Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
Posted in Biology on Aug 9th, 2007
When people hear about biofuels, they typically think of ethanol brewed from corn. That’s a reasonable association: this year the American corn crop is up nearly 20% from last year for this very reason. On the other hand, you might have also seen articles about the problems with the corn-to-ethanol process. Growing corn is, for [...]
Posted in Biology on Jul 27th, 2007
In the continuing series of strange animal vs. animal YouTube videos, here is one from the Seattle Aquarium. Poor little octopus. Sitting defenseless in a tank full of sharks. Poor little guy. I suppose that if sharks made their own version of a movie like Jaws, it would be called Eight Legs. “Just when you [...]
Posted in Biology on Jul 24th, 2007
Freeman Dyson, the physicist, provocateur, and one-time colleague of Richard Feynman, has written a piece for the New York Review of Books called Our Biotech Future, and boy is it a doozy. This is no timid prediction about curing the common cold or even avoiding the next plague. It’s a full-on embrace of a bio-kaleidoscopic [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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