Category: Blog

For the first time, scientists have watched transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, the infectious prion proteins that cause brain-wasting diseases like so-called Mad Cow Disease, invade and move within brain cells. In fact, they’ve got movies.

Live Science has compiled a helpful list of the Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth.

That’s what this study says. Yeah, right.

This past Saturday, physicians and academics from around the world gathered in Germany to mark the bicentennial of a medical breakthrough considered as important as the discovery of ether, X-rays and blood types–although the man who made that breakthrough is far from being a household name. Freidrich Wilhelm Adam Serturner was a 20-year-old pharmacist’s assistant …

Continue reading

That’s the good news. The bad news is that it was launched in 1977, and it’s taken it almost three decades to get there, so it won’t be dropping by other solar systems for a while yet. I’m talking, of course, about Voyager 1.

The most amazing thing about this story? Not that we might be able to download the contents of our brains into computers by 2050, but that the author failed to reference Robert J. Sawyer‘s new book Mindscan, which is about exactly that kind of thing, in exactly that kind of timeframe. But, of course, he’s …

Continue reading

NASA-funded scientists are experimenting with genetically engineering plants that could grow on Mars. And “Designer Plants on Mars” is my science fiction headline of the day…so far, anyway.

…and it has robots in it.

Maybe prospective parents should be issued one of these. It beats that old high-school “treat this egg like a baby” drill. (Via Medgadget.)

In honor of my turning in of the last materials required for my book Genetics Demystified, I present: Willett’s First Law of Non-Fiction Writing No non-fiction book outline survives contact with the actual content. In any event, the book is done, and thus, though I still have a million other things crying out for attention, …

Continue reading

Here’s another story on using modern technology to uncover the secrets concealed in an ancient manuscript. In this case the technology is a particle accelerator, and the document is the Archimedes Palimpsest, thought to be a 10th century copy of an original long-lost Archimedes manuscript which was copied over by a later scribe. I saw …

Continue reading

As far south as you can go, in this case: 75 Degrees South, a.k.a. Antarctica.