Biological
Paul Root Wolpe – Ethical Boundaries For Bio-Tech
by Nick Glossop on March 29, 2013
Paul Root Wolpe, of Emory University, does not spend much time making an argument for clear ethical boundaries for the conduct of bio-technology, rather he just lists off some of the more startling greatest hits of the field, and the argument more or less makes itself: bio-luminescent monkeys, bug-bots, robo-rats, animals as donor part farms (mouse ears), computer chips comprised of self-aggregated rat neurons, creatures with neural implants that …
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Hominid
by Nick Glossop on October 1, 2012
Hominid from Brian Andrews on Vimeo.
Hominid is an animated teaser based on the Hominid series of photo composites by Brian Andrews. The series has been exhibited internationally, including at SIGGRAPH, in the Hong Kong Exhibition Center, and at numerous galleries. This animated teaser was produced at Ex’pression College for Digital Arts.
h/t The Andrea Channel…
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Innovation = jobs?
by Josh Witten on September 11, 2012
Innovation is probably good for the economy. It creates new opportunities for growth. The idea that innovation creates jobs as an immediate solution to our employment problems doesn’t add up.
This rhetoric seems to work superficially. We often think of innovation as creating brand new sectors of the economy, such as airplane manufacture or alternative energy resources. A lot of innovation, however, is targeted at removing inefficiency, and that means eliminating …
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Here’s A Piggy Bird
by Nick Glossop on August 4, 2012
Look Around You is a British television comedy series devised and written by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz.
The humour is derived from a combination of patent nonsense and faithful references and homages. For instance, fictional items that have a passing resemblance to everyday objects are shown and discussed. Such items include the Boîte Diabolique, a box at the top of a piano scale which housed the “forbidden notes”; and
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Privileged Eavesdropping: Herzog, McCarthy, Krauss
by Nick Glossop on April 9, 2012
A physicist, a novelist and a filmmaker walk into a bar…
If I had been asked to name a few notables whom I would most like to overhear in conversation, Cormac McCarthy and Werner Herzog would certainly have made the shortlist. And here they are, along with physicist Lawrence Krauss and host of Science Friday, Ira Flatow having a chat about science, art, the insignificance of humanity and stuff. …
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Big Bird’s Big Brother Found
by Matthew Payne on April 5, 2012
T Rex relative is biggest ever feathered animal
This is just cool: after the break, a song for the Yu-Rex!…
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Insecticides And Hive Death
by Nick Glossop on March 30, 2012
New Evidence that Our Insecticides are Killing Off the Bees
Scientists call the mysterious wasting-away of the the world’s bee populations “colony collapse disorder.” Researchers have come up with numerous hypotheses to explain the collapse, including parasites, viruses, and — yes — insecticides, but quantifying the impact of these and other suspects has proven to be an onerous task.
Two studies, which are published in this week’s issue of Science,
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Fungus To Fungus, Shroom To Shroom
by Nick Glossop on March 29, 2012
Spectacular Science: The Lifecycle of a Mushroom from Thomas Beg on Vimeo.
We begin with Thomas Beg’s 20′s-style animation of the lifecycle of a simple mushroom, and then proceed to Jae Rhim Lee’s meditations on death, and her unique approach to the question of a zero-impact, green burial – the careful cultivation of sub-species of mushroom specifically geared to consume her corpse and process its toxins, with some help …
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Penis Size Demystified
by Desiree Schell on March 23, 2012
From the department of Questions It’s About Time Science Answered, Damn It, comes a long-overdue report from Observations of a Nerd. Grad student and science writer Christie Wilcox starts with a map of global differences in penis size, and ends up tackling the age old conundrum; is bigger really better? The answer, as so often in science, is an entirely unequivocal “kinda.”
The short answer is yes, but
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Swimming Through The Blood Stream
by Nick Glossop on February 25, 2012
Stanford engineers create wireless, self-propelled medical device
Stanford electrical engineers have created a tiny wireless chip, driven by magnetic currents, that’s small enough to travel inside the human body. They hope it will be used for a wide range of biomedical applications, from delivering drugs to cleaning arteries.
This week, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, before an audience of her peers, Poon demonstrated a tiny, wirelessly powered, self-propelled medical
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Perennial Sluts
by Nick Glossop on February 21, 2012
Gardening with Žižek
My relationship towards tulips is inherently Lynchian. I think they are disgusting. Just imagine. Aren’t these some kind of, how do you call it, vagina dentata, dental vaginas threatening to swallow you? I think that flowers are something inherently disgusting. I mean, are people aware what a horrible thing these flowers are? I mean, basically it’s an open invitation to all insects and bees, “Come and screw
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