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Link Opinion: The Case Against Species Revival

Editor's note: Stuart Pimm is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, and the 2006 laureate of the Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences awarded…

March 19 2013, 4:09pm | Comments

Link Scientist wants human woman to give birth to…

A scientist believes he's close to perfecting the necessary technology to clone a Neanderthal - all he needs is a human woman to gestate it.

January 22 2013, 3:44pm | Comments

Link Darwin Among the Machines — [To the Editor…

Sir—There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances. And…

December 31 2012, 6:54am | Comments

Link Neanderthals smart enough to copy humans

Fossils and artefacts pulled from the Grotte du Renne cave in central France present anthropologists with a Pleistocene puzzle. Strewn among the remains of prehistoric mammals are the bones of…

December 31 2012, 6:52am | Comments

Link Neanderthal vs. Homo sapiens: Who would win in…

team of archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and paleoartists has created a more accurate Neanderthal reconstruction, based on a nearly complete skeleton discovered in France more than 100 years ago. The La Ferrassie…

December 31 2012, 6:49am | Comments

Link The Fallacy of Dumb Superintelligence

This is what a New Yorker article has to say on the subject of “Moral Machines”: “An all-powerful computer that was programmed to maximize human pleasure, for example, might consign…

December 14 2012, 3:03am | Comments

Twitter Links Where Will The Next Pandemic Come From? And How Can We Stop It? | Popular Science

Where Will The Next Pandemic Come From? And How Can We Stop It? | Popular S

November 2 2012, 4:44am | Comments

Twitter Links Geologists drive golden spike toward Anthropocene's base

"I'm starting to think the strongest signal, one of them, is just nuclear explosions -- the test cases of atomic material," Crutzen said. "There…

September 18 2012, 4:23am | Comments

Wikipedia Ontogeny - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Ontogeny (also ontogenesis or morphogenesis) is the origin and the development of an organism – for example: from the fertilized egg to mature form. It covers in essence,…

September 17 2012, 6:22am | Comments

Twitter Links Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture

These past years have seen a revival of sorts of cyberpunk, that early-80s buzzword once excitingly epitomised by such concrete-and-neon spectacles as Blade Runner…

September 8 2012, 6:06am | Comments

Video

August 29 2012, 3:44am | Comments

Link "The Virus Planet" -- A Hidden Universe that…

In the invisible, parallel world of Earth, they kill half the bacteria in the ocean every day, and invade a microbe host 10 trillion times a second around the world.…

August 11 2012, 2:13pm | Comments

Link Passing the baton of life - from Schrödinger…

Craig Venter spins increasingly ubiquitous metaphor: "The digital and biological worlds are becoming interchangeable" "All living cells that we know of on this planet are 'DNA software'-driven biological machines comprised…

July 19 2012, 8:09am | Comments

Link Rationally Speaking: Enjoying natural selection on multiple levels

Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins was picking another fight. Normally, this would not be an occasion worthy of comment. The best way to distinguish between Professor Dawkins’ waking and sleeping states is…

July 10 2012, 2:53am | Comments

Link We Are Viral From the Beginning

Viruses are constantly swarming into our bodies. Sometimes they make us sick; sometimes our immune systems vanquish them; and sometimes they become a part of ourselves. A type of virus…

June 27 2012, 3:32pm | Comments

Link Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks…

June 15 2012, 5:29am | Comments

Link Evolution, Entropy, and Information

There are really two points. The first is a bit of technical background you can ignore if you like, and skip to the next paragraph. It’s the idea of “relative…

June 15 2012, 5:19am | Comments

Metafilter Sloppy MicroChips: Can a fair comparison be made between… Was reading about microchips that are designed to allow a few mistakes (known as 'Sloppy Chips'), and pondering equivalent kinds of 'coding' errors and entropy in biological systems.…

June 5 2012, 10:05am | Comments

Link Neanderthals Getting a Colourful Upgrade

A chorus of smart, modern minds is rising over the hills of anthropology that the ancient Neanderthals of Europe weren't anywhere nearly as dumb, insufferable and unrecognizable as everyone thought…

May 23 2012, 9:44am | Comments

Link We must set planetary boundaries wisely

As pressure on resources increases, pollution accumulates and humanity's impact on Earth escalates, global-scale governance of the environment is increasingly necessary. In June, the United Nations' Rio+20 Earth Summit in…

May 23 2012, 9:39am | Comments

Link A challenge to God-guided mutations

The renowned philosopher of science Elliott Sober has, in recent weeks, given a talk and written a paper that both make the same points: Evolution is totally silent on the…

May 17 2012, 3:35am | Comments

Link Did a Copying Mistake Build Man's Brain?

A copying error appears to be responsible for critical features of the human brain that distinguish us from our closest primate kin, new research finds. When tested out in mice,…

May 9 2012, 8:14am | Comments

Link Emergence of the Human 'SuperBrain' 75,000 Years Ago…

"Humans obviously evolved a much wider range of communication tools to express their thoughts, the most important being language," said Hoffecker, a fellow at CU's Institute of Arctic and Alpine…

April 22 2012, 4:15pm | Comments

Link Synthetic Genetic Polymers Capable of Heredity and Evolution

Genetic information storage and processing rely on just two polymers, DNA and RNA, yet whether their role reflects evolutionary history or fundamental functional constraints is currently unknown. With the use…

April 20 2012, 12:31pm | Comments

Link Q&A;: The Anthropology of Searching for Aliens

Before we can understand an alien civilization, it might be useful to understand our own. To help in this task, anthropologist Kathryn Denning of York University in Toronto, Canada studies…

April 6 2012, 2:07am | Comments

Link What is the biological equivalent of discovering the…

We put the question to experts in various fields. Biology is no stranger to large, international collaborations with lofty goals, they pointed out — the race to sequence the human…

March 29 2012, 8:44am | Comments

Twitter Links Physicists Discover Evolutionary Laws of Language

"Christopher Shea writes in the WSJ that physicists studying Google's massive collection of scanned books claim to have identified universal laws governing the birth,…

March 20 2012, 11:20am | Comments

Link Culturomics: Have physicists discovered the evolutionary laws of…

Can physicists produce insights about language that have eluded linguists and English professors? That possibility was put to the test this week when a team of physicists published a paper…

March 20 2012, 11:04am | Comments

Twitter Links God and the New Physics by Paul Davies

This is not a book about God: it is a book about what was in 1983 the new physics , by a distinguished scientist…

March 19 2012, 4:25pm | Comments

Twitter Links When independent thought flourishes

One of the things I instinctively hated about my “ancestral culture,” that of Bangladesh, is that there wasn’t that great of an emphasis on…

March 19 2012, 4:25pm | Comments

Tumblr “I’m not sure I want to evolve, when it comes right...

March 18 2012, 5:25pm | Comments

Findings Mat of microbes the size of Greece discovered on seafloor

Gargantuan whales and hefty cephalopods are typically thought of as the classic marine mammoths, but they might have to make way for the mighty microbes, which constitute 50 to 90 percent of the oceans’ total biomass, according to…

March 16 2012, 8:02am | Comments

Twitter Links Did Stone Age cavemen talk to each other in symbols?

Instead of studying those magnificent galloping horses and bisons, researchers are investigating the symbols painted beside them. These signs are rarely mentioned in most…

March 11 2012, 5:35am | Comments

Twitter Links Any Sufficiently Advanced Civilization is Indistinguishable from Nature

In Western cultures, nature is a cosmological, primal ordering force and a terrestrial condition that exists in the absence of human beings. Both meanings…

March 9 2012, 4:34am | Comments

Twitter Links The Virus Planet

"There are 10 billion trillion, trillion viruses inhabiting Earth... more stars than are in the Universe"

March 9 2012, 3:36am | Comments

Link What Happened Between the Neanderthals and Us?

The question of what defines the human has, of course, been kicking around since Socrates, and probably a lot longer. If it has yet to be satisfactorily resolved, then this,…

March 7 2012, 2:56pm | Comments

Twitter Links Bioconservatives vs. Bioprogressives

We are now living in the age of biopolitics, claims University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Jonathan Moreno in his new book The Body Politic: The…

March 1 2012, 1:36am | Comments

Twitter Links Wired for Culture: How Language Enabled "Visual Theft," Sparked Innovation, and Helped Us Evolve

Much has been said about what makes us human and what it means to be human. Language, which we’ve previously seen co-evolved with music…

February 28 2012, 6:35am | Comments

Twitter Links How We Won the Hominid Wars, and All the Others Died Out

How did our species come to rule the planet? Rick Potts argues that environmental instability and disruption were decisive factors in the success of…

February 25 2012, 9:35am | Comments

Twitter Links An Arthropod Version of Morlocks?

In the darkest depths of terra firma, springtails, a humble class of creepy-crawlies, quietly go about their business. Researchers documenting life in the world’s…

February 22 2012, 3:20pm | Comments

Twitter Links The Hobbit who helped us find our origins

Human beings have come to dominate our planet like no other creature before us. Today, our seven-billion-strong population inhabits most of the surface of…

February 21 2012, 1:20am | Comments

Twitter Links Computer viruses infecting worms to create hybrid 'Frankenmalware'

Most computer users are all too aware of the threat of viruses and worms infecting their machines, but according to security research firm BitDefender…

January 28 2012, 10:36am | Comments

Twitter Links Female Orgasm: An Evolutionary Journey

Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, among others, has described female orgasm as the female equivalent to male nipples, anatomy that one sex needed, while the…

January 23 2012, 8:21am | Comments

Twitter Links Rereading Darwin

The Dangers of Extrapolation (“Much light will be thrown on the origin of man.” Two centuries before Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of…

January 17 2012, 5:06pm | Comments

Findings quote from High Techne - Rutsky

The position of human beings in relation to this techno-cultural un-conscious cannot, therefore, be that of the analyst (or theorist) who, standing outside this space, presumes to know or control it.It must in-stead be a relation of connection…

January 6 2012, 7:52am | Comments

Twitter Links What We Learned About Our Human Ancestors in 2011

Genetic hints of extinct human lineages — and the benefits we might have received from having sex with them — were among the discoveries…

December 20 2011, 5:53pm | Comments

Twitter Links It Does Take a Village

It is possible to see Hrdy’s most recent book, Mothers and Others, as the third in a trilogy that began with The Woman That…

December 1 2011, 3:37am | Comments

Link What happens to a caterpillar's brain during metamorphosis?

Basically, three things can happen to any given neuron in the central nervous system. It's a really complex proccess! A) some neurons are born very early in the caterpillar's life…

November 30 2011, 11:50am | Comments

Twitter Links Paper On Super Flu Strain May Be Banned From Publication

"A Dutch researcher has created a virus with the potential to kill half of the planet's population."

November 29 2011, 6:53am | Comments

Link Neanderthal Neuroscience

As scientists began to build a database of human DNA in the 1990s, it became possible to test these ideas with genes. In his talk, Paabo described how he and…

November 21 2011, 2:09am | Comments

Link The Scariest Zombies in Nature

Once the fungus invades its victim’s body, it’s already too late. The invader spreads through the host in a matter of days. The victim, unaware of what is happening, becomes…

October 29 2011, 4:45pm | Comments

Link Is mental time travel what makes us human?

A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional…

October 28 2011, 10:32am | Comments

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