Life, the Universe, and Everything
I've just read an article which hits almost all of my intellectual hot buttons: cosmology, artificial intelligence, origins of life/evolution, relativity, particle physics, pattern recognition,...
View ArticleAnother Intersection
Bioinformatics, meet AI; AI, may I introduce Bioinformatics? This was a convergence made in heaven. DNA, cellular function, biological pathways ~ this material is by its nature (no pun intended) chock...
View ArticleLast words from Gould...
This interview could make a person melancholy. Stephen Jay Gould talks about books he plans to write, religion, and pattern.My first book, ''Ontogeny and Phylogeny,'' was about organisms. My new book...
View ArticleWrite Your Own Ticket?
Don't look now. The future is charging up on us in the most alarming ~ the most exciting ~ way. One of the major obstacles to building molecular-sized biomachines looks like it's been overcome, at...
View ArticleAnother Piece in the Puzzle
I'm thinking that this book, Linked: The New Science of Networks by Elbert-Laszlo Barabasi, should be sold in a matched set on Amazon with Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. We're going to see this...
View ArticleGiving New Meaning to the Term 'Assisted Living'
Why waste valuable wage-earners' time taking care of elderly, forgetful Mom or Dad, Grandma or Gramps, when you can get a handy-dandy AI in a box to do it?
View ArticleBigger is Much Hotter
*Get your mind out of the gutter!* Bigger is definitely hotter, but not necessarily better. Sometimes small and nimble and cheap is good. Q and Green Destiny are the respective champions in the debate....
View ArticleI want to live another 50 years...
... because I want to live long enough to see Strong AI become a reality, and because I want to see whether the Singularity happens or not. (I think that Kurzweil severely underestimates the difficulty...
View ArticlePolio Home Brew
My ex-boyfriend A- is a molecular biologist, so I've known for a long time that scientists with skillz can cook up a whole banquet of lethal dishes in the lab. Pandora's box is well and truly opened....
View ArticleToday it's Grace...
...tomorrow it's Stephen Byerley (or Roy Batty). You can read about the first baby steps towards either our Asimovian or Dickian future in this article from the New York Times.
View ArticleCommon Sense on Cloning
I've never really understood the hysteria around the issue of human cloning. Wait. Let me restate. I think it's perfectly reasonable to vehemently oppose human cloning for the purpose of harvesting...
View ArticleThe Future is Coming
... and it's riding on the backs of mice. The technique, in which bits of testicular tissue from newborn pigs and goats were grafted onto the backs of mice, could also provide an unprecedented window...
View ArticleYou can pick your nose, and you can pick your children, and now you can pick...
In a review of Redesigning Humans the NY Times quotes the author, Gregory Stock: Stock's overarching claim is that germ-line modifications will ''write a new page in the history of life, allowing us to...
View ArticleI wanna be...
...your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Or woman. Whatever. From The Globe and Mail: Gecko feet are covered with millions of tiny setae, hairs only twice as long as a strand of human hair is wide....
View ArticleCircuit to Computer: 'Come in, please!'
Using a computer-based genetic algorithm (selecting for an attribute after "mutating" variables), scientists trying to evolve a oscillator circuit managed to create one that turned into a radio...
View ArticleNo more stick-ups
Diabetics get sick of needles. Of course they do, they have to stick themselves to check their sugar levels, they have to stick themselves to deliver insulin. It's no fun. Just in time for Generation Y...
View ArticleGiant Earth Fart: Party Prank Gone Horribly Wrong?
On June 30, 1908, a large segment of the Tunguska forest in Siberia experienced some kind of spectacular explosion. Trees were flattened, and there was a major conflagration. The force has been...
View ArticleThe Other Half
I love physics. How cool is this? Physicists working in Europe announced yesterday that they had passed through nature's looking glass and had created atoms made of antimatter, or antiatoms, opening up...
View ArticleGet out your shades, baby...
...you'll be needing them to see the polarized light from the Big Bang. And that glare is the "star power" of the inflation theory of cosmology getting another piece of evidence chalked up in the Yes...
View ArticleNow here's a beauty contest I can get behind!
Here They Are, Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiments... Most of the experiments ~ which are listed in this month's Physics World ~ took place on tabletops and none required more computational power...
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