The ‘crawl’s been kinda quiet lately, mainly because I am (for the second time in as many years) on the last lap of this dumb novel. I am, in fact, committed to delivering the damn thing to Tor before I leave for FinnCon — and I’m on track to do that, if I don’t let [...]
Those of you familiar with Blindsight‘s Scramblers may remember this quirk about their physiology: they didn’t keep all their metabolism on the inside. “I don’t think Rorschach’s magnetic fields are counterintrusion mechanisms at all. I think they’re part of the life-support system. I think they mediate and regulate a good chunk of scrambler metabolism… If [...]
So Lever et al have found something in the rocks, deep below the Pacific seabed (Source paper; supplementary materials; Wired popsci commentary). It eats inorganics, notably sulfur— (βehemoth assimilates several inorganic nutrients 26-84% more efficiently than its closest terrestrial competitors. This is especially problematic when dealing with sulfur.) —it’s an anaerobe— (“βehemoth doesn’t just predate [...]
The whitecap’s skin glows with a golden tan of cultured xanthophylls. Joel’s smile grows a little more brittle. He’s heard all about the benefits, of course. UV protection, higher blood oxygen, more energy — they say it even cuts down on your food requirements, not that any of these people have to worry about grocery [...]
I’ve got a soft spot for seals. Back in the day I built a fair bit of my truncated biology career on the little beach maggots; Pacific harbor seals formed the very heart of my doctoral thesis, in fact (Attila, Thalidomide, and Strangway: I salute you, wherever you ended up). They even netted me a [...]
Take Roger Bradbury very seriously. He’s no crank: coral reef specialist, heavy background in mathematical ecology, published repeatedly in Science. Chief and director of more scientific panels than you could roll a raccoon over. So when he says the coral reef ecosystem is already effectively extinct — not the Florida Keys, not the Great Barrier [...]
I’ve got this friend, known her since we were both grad students back in the eighties: well-regarded in her profession, well-published, even coauthored a few texts on evolutionary ecology. Keeps getting best-teacher awards for her work in the classroom. Occasionally she appears as the resident expert at the local Café Scientifique‘s Valentine’s Day edition, where [...]
At the end of one of the classic novels of TwenCen SF, the protagonist — an illiterate third-class mechanic’s mate named Gulliver Foyle, bootstrapped by his passion for revenge into the most powerful man in the solar system — gets hold of a top-secret doomsday weapon. Think of it as a kind of antimatter which [...]
I’ve always had a fondness for Toxoplasma, to the point of featuring it prominently in one of my novels. It’s a protozoan after my metaphorical heart and my literal brain (specifically the part that synthesizes dopamine), and many of yours as well; in past installments (scroll down to May 6 on the right-hand side) I’ve [...]
So, I see that some of you have noticed the endearing footage of the kleptopus making off with some hapless diver’s video camera. (For those who don’t follow the endlessly proliferating comment threads from previous posts, the smoking-gun is here.1) Oh yes, how cute. But how many of you have noticed how closely this act [...]
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