Scientists in Japan want to find sperm DNA in a frozen woolly mammoth carcass, use it to fertilize an elephant egg, and thus bring back a version of an animal that went extinct 10,000 years ago. Critics are, to say the least, dubious.

A new study suggests that half of the known planetary systems outside our own could have Earth-sized planets in habitable orbits–which certainly bodes well for the possibility the galaxy is teeming with them.

When you read or hear a piece of text–say, a science column–you automatically analyze it for its tone: positive, negative, happy, excited, etc. Increasingly, computers are being programmed to do exactly the same thing. Large organizations of all kinds like to keep track of what the media are saying about them, but it’s a time-consuming, …

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Blogging will continue to be light to non-existant over the next few days as Globe Theatre rehearsals and ridiculously overlapping writing deadlines combine. But don’t worry, I haven’t gone away. I’m sure that’s a relief.

I use Word’s spelling check feature, but I don’t trust it. And I always turn off the grammar check tool. Looks like I made the right decision.

An interesting collection of werewolves, masks, and, well, “things”, made by a man with a really cool last name…

It’s just a speck of light, of course–but it’s still the first visible image of a planet orbiting a Sun-like star. Wasn’t that long ago there was debate over whether we’d ever know if there were planets around other stars. Now we’re starting to take their pictures.

I’ve written a bit about this before, but here’s a good round-up article on the current state of the burgeoning field of using brains signals to control computers.

Here’s a great vintage: Wine of the House-of-Tutankhamun Ruler-of-the-Southern-On, l.p.h.[in] the Western River, Year 5. No, we didn’t drink it–but King Tut did. And now, for the first time, scientists have been able to determine that it was red wine. Despite red wine’s health benefits, however, we probably can’t make the claim that King Tut …

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Cross-posted from The Willetts on Wine: Radical winegrowers–no, really–in France have bombed government offices to demand an increase in government subsidies. We like really expensive French wine–but the ordinary stuff leaves us cold. Give us a cheap New World wine over a cheap French one any day. Guess we’re part of the French winemakers’ problems.

Is that a great headline or what? Or am I just an unabashed science-fiction-loving geek? Don’t answer that.

It’s all at Locus Online. Don’t miss the tragic story of the deadly SFWA flamewar…