Category: Uncategorized
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My recent post on Charlie’s blog about how to save New York from rising sea level drew interesting response. And yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg announced serious proposals. So how to you think New York–and other coastal cities–should prepare? Some thoughts: –Build giant levees and seawalls. –Replace streets and cellars with wetland to absorb the water. –Give…
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We haven’t had a good creature for a while. This one, a deep sea polychaete worm, is truly amazing. You can see why James Cameron bases his science fiction on marine life. It’s easy to imagine outer space full of such creatures.
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It must be a slow news weekend for the New York Times to take seriously the idea that a Russian media entrepreneur will soon upload himself into cyberspace. At present, Dmitry Itskov’s great ambition is to create a robotic avatar of himself that uses 36 motors to “reproduce his facial expressions and voice.” An actual…
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So last fall NASA announced a synthetic biology scheme using bacteria to help form building blocks on Mars. The idea is to use Gram-positive bacteria called Sporosarcina pasteurii which hyrolyze urea (from the astronauts’ urine) to form ammonia: The ammonia protonates to ammonium ion, which then precipitates calcium carbonate in the Martian dust to bind…
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So here I am at Wiscon reporting on the latest news from the American Society for Microbiology meeting. At ASM, there is always something even more outrageous than science fiction. The human microbiome–from skin and GI tract to our respiratory passages–is now considered a part of the human body. But how unique and distinctive is…
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The journal Cell reports that nuclei from adult skin cells were introduced into the nuclei of human egg cells (somatic cell nuclear transfer, SCNT) and they successfully developed as embryonic stem cells. This is a first for human cell technology. If I understand the report correctly, a key step was to transfer the donor nucleus…
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LiveScience and NBC News quoted my views on the mitochondrial Singularity. “Since Gutenberg invented the printing press, humans have continuously redefined intelligence and transferred those tasks to machines. Now, even tasks considered at the core of humanity, such as caring for the elderly or the sick, are being outsourced to empathetic robots . . .…
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So this story really is in the journal Science, not, say the Weekly World News (where “Facebook Will End on May 15“–remember the days when the world was about to end? Nowadays, who cares about the world if Facebook ends). Neuroscientists think they have found a way to “read” what you are dreaming in your…
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At the end of the term, Kenyon’s Microbiology lab takes our annual spring trip to the Mount Vernon wastewater treatment plant. Kenyon students brave the huge pipes that collect sewage from miles around, with filters collecting whatever you flush down, from hygiene items to undigested corn. After primary treatment, the “bugs” (treatment microbes) get down…
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Athena’s anthology, The Other Half of the Sky, is now available. Here are some bits from my story, “Landfall,” which picks up where The Highest Frontier left off: Most college sophomores spent their summer running toyworlds while catching sun at air-conditioned disappearing beaches. Jenny Ramos Kennedy spent hers at the Havana Institute for Revolutionary Botany,…
Joan Slonczewski 