nature items › MachineMachine /stream

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

Portfolio Sampling, Acclimatisation, and the ‘Die Hard’ Method

October 7 2012, 3:48pm | Comments

Twitter Links Synthetic Biology: Designing a “Metaphysical” Chicken

The ultimate design material is one that understands what it is to become. By way of an example, I’d like to think about how…

September 5 2012, 1:20am | Comments

Link Synthetic Biology: Designing a “Metaphysical” Chicken

The ultimate design material is one that understands what it is to become. By way of an example, I’d like to think about how we might design a chicken. Think…

September 5 2012, 1:20am | 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 Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson on the origins of…

RICH AND SEEMINGLY BOUNDLESS as the creative arts seem to be, each is filtered through the narrow biological channels of human cognition. Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided…

April 21 2012, 5:37am | 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 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 Next What?

Technology is never a neutral tool. It is rather a socio-cultural dimension... Next Nature “refers to the nature produced by humans and their technology.”…

April 4 2012, 1:42am | Comments

Twitter Links Should we clone Neanderthals?

If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture…

April 4 2012, 1:42am | Comments

Link A universe without purpose

The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis. Everywhere we look, it appears that the…

April 2 2012, 2:38pm | 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 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 Billion Dollar Brain in a box

Officially, the Swiss Academy of Sciences meeting in Bern on 20 January was an overview of large-scale computer modelling in neuroscience. Unofficially, it was neuroscientists' first real chance to get…

February 24 2012, 3:33pm | Comments

Twitter Links At what age do babies enter the uncanny valley?

Human Beings Enter the Uncanny Valley Between 6 and 12 Years of Age

February 13 2012, 9:06am | Comments

Link We live in a "more-than-human" universe

The new political ecology is thus emerging from a call for greater humility toward the world and all the life forms it may hold, both literally and figuratively. Rather than…

February 13 2012, 2:09am | Comments

Link The meaning of monsters, magic and miracles

Monsters demonstrate, monsters alert us: whether or not the etymologies relating the word to both “monstro” (I show) and “moneo” (I warn), are correct, monsters act as a moral compass.…

February 9 2012, 10:33am | Comments

Link Nature, nurture and liberal values

Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge. But people—and politics and morality—cannot be described just by neural impulses

January 25 2012, 10:35am | Comments

Twitter Links Cross-section of a tree played like a record on a turntable

This music -- which sounds like a moody piano soundtrack for a existentialist movie about a rainy day -- is made by slicing a…

January 19 2012, 7:54am | Comments

Link Kids, unlike adults, think technology is fundamentally human

With children so easy to embrace robotics, it’s clear that there’s a ton of potential for integrating intelligent technologies into learning environments. Besides, the idea of “exploring and creating” sounds…

January 19 2012, 2:13am | 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

Video

January 15 2012, 3:49pm | Comments

Link It’s Only Humanist

To me it tastes like a desire to locate man’s place in a world that he perceives primarily with the aid of machines. The art of the Greeks has been…

January 4 2012, 9:16am | Comments

Portfolio Noise; Mutation; Autonomy: A Mark on Crusoe’s Island

December 7 2011, 8:50am | 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

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

Tumblr nevver: The Cephalopoda

November 8 2011, 12:04pm | 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

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

Video

October 2 2011, 2:40pm | 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

Twitter Links Implications of 'uplifting'

Is it Ethical to Make Animals as Smart as People?

August 30 2011, 5:52am | Comments

Tumblr (Quote) Michel Serres, The Natural Contract

“Suppose two speakers, determined to contradict each other. As violent as their confrontation may be, as long as they are willing to continue the discussion they must speak a common language in order for the dialogue to take…

August 9 2011, 5:36am | Comments

Tumblr Best guess for this image: giant isopod

August 3 2011, 1:28am | 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 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

Link Regulations proposed for animal–human chimaeras

The increasingly sophisticated blending of different species to create chimaeras is pushing biology into a new ethical dimension. Last year, scientists used new stem-cell technologies to create a mouse with…

July 22 2011, 1:30am | Comments

Tumblr (Quote) Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics

“Nothing new under the reign of the same and under the same reign, preserved. Nothing new and nothing to be born, no nature. This is death, eternally. Nature put to death, its birth unwanted. The science of this…

July 7 2011, 12:03pm | 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 Being human

Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use…

June 25 2011, 8:55am | Comments

Link Perfection Is Not A Useful Concept

Interview with Nick Bostrom Our long track record of survival–humans have been around for about 100,000 years–gives us some assurance that the natural risks have been rather small. If they…

June 20 2011, 9:21am | 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

Portfolio “EveryThing on the Face of the Earth”

June 12 2011, 10:36am | 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 This will be the Century of Disasters

A half-mile wide twister tore through Joplin, Mo., on Sunday, killing nearly 100. The tornado was one of 68 reported across seven states this weekend. Unfortunately, this century will be…

May 25 2011, 3:52am | Comments

Portfolio Headless Research

May 15 2011, 10:26am | Comments

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