{"id":2254,"date":"2011-09-04T12:39:26","date_gmt":"2011-09-04T20:39:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2254"},"modified":"2011-09-04T13:05:48","modified_gmt":"2011-09-04T21:05:48","slug":"crash-burn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2254","title":{"rendered":"Burn & Crash"},"content":{"rendered":"

A lot of science going on these days. This week’s issue<\/a> of Science<\/em> is an all-you-can-eat synthetic biology extravaganza; there’s also a recent paper on sex and death and parasites concerning an old friend, and the wondrous albeit old news<\/a> that parasitic jellyfish live in the bloodstreams of mammals and birds. (It came out in 2007; I just found out about it this weekend.\u00a0 I am ashamed.) Unfortunately I blew today’s ration of geek-time on a blog interview for Scientific American<\/em> that may not even run (well, depending on how they react to my proposal that we build an army of conjoined twins fused at the head), so all I have time for now is a quick mop-up after last week’s festivities.<\/p>\n

\"Paws<\/a>There is, however, a tenuous sciencey tie-in to the whole nuptial thing, in that last<\/em> week’s issue of Science<\/em> was an all-you-can-eat meteorite<\/em> extravaganza<\/a> \u2014 and as it happens the BUG and I, eschewing the usual clich\u00e9 of gold in a plain brown wrapper, had decided to exchange rings which actually have crunchy meteorite centers. Our fingers are currently shackled by pieces of the Gibeon meteorite<\/a>: a four-billion-year-old chunk of stardust that splashed down across Africa about ten thousand years ago, and which has this weird-ass crystalline internal structure that looks a little bit like the Andromeda Strain. If we’re very lucky, we could be the start of a world-wide spaceborne pandemic.<\/p>\n

For the trivia buffs, stalkers1<\/sup><\/a>, and absent-invitees-who-suffered-grievous-back-injuries-the-week-before amongst you, here are a few final details about the postnuptial proceedings:<\/p>\n