One of my favorite monster movies of all time has got to be John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of “The Thing”. It’s not a perfect film by any means – there are some gaffes with the rubber fx, and if eighties-era PCs ever came preloaded with software to test whether your buddies had been taken over […]
Archive for biology
A Lack of Focus
Been a while since I posted, I know. Not for lack of material. I’ve been meaning to post a few more I, Robot-type findings — more hardwired-aesthetics, this time centering around the “Golden Ratio”; more unsurprising evidence of a developmental basis for pedophilia, along with the (even-less surprising) preemptive disclaimers by the researchers that oh […]
Remedial Gigerology, Part 2
I’m guessing this portrait is already familiar to a lot of you, since I got the link both from a fellow skiffhead and a boardroom mundane, but — speaking as a biologist — this is one of the creepiest, most unsettling creature pics I’ve ever seen. This thing has teeth where a beak should be […]
The Skiffies…
Being the selection of a recent science item, hitherto unreported on this ‘crawl, most near and dear to my heart. Oddly, most of the items I’ve noticed recently seem reminiscent of my second book Maelstrom — from this tell-us-something-we-don’t-know piece in the NY Times about the increasing fragility of complex technological systems to Naomi Klein’s […]
Remedial Gigerology
Okay, I need to tell no one here how very cool it is that moray eels have a second set of accessory jaws that leap out of their throat to handle difficult prey. You all know the obvious movie reference. What I don’t know is, there are a couple of hundred species of moray eels […]
Do-It-Yourself Zombiehood
New to me, old to the lit: a paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, which came out last November (just a month after Blindsight was released): “Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes“. Let me cherry-pick a few choice excerpts: “The close relationship between attention and consciousness has led many scholars to conflate these processes.” […]
Wolbachia cronenbergium
My, the folks over at the Venter Institute have been busy lately. First they changed one microbe species into another by physically replacing its entire genome. They did this in their quest to create a synthetic organism, basically a chassis with the absolute minimum number of genes necessary for life, which could then be loaded […]
WoW! Pandemic!
Today’s post comes on the heels of a) me answering backlogged questions from XFire’s gaming community, and b) grumbles from the peanut gallery about the recent lack of shiny techy science-speak on the ‘crawl. It just so happens that today’s subject combines elements of both, and holy shit is it cool: a paper in Lancet […]