Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
Posted in Uncategorized on May 14th, 2010
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 down versions of them. We carry that flat forehead and big brain cavity (relative to skull size) right [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 25th, 2010
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, asphalt, synthetic rubber and fibers, flavorings and fragrances, cosmetics, medicine precursors, and on and on. On the plus side, we can be congratulated [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 8th, 2010
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 Carlson’s Synthesis blog because he’s the author of an article on the economics of DNA synthesis (PDF). I [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 27th, 2010
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 you. Of all the people in the world, you are the only donor guaranteed to cause [...]
Posted in Biology on Nov 18th, 2009
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 about, like a picture of the inauguration, or a map of the planet. It can be very disorienting when you’re zooming [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 26th, 2009
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, mostly ones named after pairs of obscure central-European doctors. This gene causes Niemann-Pick disease; that one causes Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 27th, 2009
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 design, and we can benefit from simply copying it. According to BotJunkie, the robofish will monitor pollution [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 8th, 2009
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 one-way trip to blindness. But the barreleye fish (for its tubular, or barrel-shaped, eyes) lost its eyelids even as [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 25th, 2008
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 are insufficiently protected in poorer “southern” countries like Brazil and India. What’s less well known is that these same southern countries have intellectual property concerns of their [...]
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 [...]
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