Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 8th, 2008
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 beardless-tyrannulet (not to be confused with the Ruby-crowned Kinglet) is a comparatively plain little flycatcher.
But I imagine any animal might have a hard time living [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 17th, 2008
If you think of a hole as positive space instead of negative space, then you can think of digging a hole as something like sculpting. Pour metal into the hole and you’ll get a sculpture that corresponds to the empty space.
This is worth considering because there is a guy, an entomologist named Dr. Walter Tschinkel, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 24th, 2008
I recently finished Before The Dawn by Nicholas Wade, a book about the evolution of the human race which I happily recommend.
Studying the history of human development has typically drawn on things buried in the dirt: paleontological/biological artifacts like the fossilized bones in Olduvai Gorge for one example, and archaeological/cultural artifacts like the ruins [...]
Posted in Biology on Mar 18th, 2008
I just finished reading Sean Carroll’s book The Making of the Fittest. Subtitled “DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution”, it’s the follow-on book to Endless Forms Most Beautiful. In this book Carroll devotes several chapters to demonstrating how, against our natural intuition, there really is enough time (given a few hundred million years) [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 19th, 2007
I was recently reading Sean Carroll’s excellent book on evolutionary developmental biology, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, in which he says that “brain size [in humans] roughly doubled in a million years.” This was a dramatic (and expensive) departure in the brainweight-to-bodyweight ratio compared to all other mammals. Carroll goes on to say:
The brain is a [...]
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 [...]
Posted in Biology on Sep 22nd, 2005
I knew it would come to this: dirt is officially good for you. The “hygiene hypothesis” has received another shot in the arm in a recent talk by Professor Peter Openshaw of Imperial College, London: How ‘Dirt’ Could Educate The Immune System And Help Treat Asthma.
What is the hygiene hypothesis? It’s the idea that being [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 25th, 2004
Your body evolved in an environment that was vastly filthier than the one you now inhabit. As a result, living with all this good hygiene can actually cause real problems in cases where your body has come to depend on filth. Your gut expects to manage large numbers of parasitic whipworms, for example, and, for [...]
