Today is Back to the Future day. October 21, 2015 is the date that Doc and Marty arrived at in the Back to the Future II film. So everyone is comparing the future imagined in the 80s to the one we are actually living in. Cars don't fly, there is no fusion reactors and you cannot hydrate your pizza in seconds. We still, disappointingly, need glasses ( Read more... )

Remember that "impossible" drive that everyone agreed cannot work but few labs made it work? Sceptics said that it wasn't really working. That thrust was just natural thermal convection currents arising from microwave heating or some other environmental conditions external to the drive. So NASA used it in vacuum and it still works. The physicist ( Read more... )

One of the base facts of biology that prves evolution from common ancestor is the fact that all organisms on Earth share the same genetic code (except for tiny differences in some very old organisms among Archea and things like mitochondria). Codons made of 3 bases correspond to either one of the 21 amino acids used (some amino acids are coded by ( Read more... )

I'll get to Nobels tomorrow when last of the science ones gets announced. Today I'm talking about some newer science.

There is a chance that world's first malaria vaccine - called RTS,S - will be available pretty soon. Right now it's on its way to the European Medicines Agency to be filed in 2014. If everything goes well, it can be approved in ( Read more... )

So I concentrated on body augmentation but other things happened in science recently, too.

We learned last years that dolphins introduce themselves by name (their signature whistle) but it turns out they also call friends and family members by their names (copy their signature whistles) when they look for them. That's makes them the only other ( Read more... )

Today's episode of science links is all about replacement body parts and interfacing them.

Remember, I mentioned 3D printing lately and all the wonderful things they can make for us. It turns out one of those things can be body parts. Scientists from Cornell University made a replacement ear by putting injection of living, cartilage-producing ( Read more... )

You can pick a face expression that will be on Cory Doctorow's head 3D print. The face expressions are presented by John Scalzi. I can't stop thinking Doctorow has no chance of replicating it correctly. Especially that one cross eye.

If just sharing your 3D bust is not SF enough for you here is a chip that will turn you into a battery. Coming next ( Read more... )

It looks like our ancestors not only had sex with neanderthals but kept having offspring with other apes as long as they could. Even after the split between different lines of apes (humans/chimpanzees and earlier humans&chimps/gorillas) the interbreeding between the lines continued for a while. This is one of the first things that came from finally ( Read more... )

James Cameron is not satisfied by going to the deepest place on Earth - his next goal is space. He is one of the backers, along Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, among others, of Planetary Resources. It's a mysterious company which promises to "overlay two critical sectors - space exploration and natural resources - to add trillions of ( Read more... )