Prometheus Untenured

Dammit, Jim

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:20:03 GMT

Where is my hypospray? is up at io9. I really need a "Bones" McCoy icon.

If you or anyone you know has a good biogeek question, intertube them to tdj@io9.com.

How I roll

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:15:58 GMT

Cthulhu Arms Apartments

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:34:00 GMT

Via jwz.

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:30:26 GMT

"For those with this devastating condition called anosmia, everything changes. Our sense of smell is essential to our humanity: emotionally, physically, sexually, and socially."

- Dr. Rachel Herz

I have had practically no sense of smell for as long as I can remember, but I think I'm still technically human.

Microfluidic art

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 04:37:39 GMT

A friend and former student are working on this - every line is formed by a dye traveling through a lane whose width is measured in microns.

Any idea where this image came from?

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:37:17 GMT

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:25:18 GMT

Student forensic astronomers help determine exactly where and when Caesar came, saw, and conquered.

Question for artsy people

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:54:06 GMT

Is there a good, inexpensive tablet mouse out there that any of you would recommend? I'm looking to reduce my trackball use whilst occasionally working with Illustrator.

Would you eat vat-grown meat?

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:51:49 GMT

Via Biology in Science-Fiction.

Barbie needs an X-Box

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:55:36 GMT

To eliminate the visuospacial gender gap, girls should spend more time playing violent video games.

Build a lifeform contest

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:38:50 GMT

io9 has asked me to serve as a Mad Science judge for their build a lifeform contest.

Contestants can either:

- Stick with creatures designed using the BioBricks standard parts registry. Show the world that biology can be open sourced. The winner will receive a trip to a synthetic biology conference in Hong Kong.

- Propose a scientifically plausible but slightly more speculative designed organism. The winner will receive $1,000 plus a signed copy of an artist's rendering of your creation.

Spread the word!

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:03:47 GMT

How roundworms perform calculus to find food.

Breathing lung dog

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:51:14 GMT

Animals as respiratory assist devices?

(Don't worry - it's an art project.)

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:48:08 GMT

Up on io9: Where is my silicon-based life?

Short version? You're soaking in it.

Genetics roundup

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:32:17 GMT

Removing the gene for CCR5 from T-cells makes them practically immune to HIV infection.

Over 30 genes known to affect the likelihood of developing Crohn's disease.

The evolution and modeling of the tomato.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions with genetically modified crops.

Explaining the paradox of hereditary homosexuality.

Medical roundup

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:55:44 GMT

Stem cells: to make implantable nerve cells or a potential Parkinson's cure (using adult cells from, of all places, the nose).

Caffeine: to improve post-exercise muscle refueling.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation: to reduce migraine pain.

Apoptosis: to kill off freeloading immune cells.

iPhones: for medical imaging (and deploying robot drone aircraft).

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:31:40 GMT

A really shoddy way to improve university rankings.

On the upside, it's only marginally worse than the existing system.

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:12:44 GMT

The end of theory:

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

...

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete.

...

Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about "dominant" and "recessive" genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton's laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.

In short, the more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it.

Provocative, but ultimately self-defeating as stated. While I think that some science is moving in this direction (in many cases, for good reason), the "end of theory" theory is overblown.

(1) Not all data is good (unbiased) data, and without a causative link, telling good from bad isn't so simple.

(2) This view of science practically rules out the creation of design principles (as we know them). How does one build a bridge statistically? In biology, let's say you want to create new versions of bacteria. You might want to add a gene to an existing bacteria that has never been expressed by the bug before. Statistical methods fail - no data. Let's say you want to try combinations of genes that are unique. Same problem.

Take a combination of genes that you have data for, and you may discover that - owing to changes in expression levels, etc. - their behavior ventures into a realm that you haven't any data for. While those combinations have existed before, there's no data for that combination with gene A turned up to 11. These methods blind you to situations that don't already exist, and that's a design killer.

From the department of Dancing YouTube Bird research

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:06:40 GMT

How exactly does one cite a YouTube video?

When Snowball, a sulphur-crested male cockatoo, was shown last year in a YouTube video apparently moving in time to pop music, he became an Internet sensation. But only now has his performance been subjected to scientific scrutiny. And the conclusion is that Snowball really can dance.

Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues say that Snowball’s ability to shake his stuff is much more than a cute curiosity. It could shed light on the biological bases of rhythm perception, and might even hold implications for the use of music in treating neurodegenerative disease.

I will happily volunteer myself as a negative rhythm control.

23andMe

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:30:05 GMT

Just got out of a talk given by the co-founder of 23andMe, the company that will sequence your SNPs. If I ever become unhappy in my current position, I would definitely email them a resume.

Flight

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:52:37 GMT

Weird science roundup

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:39:45 GMT

They Saved Fido's Brain - keeping a dog's head alive when it's been severed from its body. Videos you don't want to watch over a meal here.

17 hours without brain activity and still ticking.

A baby who was born twice. Once for surgery, after which she was returned to the womb.

A homebrew biotech club.

Euthanizing your bio-art piece.

You now know what I'm doing this summer

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:15:11 GMT

Synthetic biology - the crib sheet.

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:16:57 GMT

Fractally wrong:

The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.

Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person's opinions will lead to a rejoinder, full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time.

If you ever get embroiled in a discussion with a fractally wrong person on the Internet--in mailing lists, newsgroups, or website forums--your best bet is to say your piece once and ignore any replies, thus saving yourself time.

Light cages

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:39:52 GMT