People reading this are probably familiar with the demonstration of evolution in clocks. The other night I was listening to some keyboard music (the piece from the end credits of Rah Xephon), and became fascinated with the way keyboards have evolved. I have also finished reading Permutation City by Greg Egan. I say that because it's "Autoverse" may ( Read more... )

The real Flowers for Algernon? : Ravel and Dr. Adams were in the early stages of a rare disease called FTD, or frontotemporal dementia, when they were working, Ravel on “Bolero” and Dr. Adams on her painting of “Bolero,” Dr. Miller said. The disease apparently altered circuits in their brains, changing the connections between the front and back ( Read more... )

Researchers at Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, US have constructed two artificial bases that are accurately replicated by existing polymerase enzymes.

Luckily I have been practising my alien hybrid extermination skills with the HalfLife combat simulator, and attending zombieology lectures, so will be ready when the time comes ( Read more... )

And this post may be redundant also, but redundancy ensures survival.

tatjna posted a link to Ten Videos to Change How You View the World a couple of days ago, so I've now had a chance to watch some of them, and I have to agree that they are worth watching. They're from TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) which is a yearly conference, the link above ( Read more... )

I've been reading up on peak oil and energy related matter's, partially because of bigby_wolf's posts. Everything seems to be doom and gloom, and everyone's trying to convince you that there's no way out. I don't accept that. Thinking that way is a defeatist attitude that will prevent you from finding a solution. It would still be prudent to plan for not ( Read more... )

Wow. All in one brief burst of space time.

• An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything
  From November's New Scientist :GARRETT LISI is an unlikely individual to be staking a claim for a theory of everything. He has no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii. In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, ( Read more... )

• The Truth Machine - mind-reading by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): He cannot tell what the undergrad is looking at just by peering at the dance of neuronal firings inside his head. So Tong extracts the data from the scanner, takes it back to his lab and runs it through his processing software. After several hours he has a ( Read more... )

• Can a 12" inch tube halve your power bills?
• A Czech speedway driver knocked unconscious in a crash stunned ambulance drivers when he woke up speaking perfect English.
  Is this what happened to wyldcard's character Marrow in jarratt_gray's Mage game ?
• To gain a better understanding of ice-sheet disintegration, Kansas researchers are building an unmanned plane with ( Read more... )

Dogs are smarter than people may think, smarter than apes even :"When it comes to understanding human behaviour, no mammal comes even close to the dog," says Kaminski. Her Leipzig research team has demonstrated that dogs are far better than the supposedly clever apes at interpreting human gestures.
Wolves, however, do not demonstrate these traits, ( Read more... )

Recently I posted a link to a news story about people supposedly documenting a scientific basis for girls preferring pink. Bad Science nicely debunks thisIt also talks about how publicly-funded research institutions are trying to prevent public access to findings paid for by the public by putting them behind pay-walls designed for institutional ( Read more... )