life items › MachineMachine /stream

“I knew as a kid I’d have to take care of it. I had prepared myself for it – for this moment,” Greg M., 41, says rather stoically of the…

May 4 2012, 4:36am | Comments

Link Children of Hoarders on Leaving the Cluttered Nest

In dealing with her mother’s home in Minneapolis, Ms. Sholl has spent much of her life alternating between feeling shame about its squalid condition and attempting to rid it of…

May 4 2012, 3:45am | Comments

Link The social cell

A single cell, such as a bacterium, is the simplest thing that can be alive. In addition to the materials from which it is constructed, it needs three features: a…

April 30 2012, 10:46am | Comments

Twitter Links Is Chernobyl a Wild Kingdom or a Radioactive Den of Decay?

The pine trees framing the entrance to the forest appear to be normal. Unremarkable. But the crackling dosimeter says otherwise. On this freezing February…

April 20 2012, 7:36am | Comments

Twitter Links Buying the Body of Christ

“We’re proud to put our name on what will become the body of Jesus.” The wafers I bought were manufactured by the Cavanagh Company…

April 8 2012, 1:06am | Comments

Twitter Links Bespoke pets: Just press “print” | The Economist

Thanks to 3D printing, it will soon be possible to design and build household animals to order. GeneDupe’s Universal Pet Printer is loaded with…

April 5 2012, 3:02am | Comments

Twitter Links Daphne Koller: when machines are almost human

The world is entering an age of superabundant data. We’re spewing out masses of information: from credit card charges to consumer shopping patterns and…

April 4 2012, 1:42am | Comments

Twitter Links Everything You Wanted to Know About Data Mining but Were Afraid to Ask

To most of us data mining goes something like this: tons of data is collected, then quant wizards work their arcane magic, and then…

April 3 2012, 2:33pm | 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 Bacteria Use ‘Chemical Twitter’ and ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ to Make Decisions

In life-threatening conditions, microbes use game theory to account for neighbors’ decisions and work out their best tactics for survival. New research presented at…

March 27 2012, 2:06pm | Comments

Twitter Links Borges: The Task of Art

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something…

March 19 2012, 4:25pm | 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

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 Anatomy of Norbiton: labyrinthine

Some deaths are linear; others are labyrinthine. In some the journey of the soul is straight, direct, if necessarily troubled. Thus it crosses water,…

March 11 2012, 4:12am | Comments

Instapaper 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, 5:34am | 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, 4:36am | 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, 4:20pm | 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, 12:50pm | Comments

Tumblr nevver: The Cephalopoda

November 8 2011, 1:04pm | 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

Video

September 18 2011, 4:21am | Comments

Tumblr (Quote) "What is an enemy, who is he to us, and how must we deal…

“What is an enemy, who is he to us, and how must we deal with him? Another way to put it, for example, is: What is cancer? - a growing collection of malignant cells that we must at…

September 14 2011, 5:01am | Comments

Biblio The Logic of Life by Francois Jacob

August 31 2011, 7:31am | Comments

Link Reading Life - What We Do to Books

There has always been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us. Far less attention has been paid to the effect that we (the readers)…

August 30 2011, 9:08am | Comments

Link Reading Life - What We Do to Books

There has always been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us. Far less attention has been paid to the effect that we (the readers)…

August 30 2011, 8:32am | Comments

Twitter Links Implications of 'uplifting'

Is it Ethical to Make Animals as Smart as People?

August 30 2011, 5:52am | Comments

Link Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history

By comparing individual DNA letters in multiple modern human genomes with those in the Neanderthal genome, the date of that interbreeding has now been pinned down to 65,000–90,000 years ago.…

August 15 2011, 2:45am | Comments

Link On Discovering Life

There is an aspect of life sciences that has been largely absent: the confrontation of fundamental questions of biology much as particle accelerators grapple with fundamental questions of physics. The…

July 27 2011, 3:05pm | Comments

Link New York - Empire of Evolution

Dr. Munshi-South has joined the ranks of a small but growing number of field biologists who study urban evolution — not the rise and fall of skyscrapers and neighborhoods, but…

July 26 2011, 1:55pm | Comments

Link What's human? What's animal? And what of the…

Friday's report by the Academy of Medical Sciences on the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the human and the animal is the latest in a long series of policy reflections on…

July 25 2011, 3:20pm | Comments

Wikipedia Clinamen Clinamen is the Latin name Lucretius gave to the unpredictable swerve of atoms, in the atomistic doctrine of Epicurus. According to Lucretius, the unpredictable swerve occurs "at no…

July 7 2011, 11:15am | Comments

Link Heaven for Atheists

It’s human nature, I suppose, to want to survive, to resist succumbing to the same fate all living things do. It’s the reason we write books, create art, have children—we’re…

July 4 2011, 9:01am | Comments

Link A Home Before the End of the World

Our ignorance is truly staggering. According to some estimates, 95 percent of organisms in the soil alone are unknown to science. Many of them labor unseen, in the dark, serving…

June 29 2011, 4:11pm | Comments

Wikipedia Risks to civilization, humans and planet Earth Risks to civilization, humans, and planet Earth are existential risks that could threaten humankind as a whole, have adverse consequences for the course of human civilization, or even…

June 26 2011, 11:00am | Comments

Link Three arguments against the singularity

This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to…

June 23 2011, 2:48am | Comments

Wikipedia Experiments in the Revival of Organisms Experiments in the Revival of Organisms is a 1940 motion picture which documents Soviet research into the resuscitation of clinically dead organisms. It is available from the Prelinger…

June 15 2011, 9:12am | Comments

Link Man Is Not Cat Food

In the last decade, human vanity has taken a major hit. Traits once thought to be uniquely, even definingly human have turned up in the repertoire of animal behaviors: tool…

June 12 2011, 8:12am | Comments

Link Biomathematics: The formula of life

Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great revolutions have changed the way that scientists think about life: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification…

May 11 2011, 3:32am | Comments

Link How the Illusion of Being Observed Can Make…

A group of scientists at Newcastle University, headed by Melissa Bateson and Daniel Nettle of the Center for Behavior and Evolution, conducted a field experiment demonstrating that merely hanging up…

May 11 2011, 3:14am | Comments

Link Gigantic New SuperOrganism with 'Social Intelligence' is Devouring…

In 2000, Roy Cullimore, a microbial ecologist and Charles Pellegrino, scientist and author of Ghosts of the Titanic discovered that the Titanic --which sank in the Atlantic Ocean 97 years…

April 24 2011, 2:53am | Comments

Link Where Do Animals Come From?

The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From single-celled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity.…

March 20 2011, 5:37am | Comments

Link The not so universal tree of life or…

According to this view, ancient viruses, as with the ones today, could only make copies of themselves by succesfully infecting a host. So they become engines of innovation, using every…

March 2 2011, 7:32am | Comments

Link Paramecium video games

In a clever juxtaposition of biology and technology, Stanford physicist, Ingmar Riedel-Kruse and his team are creating paramecia-based versions of classic video games that you can play by controlling the…

January 20 2011, 5:16pm | Comments

Link John Gray on humanity's quest for immortality

How do we deal with a purposeless universe and the finality of death? From Victorian séances to the embalming of Lenin's corpse to schemes for uploading our minds into cyberspace,…

January 9 2011, 4:38pm | Comments

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