Haven’t been posting the past few days. I really should have written something to commemorate Darwin’s 200th birthday, but how can you celebrate when the latest Gallup poll shows that over 60% of the US population is too blinkered, too misled, or too downright stupid to grasp the reality of natural selection? And I would […]
Archive for biology
30
Jan
2009
Deep Sea = Deep Space
A few bits of personally-relevant science have slid down the pike the past few days: yet another step along the road to functioning head cheeses, and a development in graphene tech that might — if you squint really hard and give me way more credit than I deserve — seem a bit reminiscent of Rorschach‘s computational […]
07
Jan
2009
Iterating Towards Bethlehem
Most of you probably know about Turing machines: hypothetical gizmos built of paper punch-tape, read-write heads, and imagination, which can — step by laborious step — emulate the operation of any computer. And some of you may be old enough to remember the Sinclair ZX-80— a sad little personal computer so primitive that it couldn’t […]
16
Oct
2008
The Living Dead
Meet Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator, the bacterium that does it all: fix carbon, fix nitrogen, synthesize all essential amino acids, locomote — an organism that can exist totally independent of other life. It doesn’t even need the sun. This fucker basically lives on sulfur, rock, and electrons*. It’s an obligate anaerobe, without even the most rudimentary […]
19
Sep
2008
Avast! Here Be a Blindsightinator for Ye!
Aye me hearties, be ye rememberin’ that time in Blindsight when Rorschach, she be putting the sun in scurvy Szpindel’s eyes? “Argh, I be seein’ naught,” Szpindel be sayin’, his timbers a’shiver. “It be the EM fields,” James be barking. “That be how they signal. The briney deep, she be fulla words, she be—” “I […]
14
Mar
2008
In Praise of MPD
This month’s New Scientist carries an opinion piece by Rita Carter, author of the imminent Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality. She’s not the first to argue that multiple personalities may be adaptive (the whole backbone of the eighties’ MPD fad was that they served to protect the primary persona from the stress of extreme […]
09
Mar
2008
Mind Reading Technology…
…has been a staple of every low-budget piece of celluloid skiffy going back at least to that early-sixties Gerry-Anderson puppet show Stingray (which no one with any dignity will admit to having watched, although I clearly remember the episode with the mind-reading chair). The Prisoner also featured an episode in which No. 6’s dreams could […]
06
Mar
2008
Is this theory of yours accepted by any respectable authorities?
The long-awaited new Neuropsychologia‘s finally on the stands, and it’s a theme issue on — wait for it — consciousness! Lots of articles on blindsight, interhemispheric signaling, anosognosia, all that cool stuff. And nestled in the heart of this month’s episode is a paper by David Rosenthal entitled “Consciousness and its function“. Guess what. He […]
26
Feb
2008
Law & Order: Victims of Reality Unit
So Prozac and its ilk prove to be, for the most part, about as clinically effective as a sugar pill. Which kicks loose an idea for a story that’s been rattling around in my head for a few years now: A man diagnosed with terminal cancer is beating the odds with the help of a […]
18
Jan
2008
Scramblers in the Shallows, Light in the Deeps
This is a short, stunning clip that starts with deep-sea glowsticks and segues to shallow-water cephalopods. The first part gives you a taste of Beebe Station; the second (including the Two-Faced Squid!) demonstrates some camo tricks that make scramblers look like amateurs. No new information here, but beautiful. Try to ignore the creationist idiot in […]
