Category: Uncategorized
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The USA FDA has scheduled hearings on designer babies. Once you start hearings, you know there’s only one way down the rabbit hole. Or up the mountain, depending on your perspective. As we recall from Frontera 3D, in our increasingly inward-directed universe, down and up are always the same. The aim of the proposed therapies…
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Well, I was going to write up the latest amazing news on memory molecules, but it will have to wait. A remarkable piece of true news (no, it’s not April 1st yet) has somehow managed to escape major notice. To quote from NYT: “Around noon on a recent Friday, Donor Five, a healthy 31-year-old, walked…
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Before Boskone, I visited my friends in Cambridge, who build transgenic blood cells and figure out the mysteries of cell signaling. Meanwhile, our Harvard friends construct termite robots. These adorable Lego-like robots supposedly scurry like termites stochastically building the termite equivalent of Highclere castle. Termite mounds are visible from space—though I wonder how great a…
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An undergraduate at U. Arizona may have spotted the first signs of flowing water on Mars–Today, not billions of years ago. The student, Lujendra Ojha, now pursuing graduate work at Georgia Institute of Technology, published a report of dark streaks on a crater that had no known explanation. The streaks appear and disappear seasonally, consistent…
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The Ham versus Nye interview is the latest adventure in the misbegotten aim of trying to reason with creationists. You know they’re in trouble when the creationists cite my textbook–Microbiology: An Evolving Science–which interviews Richard Lenski, director of the twenty-year bacterial evolution experiment. It doesn’t get better than this. Any thoughtful person reading that interview–and…
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UPDATE: Unfortunately the results of this study were found to involve fraudulent data. An update on the finding is reported here. It was long established that vertebrate development is a one-way path. Like time’s arrow, cells differentiate by losing their old “pluripotency” (multiple possible fates). There were glimmers of the opposite, such as the partial…
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It’s time to make your plans for Boskone, my favorite science fiction convention. This year I’m back on all my favorite science themes–climate disaster, space-beamed solar, plagues and parasites, and of course 3D printing. To top it off, I get to play R2D2 — the Shakespeare version, directed by Laurie Mann. Joan’s Schedule at Boskone…
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If a car drives itself, what does it see? How does it compare with you? Ford and MIT are teaming up to help the car do better. A big challenge: How to see around an obstacle, to see what other obstacles lie ahead. My first thought is, the human driver may see more distractions, like…
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No, these are not the “pure spirits” from the tropical trees of Avatar. They are anemones, growing beneath 250 meters of ice–off Antarctica. About an inch long, with two dozen tentacles, each anemone seeks its tiny dinner to strangle; in subfreezing temperatures, with no light (until the exporers came.) Marymegan Daly and colleagues found these tiny denizens…
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Ever since I can remember, scientists have been trying to figure out photosynthesis–and do it ourselves. In elementary school, back mid-twentieth century, we were shown a film (the kind you feed through a projector, and hope it doesn’t break) where a little cartoon creature labeled “photosynthesis” says, “And I’m NOT going to tell you!” Outside…
Joan Slonczewski 