Posts Tagged ‘DNA’
Next generations of kids on Mars. Here’s how they’ll survive
Note: This talk was supposed to explain how kids will survive on Mars, but it didn’t.
It sounds like science fiction, but journalist Stephen Petranek considers it fact: within 20 years, humans will live on Mars.
In this provocative talk, Petranek makes the case that humans will become a spacefaring species and describes in fascinating detail how we’ll make Mars our next home. “Humans will survive no matter what happens on Earth,” Petranek says. “We will never be the last of our kind.”
Patsy Z and TEDxSKE shared a link.
Strap yourselves in, we’re going to Mars.
00:16 Not just a few astronauts — thousands of people are going to colonize Mars. And I am telling you that they’re going to do this soon. Some of you will end up working on projects on Mars, and I guarantee that some of your children will end up living there.
That probably sounds preposterous, so I’m going to share with you how and when that will happen. But first I want to discuss the obvious question: Why the heck should we do this?
12 years ago, I gave a TED talk on 10 ways the world could end suddenly.
We are incredibly vulnerable to the whims of our own galaxy. A single, large asteroid could take us out forever. To survive we have to reach beyond the home planet.
Think what a tragedy it would be if all that humans have accomplished were suddenly obliterated. (It will be, no matter where is your next destination)
And there’s another reason we should go: exploration is in our DNA. (No kidding)
Two million years ago humans evolved in Africa and then slowly but surely spread out across the entire planet by reaching into the wilderness that was beyond their horizons.
This stuff is inside us. And they prospered doing that. Some of the greatest advances in civilization and technology came because we explored.
Yes, we could do a lot of good with the money it will take to establish a thriving colony on Mars.
And yes we should all be taking far better care of our own home planet.
And yes, I worry we could screw up Mars the way we’ve screwed up Earth. (No doubt about that Mr. DNA explorer)
01:53 But think for a moment, what we had when John F. Kennedy told us we would put a human on the moon. He excited an entire generation to dream.
Think how inspired we will be to see a landing on Mars. Perhaps then we will look back at Earth and see that is one people instead of many and perhaps then we will look back at Earth, as we struggle to survive on Mars, and realize how precious the home planet is.
So let me tell you about the extraordinary adventure we’re about to undertake. (Mr. Jules Verne)
But first, a few fascinating facts about where we’re going. This picture actually represents the true size of Mars compared to Earth. Mars is not our sister planet. It’s far less than half the size of the Earth, and yet despite the fact that it’s smaller, the surface area of Mars that you can stand on is equivalent to the surface area of the Earth that you can stand on, because the Earth is mostly covered by water.
The atmosphere on Mars is really thin — 100 times thinner than on Earth — and it’s not breathable, it’s 96 percent carbon dioxide. (We destroyed even our much thicker atmosphere)
It’s really cold there. The average temperature is minus 81 degrees, although there is quite a range of temperature.
A day on Mars is about as long as a day on Earth, plus about 39 minutes. Seasons and years on Mars are twice as long as they are on Earth.
And for anybody who wants to strap on some wings and go flying one day, Mars has a lot less gravity than on Earth, and it’s the kind of place where you can jump over your car instead of walk around it. (I just reserved a ticket, just to jump over my car)
Mars isn’t exactly Earth-like, but it’s by far the most livable other place in our entire solar system.
Here’s the problem. (Here we go)
Mars is a long way away, a thousand times farther away from us than our own moon. The Moon is 250,000 miles away and it took Apollo astronauts three days to get there.
Mars is 250 million miles away and it will take us eight months to get there — 240 days. And that’s only if we launch on a very specific day, at a very specific time, once every two years, when Mars and the Earth are aligned just so, so the distance that the rocket would have to travel will be the shortest. 240 days is a long time to spend trapped with your colleagues in a tin can.
And meanwhile, our track record of getting to Mars is lousy. We and the Russians, the Europeans, the Japanese, the Chinese and the Indians, have actually sent 44 rockets there, and the vast majority of them have either missed or crashed. Only about a third of the missions to Mars have been successful. (My spacecraft is insured)
And we don’t at the moment have a rocket big enough to get there anyway. We once had that rocket, the Saturn V.
A couple of Saturn Vs would have gotten us there. It was the most magnificent machine ever built by humans, and it was the rocket that took us to the Moon. But the last Saturn V was used in 1973 to launch the Skylab space station, and we decided to do something called the shuttle instead of continuing on to Mars after we landed on the Moon.
The biggest rocket we have now is only half big enough to get us anything to Mars.
So getting to Mars is not going to be easy and that brings up a really interesting question … how soon will the first humans actually land here?
05:36 Now, some pundits think if we got there by 2050, that’d be a pretty good achievement.
These days, NASA seems to be saying that it can get humans to Mars by 2040. Maybe they can. I believe that they can get human beings into Mars orbit by 2035.
But frankly, I don’t think they’re going to bother in 2035 to send a rocket to Mars, because we will already be there.
We’re going to land on Mars in 2027. (The prediction of a journalist enamoured with Elon Musk)
And the reason is this man is determined to make that happen. His name is Elon Musk, he’s the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX.
Now, he actually told me that we would land on Mars by 2025, but Elon Musk is more optimistic than I am — and that’s going a ways — so I’m giving him a couple of years of slack.
Let’s put a decade with Elon Musk into a little perspective. Where was this 10 years ago? That’s the Tesla electric automobile. In 2005, a lot of people in the automobile industry were saying, we would not have a decent electric car for 50 years.
And where was that? That is SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, lifting six tons of supplies to the International Space Station.
10 years ago, SpaceX had not launched anything, or fired a rocket to anywhere. So I think it’s a pretty good bet that the person who is revolutionizing the automobile industry in less than 10 years and the person who created an entire rocket company in less than 10 years will get us to Mars by 2027.
Now, you need to know this: governments and robots no longer control this game. Private companies are leaping into space and they will be happy to take you to Mars.
And that raises a really big question. Can we actually live there?
NASA may not be able to get us there until 2040, or we may get there a long time before NASA, but NASA has taken a huge responsibility in figuring out how we can live on Mars.
Let’s look at the problem this way. Here’s what you need to live on Earth: food, water, shelter and clothing. And here’s what you need to live on Mars: all of the above, plus oxygen.
So let’s look at the most important thing on this list first.
Water is the basis of all life as we know it, and it’s far too heavy for us to carry water from the Earth to Mars to live, so we have to find water if our life is going to succeed on Mars.
And if you look at Mars, it looks really dry, it looks like the entire planet is a desert. But it turns out that it’s not. The soil alone on Mars contains up to 60 percent water.
And a number of orbiters that we still have flying around Mars have shown us — and by the way, that’s a real photograph — that lots of craters on Mars have a sheet of water ice in them. It’s not a bad place to start a colony.
Now, here’s a view of a little dig the Phoenix Lander did in 2008, showing that just below the surface of the soil is ice — that white stuff is ice. In the second picture, which is four days later than the first picture, you can see that some of it is evaporating.
09:19 Orbiters also tell us that there are huge amounts of underground water on Mars as well as glaciers. In fact, if only the water ice at the poles on Mars melted, most of the planet would be under 30 feet of water. (Not to worry, we will have the poles on Mars melt in no time)
So there’s plenty of water there, but most of it’s ice, most of it’s underground, it takes a lot of energy to get it and a lot of human labor.
This is a device cooked up at the University of Washington back in 1998. It’s basically a low-tech dehumidifier. And it turns out the Mars atmosphere is often 100 percent humid. So this device can extract all the water that humans will need simply from the atmosphere on Mars. (Why wait to land on Mars to use these devices? Billions of people are drinking totally polluted water)
Next we have to worry about what we will breathe. Frankly, I was really shocked to find out that NASA has this problem worked out. This is a scientist at MIT named Michael Hecht.
And he’s developed this machine, Moxie. I love this thing. It’s a reverse fuel cell, essentially, that sucks in the Martian atmosphere and pumps out oxygen. And you have to remember that CO2 — carbon dioxide, which is 96 percent of Mars’ atmosphere — CO2 is basically 78 percent oxygen.
the next big rover that NASA sends to Mars in 2020 is going to have one of these devices aboard, and it will be able to produce enough oxygen to keep one person alive indefinitely.
But the secret to this — and that’s just for testing — the secret to this is that this thing was designed from the get-go to be scalable by a factor of 100. (What that mean again?)
Next, what will we eat? Well, we’ll use hydroponics to grow food, but we’re not going to be able to grow more than 15 to 20 percent of our food there, at least not until water is running on the surface of Mars and we actually have the probability and the capability of planting crops. In the meantime, most of our food will arrive from Earth, and it will be dried. (So only trained soldiers will be dispatched first?)
And then we need some shelter. At first we can use inflatable, pressurized buildings as well as the landers themselves. But this really only works during the daytime. There is too much solar radiation and too much radiation from cosmic rays. So we really have to go underground.
it turns out that the soil on Mars, by and large, is perfect for making bricks. And NASA has figured this one out, too. They’re going to throw some polymer plastic into the bricks, shove them in a microwave oven, and then you will be able to build buildings with really thick walls. Or we may choose to live underground in caves or in lava tubes, of which there are plenty.
And finally there’s clothing. On Earth we have miles of atmosphere piled up on us, which creates 15 pounds of pressure on our bodies at all times, and we’re constantly pushing out against that. On Mars there’s hardly any atmospheric pressure. So Dava Newman, a scientist at MIT, has created this sleek space suit. It will keep us together, block radiation and keep us warm. (No fashion industry on Mars?)
So let’s think about this for a minute. Food, shelter, clothing, water, oxygen … we can do this. We really can. But it’s still a little complicated and a little difficult.
that leads to the next big — really big step — in living the good life on Mars. And that’s terraforming the planet: making it more like Earth, reengineering an entire planet.
12:59 That sounds like a lot of hubris, but the truth is that the technology to do everything I’m about to tell you already exists.
First we’ve got to warm it up. Mars is incredibly cold because it has a very thin atmosphere. The answer lies here, at the south pole and at the north pole of Mars, both of which are covered with an incredible amount of frozen carbon dioxide — dry ice. If we heat it up, it sublimes directly into the atmosphere and thickens the atmosphere the same way it does on Earth. (Fooling around again)
13:31 And as we know, CO2 is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas. Now, my favorite way of doing this is to erect a very, very large solar sail and focus it — it essentially serves as a mirror — and focus it on the south pole of Mars at first. As the planet spins, it will heat up all that dry ice, sublime it, and it will go into the atmosphere. It actually won’t take long for the temperature on Mars to start rising, probably less than 20 years. (Please, don’t let this journalist land on Mars)
on a perfect day at the equator, in the middle of summer on Mars, temperatures can actually reach 70 degrees, but then they go down to minus 100 at night.
What we’re shooting for is a runaway greenhouse effect: enough temperature rise to see a lot of that ice on Mars — especially the ice in the ground — melt. Then we get some real magic.
14:27 As the atmosphere gets thicker, everything gets better. We get more protection from radiation, more atmosphere makes us warmer, makes the planet warmer, so we get running water and that makes crops possible. Then more water vapor goes into the air, forming yet another potent greenhouse gas. It will rain and it will snow on Mars. And a thicker atmosphere will create enough pressure so that we can throw away those space suits. We only need about five pounds of pressure to survive. Eventually, Mars will be made to feel a lot like British Columbia.
15:05 We’ll still be left with the complicated problem of making the atmosphere breathable, and frankly that could take 1,000 years to accomplish. But humans are amazingly smart and incredibly adaptable.
15:16 There is no telling what our future technology will be able to accomplish and no telling what we can do with our own bodies. In biology right now, we are on the very verge of being able to control our own genetics, what the genes in our own bodies are doing, and certainly, eventually, our own evolution.
We could end up with a species of human being on Earth that is slightly different from the species of human beings on Mars.
15:49 But what would you do there? How would you live? It’s going to be the same as it is on Earth. Somebody’s going to start a restaurant, somebody’s going to build an iron foundry. Someone will make documentary movies of Mars and sell them on Earth. Some idiot will start a reality TV show. (Listen, people running hotels in the Congo barely step outside the air-conditioned confine of the hotel and for fear of diseases)
There will be software companies, there will be hotels, there will be bars.
This much is certain: it will be the most disruptive event in our lifetimes, and I think it will be the most inspiring.
Ask any 10-year-old girl if she wants to go to Mars. Children who are now in elementary school are going to choose to live there.
16:35 Remember when we landed humans on the Moon? When that happened, people looked at each other and said, “If we can do this, we can do anything.” What are they going to think when we actually form a colony on Mars?
16:49 Most importantly, it will make us a spacefaring species. And that means humans will survive no matter what happens on Earth. We will never be the last of our kind.
Editing your DNA: Are you wise enough for that task?
A few years ago, with my colleague, Emmanuelle Charpentier, I invented a new technology for editing genomes.
It’s called CRISPR-Cas9. The CRISPR technology allows scientists to make changes to the DNA in cells that could allow us to cure genetic disease.
CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats
You might be interested to know that the CRISPR technology came about through a basic research project that was aimed at discovering how bacteria fight viral infections.
Bacteria have to deal with viruses in their environment, and we can think about a viral infection like a ticking time bomb — a bacterium has only a few minutes to defuse the bomb before it gets destroyed. So, many bacteria have in their cells an adaptive immune system called CRISPR, that allows them to detect viral DNA and destroy it.
Patsy Z shared this link TEDxUCLA
We can now #edit our #DNA But let’s do it #wisely. By Jennifer Doudna
http://www.ted.com/…/jennifer_doudna_we_can_now_edit_our_dn…
Part of the CRISPR system is a protein called Cas9, that’s able to seek out, cut and eventually degrade viral DNA in a specific way. And it was through our research to understand the activity of this protein, Cas9, that we realized that we could harness its function as a genetic engineering technology.
A way for scientists to delete or insert specific bits of DNA into cells with incredible precision — that would offer opportunities to do things that really haven’t been possible in the past.
The CRISPR technology has already been used to change the DNA in the cells of mice and monkeys, other organisms as well.
Chinese scientists showed recently that they could even use the CRISPR technology to change genes in human embryos. And scientists in Philadelphia showed they could use CRISPR to remove the DNA of an integrated HIV virus from infected human cells.
The opportunity to do this kind of genome editing also raises various ethical issues that we have to consider, because this technology can be employed not only in adult cells, but also in the embryos of organisms, including our own species.
And so, together with my colleagues, I’ve called for a global conversation about the technology that I co-invented, so that we can consider all of the ethical and societal implications of a technology like this.
What I want to do now is tell you what the CRISPR technology is, what it can do, where we are today and why I think we need to take a prudent path forward in the way that we employ this technology.
When viruses infect a cell, they inject their DNA. And in a bacterium, the CRISPR system allows that DNA to be plucked out of the virus, and inserted in little bits into the chromosome — the DNA of the bacterium. And these integrated bits of viral DNA get inserted at a site called CRISPR.
CRISPR is a mechanism that allows cells to record, over time, the viruses they have been exposed to.
And importantly, those bits of DNA are passed on to the cells’ progeny, so cells are protected from viruses not only in one generation, but over many generations of cells.
This allows the cells to keep a record of infection, and as my colleague, Blake Wiedenheft, likes to say, the CRISPR locus is effectively a genetic vaccination card in cells.
Once those bits of DNA have been inserted into the bacterial chromosome, the cell then makes a little copy of a molecule called RNA, which is orange in this picture, that is an exact replicate of the viral DNA. RNA is a chemical cousin of DNA, and it allows interaction with DNA molecules that have a matching sequence.
So those little bits of RNA from the CRISPR locus associate — they bind — to protein called Cas9, which is white in the picture, and form a complex that functions like a sentinel in the cell. It searches through all of the DNA in the cell, to find sites that match the sequences in the bound RNAs.
And when those sites are found — as you can see here, the blue molecule is DNA — this complex associates with that DNA and allows the Cas9 cleaver to cut up the viral DNA. It makes a very precise break.
So we can think of the Cas9 RNA sentinel complex like a pair of scissors that can cut DNA — it makes a double-stranded break in the DNA helix. And importantly, this complex is programmable, so it can be programmed to recognize particular DNA sequences, and make a break in the DNA at that site.
As I’m going to tell you now, we recognized that that activity could be harnessed for genome engineering, to allow cells to make a very precise change to the DNA at the site where this break was introduced. That’s sort of analogous to the way that we use a word-processing program to fix a typo in a document.
The reason we envisioned using the CRISPR system for genome engineering is because cells have the ability to detect broken DNA and repair it. So when a plant or an animal cell detects a double-stranded break in its DNA, it can fix that break, either by pasting together the ends of the broken DNA with a little, tiny change in the sequence of that position, or it can repair the break by integrating a new piece of DNA at the site of the cut.
So if we have a way to introduce double-stranded breaks into DNA at precise places, we can trigger cells to repair those breaks, by either the disruption or incorporation of new genetic information.
If we were able to program the CRISPR technology to make a break in DNA at the position at or near a mutation causing cystic fibrosis, for example, we could trigger cells to repair that mutation.
Genome engineering is actually not new, it’s been in development since the 1970s. We’ve had technologies for sequencing DNA, for copying DNA, and even for manipulating DNA.
And these technologies were very promising, but the problem was that they were either inefficient, or they were difficult enough to use that most scientists had not adopted them for use in their own laboratories, or certainly for many clinical applications.
The opportunity to take a technology like CRISPR and utilize it has appeal, because of its relative simplicity. We can think of older genome engineering technologies as similar to having to rewire your computer each time you want to run a new piece of software, whereas the CRISPR technology is like software for the genome, we can program it easily, using these little bits of RNA.
So once a double-stranded break is made in DNA, we can induce repair, and thereby potentially achieve astounding things, like being able to correct mutations that cause sickle cell anemia or cause Huntington’s Disease.
I actually think that the first applications of the CRISPR technology are going to happen in the blood, where it’s relatively easier to deliver this tool into cells, compared to solid tissues.
Right now, a lot of the work that’s going on applies to animal models of human disease, such as mice. The technology is being used to make very precise changes that allow us to study the way that these changes in the cell’s DNA affect either a tissue or, in this case, an entire organism.
Now in this example, the CRISPR technology was used to disrupt a gene by making a tiny change in the DNA in a gene that is responsible for the black coat color of these mice.
Imagine that these white mice differ from their pigmented litter-mates by just a tiny change at one gene in the entire genome, and they’re otherwise completely normal. And when we sequence the DNA from these animals, we find that the change in the DNA has occurred at exactly the place where we induced it, using the CRISPR technology.
Additional experiments are going on in other animals that are useful for creating models for human disease, such as monkeys. And here we find that we can use these systems to test the application of this technology in particular tissues, for example, figuring out how to deliver the CRISPR tool into cells.
We also want to understand better how to control the way that DNA is repaired after it’s cut, and also to figure out how to control and limit any kind of off-target, or unintended effects of using the technology.
I think that we will see clinical application of this technology, certainly in adults, within the next 10 years. I think that it’s likely that we will see clinical trials and possibly even approved therapies within that time, which is a very exciting thing to think about.
And because of the excitement around this technology, there’s a lot of interest in start-up companies that have been founded to commercialize the CRISPR technology, and lots of venture capitalists that have been investing in these companies.
But we have to also consider that the CRISPR technology can be used for things like enhancement.
Imagine that we could try to engineer humans that have enhanced properties, such as stronger bones, or less susceptibility to cardiovascular disease or even to have properties that we would consider maybe to be desirable, like a different eye color or to be taller, things like that.
“Designer humans,” if you will. Right now, the genetic information to understand what types of genes would give rise to these traits is mostly not known. But it’s important to know that the CRISPR technology gives us a tool to make such changes, once that knowledge becomes available.
This raises a number of ethical questions that we have to carefully consider, and this is why I and my colleagues have called for a global pause in any clinical application of the CRISPR technology in human embryos, to give us time to really consider all of the various implications of doing so.
And actually, there is an important precedent for such a pause from the 1970s, when scientists got together to call for a moratorium on the use of molecular cloning, until the safety of that technology could be tested carefully and validated.
Genome-engineered humans are not with us yet, but this is no longer science fiction.
Genome-engineered animals and plants are happening right now. And this puts in front of all of us a huge responsibility, to consider carefully both the unintended consequences as well as the intended impacts of a scientific breakthrough.
Bruno Giussani: Jennifer, this is a technology with huge consequences, as you pointed out. Your attitude about asking for a pause or a moratorium or a quarantine is incredibly responsible. There are, of course, the therapeutic results of this, but then there are the un-therapeutic ones and they seem to be the ones gaining traction, particularly in the media.
This is one of the latest issues of The Economist — “Editing humanity.” It’s all about genetic enhancement, it’s not about therapeutics. What kind of reactions did you get back in March from your colleagues in the science world, when you asked or suggested that we should actually pause this for a moment and think about it?
Jennifer Doudna: My colleagues were actually, I think, delighted to have the opportunity to discuss this openly. It’s interesting that as I talk to people, my scientific colleagues as well as others, there’s a wide variety of viewpoints about this. So clearly it’s a topic that needs careful consideration and discussion.
BG: There’s a big meeting happening in December that you and your colleagues are calling, together with the National Academy of Sciences and others, what do you hope will come out of the meeting, practically?
JD: Well, I hope that we can air the views of many different individuals and stakeholders who want to think about how to use this technology responsibly. It may not be possible to come up with a consensus point of view, but I think we should at least understand what all the issues are as we go forward.
BG: Now, colleagues of yours, like George Church, for example, at Harvard, they say, “Yeah, ethical issues basically are just a question of safety. We test and test and test again, in animals and in labs, and then once we feel it’s safe enough, we move on to humans.”
So that’s kind of the other school of thought, that we should actually use this opportunity and really go for it. Is there a possible split happening in the science community about this? I mean, are we going to see some people holding back because they have ethical concerns, and some others just going forward because some countries under-regulate or don’t regulate at all?
JD: I think with any new technology, especially something like this, there are going to be a variety of viewpoints, and I think that’s perfectly understandable. I think that in the end, this technology will be used for human genome engineering, but I think to do that without careful consideration and discussion of the risks and potential complications would not be responsible.
BG: There are a lot of technologies and other fields of science that are developing exponentially, pretty much like yours. I’m thinking about artificial intelligence, autonomous robots and so on. No one seems — aside from autonomous warfare robots — nobody seems to have launched a similar discussion in those fields, in calling for a moratorium. Do you think that your discussion may serve as a blueprint for other fields?
JD: Well, I think it’s hard for scientists to get out of the laboratory. Speaking for myself, it’s a little bit uncomfortable to do that. But I do think that being involved in the genesis of this really puts me and my colleagues in a position of responsibility. And I would say that I certainly hope that other technologies will be considered in the same way, just as we would want to consider something that could have implications in other fields besides biology.
Cloning therapy: not a science fiction (January 29, 2009)
This is no longer the realm of science fictions: you can repair any sick organ with cloning parts and if you are rich you can extend your life to 150 years. We don’t need male sperms to clone a complete entity, human or animal. We don’t need a female nucleus in eggs to clone a complete entity, human or animal. Soon, we won’t need female eggs; labs would be able to manufacture the “pouch” or envelop of the female egg. It is going to take some time before human invest on research to circumvent female uterus for incubating fetuses during nine months. There are human clones on earth.
Italian gynecologist Severino Antinori announced publicly in 2003 that he has cloned three babies; he was forced to recant and moved his business to Ukraine. There are many professional institutions cloning human, for a price, after they have been cloning favorite pets of the rich and famous. No State or institution is about to go public on human cloning; they don’t have to, they just do it.
Let us examine the protocol for clone fertilization which is very close to cloning spare parts. First phase, a female egg is removed; its nucleus, which contains the genetic instructions, is extracted. A male non-sexual cell (generally taken from the skin) is treated to extract its nucleus (containing the DNA) and implanted in the de-nucleated egg. Let me remind you that the cell can belong to the same female person of the ovary and it would work equally well! The new egg contains all the DNA information of the donor.
Phase two: A special cocktail of electric shocks and chemicals aid the cell to regress to a primordial cell that replicates. Phase three is the process called “blastocyst” that can generate either an embryo for fertilization or the production of specialized spare parts of the various organs such as kidney, liver, heart muscle, or even hair.
Phase four cultivates the different organs by immersing the cell “souche” in a “soup” of proteins and enzymes to normally develop and then be transplanted to the sick donor in order to repair the failing organ.
Three main obstacles for assuring complete success have already been conquered. The first hurdle was taming the chaotic replication of cells; the second problem was the immunological aspect where virulent tumors developed in reproduced cells; and the third problem was the longevity of the organ due to the atrophy of the telomeres.
China, Britain, and the USA are publicly leading the research on cloning therapeutic spare part organs but they are the tip of the iceberg; many specialized institutions in Asia, Turkey, Israel, and India are working full time.
Adonis Diaries 