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Live! Nudis! (toxic nudibranchs, that is)
Some animals live up to their cool names. Animals like the toothy velociraptor and the mysterious leafy sea dragon. Others, despite their nifty cognomens, fall short. For example, the Northern...
View ArticleGenetic intellectual property
One of the great sticking points in international trade negotiations has been over intellectual property rights. The rich “northern” countries complain that their expensive movies, music, and software...
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Fish shows the value of keeping a clear head
There are many species of cave fish that, after millennia in utter darkness, have either lost their eyelids or lost their eyes entirely. You might think that losing your eyelids is a way station on a...
View ArticleBio-mimics and bio-copycats
On BotJunkie I came across this robotic fish video. The fish, from the University of Essex, is a careful model in form and behavior of a real fish. The idea is that nature has already created a great...
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Virusworld
In the book Genome, author Matt Ridley starts chapter four like so: Open any catalogue of the human genome and you will be confronted not with a list of human potentialities, but a list of diseases,...
View ArticleCell Size and Scale
In a Zoomable User Interface (ZUI), you can move up and down the scale of a spatial dimension easily. This feels very natural when you’re zooming through something that you have some physical intuition...
View ArticleRegenerative medicine: Printed parts for a broken heart
If you needed a kidney, who’s the best person in the world to donate that kidney to you? Your brother? Your sister? Your child? If I told you this was a trick question, you might guess the answer is...
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Nature Biotechnology on Synthetic Biology
If you have any interest in synthetic biology, Nature Biotechnology has been kind enough to A) devote a special issue to the topic and B) make it available for free. I first learned about this on Rob...
View ArticleMicro-Brewing the Bioeconomy
The amount of useful stuff we squeeze out of petroleum is shockingly long. In addition to merely propelling us in various motor vehicles, it takes the form of plastics, lubricants, solvents, waxes,...
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Arrested development or pedomorphic edge?
It’s remarkable how much a baby ape resembles a small human. The similarity decreases quickly with age, but it does help explain how we can share so much DNA with them. In many ways we’re just slowed...
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