Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Biology on Jun 26th, 2007
I’m reading a biology book right now, The Making of the Fittest, that talks about how much information about the past we’re able to reconstruct from the forensic record of currently available DNA. One of the things that Sean Carroll, the author, talks about is the fossil genes to be found in our genome. Fossil [...]
Posted in Biology on Jun 19th, 2007
Movies that depict fictional encounters with alien life forms always seem so tame compared to the weird animals here on Earth. The deep sea is one of the best places to go looking for the unusual, and the good news is that we’re getting lots of snapshots these days.
Claire Nouvian is the author of a [...]
Posted in Biology on May 23rd, 2007
I just came across this Wired item on a magnetic brain stimulator that’s being discussed at the latest American Psychiatric Association meeting as a new therapeutic tool for treating depression.
It works like this: much of your brain activity is electrical. You can drive electrical activity by changing nearby magnetic fields. Thus, with cleverly designed [...]
Posted in Biology on Mar 26th, 2007
How close are we to truly playing Dr. Frankenstein and creating life from scratch? Watch this video to the end to find out. It starts off pretty tame, but stick with it. The ending is the most profoundly disturbing tub of damp cornstarch you will ever meet. Wet cornstarch is weird stuff. Even without divine [...]
Posted in Biology on Mar 21st, 2007
Read this story and you may well conclude a robot uprising is right around the corner.
Carl Zimmer’s recent post Evolving Robotspeak describes robotics research done by social evolution researcher Laurent Keller in Switzerland. Plenty of folks have used genetic algorithms to “breed” robots, but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone using family [...]
Posted in Biology on Jan 12th, 2007
In the fall of 2002, MIT proudly announced its OpenCourseWare initiative. They were rightly praised at the time for putting course materials directly online and making them freely available to anyone with access to the web. I was interested in biology classes and poked around the site and came away a little disappointed. Not all [...]
Posted in Biology on Dec 20th, 2006
I’m not sure who’s behind NEXTgencode, but it’s a well done parody of the commercial promise of biotechnology. Some of the things they bring up in joke form are sure to be real issues at some point in the future. How much would you pay for a terminally cute PermaPuppy? How much is the gene [...]
Posted in Biology on Nov 28th, 2006
Video blogs are getting more and more interesting. This one, My JoVE, isn’t really a blog so much as a repository of valuable information for biologists, but it aspires to become a kind of video journal. JoVE stands for Journal of Visualized Experiments, and they’re trying to attack two big problems in biological research: “low [...]
Dogma is a funny word to appear so prominently in a science like biology. Any picture, any model, any theory currently in vogue is resting on the shifting sands of biological weirdness. I love, for instance, the fact that the Nobel Prize in medicine this year was awarded for major form of genetic regulation that [...]
Posted in Biology on Sep 29th, 2006
A few years ago, PBS ran a series called, simply, DNA. It included some of the spiciest, most inspiring animations of biological molecules in action that I’d ever seen. I longed to linger over them and savor them, but they came and went so fast in the show, and until this evening I had no [...]
