My father grew up near the centre of the universe…

…a.k.a. Coffeyville, Kansas: at least, according to Google.

An Ebola vaccine?

Not yet, but encouraging results have been reported in a Phase I trial.

Paging Captain Kirk…

… both versions: quantum teleporter creates laser beam clones, reports New Scientist.

Curling: inspirational to scientists

We all have interests which seem odd to those who don’t share them. Maybe it’s stamp collecting. Maybe it’s science fiction. Maybe it’s watching NASCAR races. Whatever our interest, when we are called upon to defend it, we’re usually reluctant to give the real reason, which is generally no more complicated than, “Because I enjoy …

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You’ve played too many computer games when…

…you read a headline that says: “‘Half Life’ returns for CanStage season,” and you wonder who will be playing the part of Gordon Freeman.

Paging Superman…

A new optical effect created in a London laboratory may someday render solid objects transparent, providing a new way to look at bones or find earthquake victims.

Margaret Atwood, "of Canadian Sci-Fi author fame"

Margaret Atwood will unveil her invention, the LongPen, which will purportedly allow authors to sign books for fans long-distance via a robotic hand that emulates the movement of the author’s real hand, at the London Book Fair in a couple of weeks. I seriously doubt it will catch on, but whether it does or not, …

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Aurora Award nominations now open!

The Aurora Award nominations are now open. The Auroras honor the best Canadian science fiction and fantasy of the year. Anyone who is a Canadian citizen or permanent resident may nominate; you can find the nomination form here (in PDF format). It’s unseemly of me to mention it, perhaps, but may I point out that …

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Sleep? We don’ need no steenkin’ sleep…

…or at least we won’t in a decade or two if this research succeeds in replacing eight hours of sleep a night with two.

Writing tips for non-writers

Author John Scalzi at Whatever offers some excellent “Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don’t Want to Work at Writing”–which also happen to be pretty good writing tips for pro writers, too. In particular, Scalzi’s tip about making sentences shorter struck home; just like Scalzi confesses to, I often use semi-colons to create long sentences that …

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The 60th anniversary of ENIAC

In honor of the 60th anniversary of the world’s first practical all-electronic computer, ENIAC, which was unveiled on February 14, 1946, here’s a 1989 interview with ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert. (Via KurzweilAI.net.)

Publication date set for my Jimi Hendrix bio

I see a publication date has been set for my children’s biography of Jimi Hendrix: August. And it seems to have a title: Jimi Hendrix: Kiss the Sky. Cool!