Scientists Create Living/Reproducing Synthetic Cell

[Don't panic]

Great potentials for alternative fuels, curbing effects of global warming, creating organisms that eat oil from oil spills, etc. They'll need to regulate the heck out of it though.

we aren't any closer to any of those than we were before.
the technological issues of manufacturing and inserting synthetic DNA into a host are completely different from designing the sequence to perform custom functions.

don't get me wrong, what venter group did is an important technical milestone in biotechnology, and there are a few fantastic touches in the project (like emails embedded in the primary DNA sequence), but a lot of the supposed implications are just hype.