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Pop Culture Taxonomy
There was quite a flutter in the geek community a while back when cartoonist Gary Larson got his own species–the Strigiphilus garylarsoni owl louse was named in his honor–not to mention the joy at Thagomizer being adopted as an anatomical term for Stegosaur tail spikes. It turns out that there are quite a lot of…
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Plant Science
This isn’t science fiction or even the sort of space science that we usually mention here, but yesterday Discoblog linked to an article detailing a study which suggests that talking to your plants actually can make them grow better. Researchers recorded volunteer “plant whisperers” and played the recordings to tomato plants (via headphones attached to…
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Meet “The Link”
Ida is a darling of the news right now, with a shiny new Website, an upcoming special on The History Channel, and enough coverage in the blogosphere to choke a cybernetic horse. It’s not without reason; she’s the most perfect primate fossil ever found: Her skeleton is almost 100% complete. Around the skeleton is a…
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Our Jewelry, Ourselves
Artist Marta Lwin has protoyped a biological jewelry she’s calling “epiSkin.” Cultured in a lab, this biological jewelry is made of epithelia cells which grow to create an artificial skin. The cells are grown into custom designed forms, controlled by the artist. The cells are incubated for a period of time, following which they are…
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Cue the “Aporkalypse” Jokes
Google Maps meets Captain Trips: (Takes a few seconds to fully load) (via Cognitive Dissident) Swine Flu PSAs from 1976: (The second ad is fairly good illustration of how infection spreads…assuming everybody is pawing each other all the time. Also the guy with the moustache scares me.) (via BoingBoing) Outbreak Movie Trailer: (io9 has this…
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What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Banking on the notion that programming glitches are entirely preventable, the U.S. Army is commissioning studies on the creation of autonomous armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. Ronald Arkin, one of the robotics experts working on the study, feels that “Robots can be built that do not exhibit fear, anger,…
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Art for Nerdy Children
I wish I’d known about Tiffany Ard when we were decorating Shadowboy’s nursery. She creates “artwork and nursery decor for serious science nerds,” including beautifully whimsical posters illustrating important scientific laws and formulae (there’s even one featuring a squid!), “Nerdy Baby” flash cards, and “Books for Wee Nerds”. (I particularly love the “Pat Schroedinger’s Kitty”…
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Science is Easy, Comedy’s Hard
Sometimes you can tell when it’s a slow news day. Newspapers start digging up stories about things like a sudden upswing in comedy routines involving science. “Physics can be hard for comedy,” he admits, “but biology is hilarious. It’s easier to make a joke about the sex lives of bonobo chimpanzees than it is to…
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Yeah, We Never Saw That Coming
A robot…designed to look like a pretty girl. (!!!) Cybernetic Human HRP-4C is a “fashion-bot” that will soon be strolling the catwalk in Tokyo. She’s been programmed to emulate 42 different “fashion model movements,*” and although she’s designed to look more or less like an average Japanese woman, her creators gave her slightly larger-than-normal eyes…
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Robot to Teach Elementary School
Japan is faced with an aging workforce, pushing up wage costs and making recruitment difficult. In an attempt to reduce costs but still retain some human interaction, an android named Saya is about to have a trial run as a teacher at a primary school in Tokyo. “She” has a latex face with 18 motors…