Category: Uncategorized
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At Oklahoma State-Stillwater, I met some great scientists doing the kind of research that will one way or another make it into my next book. One is Danielle Lee, postdoc and artistic note taker (see above) who authors Urban Scientist blog for Scientific American. Danielle is studying giant pouched rats in Tanzania, and how they…
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The next stop in my Oklahoma tour was Oral Roberts University, where a science fiction conference was held by my friend Andy Lang, who teaches mathematics. ORU, as I discovered online, has a colorful history perhaps worthy of a novel. Those of us attending the conference received a warm welcome, including about twenty wonderful ORU…
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At OU-Norman, I will be meeting a microbiology class to talk about biofilms. I know it’s hard to believe how beautiful a biofilm can be, especially when it’s growing on your teeth. But this one pictured above is a marine bacterium Marinobacter hydrocarbonoclasticus SP17 growing on alkanes (hydrocarbon pollutants). It’s not only beautiful, it’s doing…
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In (pagan) celebration of the holidays, here are chickens bred to lay colored eggs. For more about the chickens, also interestingly colored, see here. Now I’m off to polish my lectures for my three-university tour of Oklahoma. If you’re in Oklahoma, feel free to stop by: Norman: OU Department of Microbiology, Wednesday April 11 Tulsa:…
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So at last Google Glass invents what I came up with in Brain Plague–a virtual computer plugged into your eyes. Supposedly we’ll see computers in eyeglasses, even contact lenses, projecting data hovering around us. The initial prototypes look rather simplistic; but what happens when a virtual world surrounds us, superimposed on our own? Perhaps we…
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Is there “foreign life” on Earth? That is a question posed this week by Nature. Foreign life–in the sense of a new, fundamentally different and unpredicted kind–has emerged more than once in human history. Leeuwenhoek’s microscope in 1673 revealed new life all around us; life so terrifying that his neighbor had all their teeth pulled…
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No, this story is not April Fool. The Swiss, notorious for fanatic cleaning, are sending a special cleaner craft, CleanSpace One, to recapture their own SwissCube, an old decommissioned satellite. The idea is to bring it back through the Earth’s atmosphere to vaporize before it becomes part of the growing cloud of Kessler debris. Kessler…
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On an expedition for National Geographic, James Cameron made it to the deepest part of the ocean. It’s hard to overstate the personal challenges of this feat: To spend hours alone in a cramped space, with temperature veering from a hundred degrees F down to near freezing, pressures threatening to bubble nitrogen from your veins.…
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As we all know, the US health care reform law got its day in court today. Scalia and Roberts noted that the health care overhaul law would make people get insurance for things they may not need, such as heart transplants (only vice presidents need those) or pregnancy services (only alien beings need those, not…
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Perhaps the biggest surprise I found in Havana was the enormous trees. Trees that had survived decades, even centuries, of deforestation, human poverty, and hurricanes. Monster trees thrust out of sidewalks and courtyards like something out of science fiction. The one above is a ceiba or kapok, whereas others are strangler fig. The ceiba is…
Joan Slonczewski 