Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra "hidden variables". Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/11/4/14* * *
In other news, scientists have applied for a U.S. patent on a "minimal set of protein-coding genes which provides the information required for replication of a free-living organism", which amounts to a patent on synthetic life.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/06/scientists_appl.html
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