By KIM BELLARD

Well, let’s see. Last week much of the U.S. and parts of Europe were under a crippling heat dome. The U.S. celebrated its 250^th birthday. And there’s something called the World Cup going on, for those of you who care about such things. But, I mean, really, the news of the week? SpudCell.

OK, maybe you missed that one. If you are not a fan of science, or of synthetic biology in particular, news about it might not have shown up in your feeds, or perhaps you thought it was another ploy by the Potato Association of America to get you to buy even more potatoes. SpudCell is something truly new: “the world’s first synthetic cell with a complete life cycle, built entirely from non-living chemical components.”

Take a minute to take that description in.

“SpudCell performs the behaviors often used to tell the living from the inert — it feeds, grows, replicates its genome, divides and undergoes selection — yet it is far simpler than any natural cell and was assembled, part by part, by hand,” the project researchers wrote in a statement.

It was designed and built by researchers at the University of Minnesota, announced last week along with a preprint of their paper.The team was led by Professor Kate Adamala, and the name is either due to its supposed resemblance to a potato or it’s a play on “Sputnik.”

“This is likely the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on,” said Professor Adamala. “We’ve replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell. It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark.”

Scientists have been working for decades on stripping away genetic material from living cells to try to find the minimum necessary for life, but Professor Adamala and her team went the other way, gradually building up genetic material until it started behaving in ways we’d expect cells to.

The impressive thing is that the team engineered everything SpudCell does. As The Economist put it: “Everything the resulting cells do, they do because of molecules that Dr Adamala’s team put there. That leaves no room for mysteries.” That’s not true when researchers start with living cells.

Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University, told Carl Zimmer of The New York Times, “It’s a cell that was built, not born. It’s constructed, but it does what cells do.”

SpudCell is very basic.