There’s a strange technological yin-yang to these two stories. First, scientists at Tel-Aviv University have discovered that artificial cultures of live neurons can be used to store data in the form of coordinated firing patterns in a similar manner to silicon chips. Second, an international team of boffins have started the Sensopac Project, a program intended to develop an ‘artificial cerebellum’, a device that will be installed in robots to enable them to move more like living creatures. Can anyone else spot a convergence of ideas happening here?

Via Bruce Sterling, I present to you a website that operates exactly as advertised by its name – An Atlas of the Universe.

A forthcoming psychology paper is bound to provoke some lively debate on matters political. In researching the way people reach moral judgements (and finding in the process that an awful lot of it boils down to subsequent justification of instinctive decisions), the psychologists have concluded that people with conservative political attitudes have more subsystems in their moral processing brain centres than their liberal equivalents. Ample opportunity for spin from both sides with those results, I’d say. Watch closely for the first salvoes!

Astronomy and the space sciences are going through somewhat of a renaissance, in both senses of the word – not only becoming of greater interest to the general public, but undergoing revolutions of theory and methodology. For example, not only are more extrasolar planets being discovered at an ever increasing rate, but their discovery is forcing changes to the theories of how planets are formed – it now appears that the heaviest of stars are actually the most likely to form a planetary system, contrary to previous thought. As always, Centauri Dreams provides the stuff that the mainstream media doesn’t bother with – like the fact that the water in the atmosphere of Gliese 436b isn’t quite what we’re accustomed to thinking of as water here on Earth.

There are few writers of science fiction whose work I look forward to more than Rudy Rucker‘s. His playful and laid-back sense of humour lends everything he writes a unique and unmistakable tone – and that applies to his non-fiction too. If his work is unfamiliar to you, this essay by Rucker for Newsweek on the not-so-science-fictional-any-more subject of synthetic biology should give you a taste of his style. [BoingBoing]