Breakfast on Pluto

In a much needed shot in the arm for the UK economy, Jaguar Land Rover is expected to confirm that it will open a new £400 millon engine plant in the West Midlands creating around 750 jobs but with the potential to create around 2,000 new jobs overall when the suppliers are taken into account. The new factory is set to be built at the i54 business park near in Wolverhampton, which is one of the new enterprise zones set up by the coalition government.

The government is understandably delighted that it’s enterprise zone policy to promote business is being seen to pay off and Business Secretary Vince Cable has pledged more than £10 million of public money towards the project whihc is expected to take about two years to build. This site is ideally located for JLR’s existing vehicle assembly plants in Castle Bromwich, Birmingham and Halewood, Merseyside.

However its probably not all good news since JLR currently sources engines built by Ford in factories elsewhere including Dagenham and Bridgend in the UK so some jobs may ultimately be lost elsewhere. The indian owned car maker wishes to take greater control of engine production since now that sales of Jaguar Land Rover are booking in the fast expanding Asian market so overall this is to be seen as great news for the UK economy.

Following on from my recent article about synthetic life I thought I would look at how the issue was reported in the UK press and who had published the best laymans guide to the process. I was not particularly impressed by a doomsday scenario grabbing article published in the Daily Mail suggesting that artificial life created by Craig Benter could wipe out humanity, however there was a graphic attributed to John Lawson that was published within the article which broke the entire process down into 7 more easily understood stages. I have a created a small thumbnail of the graphic for use within this post but I would like to respect the rights of the creator so you can see both the original article and the more impressive graphic here.

White desking seems to be flavour of the month when it comes to fitting out larger new prestige offices particularly in London where white desking is proving to be almost as popular as the ubiquitous but some would say boring beech finish. Exactly why it should be that white desking is proving so popular at the moment is hard to say so we can only speculate. Black ash office furniture is also proving very popular and it could be argued that both black and white office furniture have come back into fashion after a gap of around 20 years, so these finishes could be considered to be a very retro look.

Despite this popularity, few office furniture dealers are geared up to offer much in the way of choice when asked for a range of white desks and other white office furniture. If you are looking for a 1 stop shop then you could look at a specialist white office furniture store.

US scientist Dr Craig Venter of the J Craig Venter Institute in Maryland and California claimed yesterday to have succeeded in developing the first sythetic living cell which is controlled entirely by synthetic DNA by constructing the “genetic software” of a bacterium and transplanting it into a host cell. The resulting microbes look and behaviour was then “dictated” by the synthetic DNA.

The advance which was published in Science, has been proclaimed as a scientific landmark comparable to the splitting of the atom or the development of silicon chips, but critics are lining up to denounce the potential dangers posed by the creation of brand new synthetic organisms such as the creation of new and dangerous diseases and some feel that the potential benefits of this technology are a vastly over-hyped.
The more optimistic scientists hope that this new techology could lead to bacterial cells being designed to produce medicines, fuels and may possibly help the world to resolve climate change issues by absorbing greenhouse gases.

The breakthrough occured by creating a synthetic bacterial genome and transplanting this genome into a normal living bacterium, to create the “synthetic cell”. In truth only the genome is truly synthetic having been created in a synthesis machine.