-
I Like the Idea of a CowShark
Charlie Brooker has an article up at The Guardian, weighing in on the recent breakthrough in creating artificial life. To “watermark” their artificial bug, the geneticists spliced a James Joyce quotation into the DNA sequence. The unsuspecting genome now has the phrase “to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of…
-
Take a Walk on the Moon, Virtually
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera has taken lots of new extremely high-resolution pictures of the moon, and they’re crowdsourcing their analysis. The public is invited to visit the Moon Zoo site to view and interpret the new images. “We need Web users around the world to help us interpret these stunning new images of the…
-
A Real Electric Monk
An “I-Fairy” robot presided at a wedding ceremony in Tokyo last Sunday. The groom is a professor of robotics and the bride is an employee at Sanrio’s humanoid robotics division (although a BoingBoing commenter had a more plausible theory). The little robot’s normal job is to conduct people around museums, but Sanrio reprogrammed it for…
-
It’s the Cognitive Bias Song!
Everbody sing! Lordy, I love the Internet. (via Skepchick)
-
BANG! The Universe Verse
James Lu Dunbar is creating a series of rhyming comic books that illustrate scientific theories about the origin of the universe. Book 1 is available for free as individual images on his site or as a PDF (email him with your request). You can also get a higher-resolution eBook for $5 or a physical copy…
-
What’s Pink and Tubular?
Naked Mole Rats! (Of course.) The Smithsonian’s National Zoo recently acquired a baby Giant Pacific Octopus and touted its OctopusCam in press releases. It turns out that the zoo has a whole load of live animal cams, including ferrets, gharials, and Naked Freakin’ Mole Rats. Many of the other cams look out onto empty space…
-
Listen to Reason
The Tree Lobsters site has a lovely list of science/skeptic podcasts for your delectation, along with a short description of the format of each. Really how can you not want to immediately go download a program described as, “Science, skepticism and fart jokes?” Go look! (Also I love the graphic.)
-
A Humanist Thanksgiving Proclamation
When I became convinced that the universe is natural-that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the…
-
Symphony of Science
John Boswell followed up his wonderful Autotuned Sagan/Hawking A Glorious Dawn video with “We Are All Connected,” featuring Richard Feynman, Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan. He’s also created a site devoted to these efforts, where you can view the videos, download the MP3s, and read the lyrics. Similar projects are probably forthcoming,…
-
Darwin: The Musical
Composer and Songwriter David Haines loves science so much that he’s created a musical called Tremendous Journey to celebrate it. The concert will feature 15 songs about the science of life and evolution. It’s a shorter version of my “science oratorio”, Lifetime. We open with a song called Mr Darwin, which tells the story of…