A recurring puzzle of evolution is the persistence of certain entities or behaviours that - at first glance - seem to harm the reproductive fitness of individuals. From the naive standpoint, an individual worker ant makes a mockery of evolution. They’re sterile; a reproductive dead-end.

One way of conceptualizing the answer is the unit of ( Read more... )

There is an arms race in progress between humans and bacteria. It started in earnest just before World War 1 with Salvarsan and really got going during World War 2 with the wide-spread use of Penicillin. In response to human aggression, resistant strains of bacteria evolved. Superbugs.


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Time stopped.


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A little while ago, I got a new iPhone. You wouldn’t know it to look at it. It’s not an upgrade or anything, just a repair job turned replacement. It looks and behaves the same as my old iPhone except that whatever was wrong with the screen on the old one isn’t on this one. The process was painless - I went in, they looked at the phone, handed me a ( Read more... )

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A few years ago, I spent most of the summer sleeping on the floor of a friend’s kitchen. It was a lots-of-time, not-much-money sort of summer so everyone was pretty excited when the set of lockpicks that he’d ordered off the Internet arrived. We went down to the hardware store and bought a vise, some wood, and 6 random locks. Brought the whole ( Read more... )

In adventure stories, one recurring trope is the ranger/guide. Wizened, possessed by wanderlust, removed from the main branch of civilization, they take the heroes through a patch of inhospitable land. Their years of living at one with nature allows them to see pathways invisible to the rest of the party. They consider broken twigs, scraped bark, ( Read more... )

Excerpts from “Ashphalt Veins - The Freeway States” Published in NEWStream and syndicated to all ReutAssoc membersites (retrieved December 21 2012 @ 13:34).


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In Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, there is a passage where he considers the apparent failure of architecture as a device for making us better people.


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On Monday, the Re-Burbia contest announced the 20 Finalists. The entries are a lot of fun. There are zeppelins and Metabolist housing and even a perpetual motion machine.


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