Professor Alfonso Jaramillo of the Ecole Polytechnic, near Paris.

Some researchers are trying to tweak the enzymes to make them less sensitive to oxygen, but with limited success. As a part of the EU-funded BioModularH2 project, Jaramillo's team is using a different approach: stick with the natural enzyme and engineer another set of proteins that take oxygen out of the cell before it can do any harm. These hydrogen producers are longer-term options: it may take 10 years to get to a prototype, says Jaramillo.

You can read the rest at the Guardian.