Researchers have created a primordial soup that works like a digital DNA factory, where T-shaped "codons" swim in a computer-generated virtual liquid forming single, double, and even triple strands. Like DNA, these digital particles "can be assembled into patterns that encode" information, claims robotics scientist Peter Turney. Given sufficient time, a soup of separated individual particles will "spontaneously form self-replicating patterns."
A radical research proposal by two Australian scientists calls for turning the Internet into a giant Napster. It could transform the Web into its most natural form -- a free communication device operated entirely by its users in a vast, so-called peer-to-peer network.
Robert Foot of the University of Melbourne claims that invisible asteroids and other cosmic bodies made of a new form of matter may pose a threat to Earth. These meteorites are composed of mirror matter -- a form of the invisible dark matter that many say makes up over 95 percent of the universe -- and may have been responsible for such cataclysmic events as the so-called Tunguska blast, which destroyed acres of Siberian forest in 1908.