All posts by Paul Raven

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New-found native life in the stratosphere

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skyWhile the needle-in-a-haystack search for life on other planets continues, we still consistently find new lifeforms on Earth when we look in the right places. Our oceans are still a source of biological mystery, but that’s not the only place that extremophile life can be found: the Indian Space Research Organisation recently announced the discovery of new bacterial species in the stratosphere:

Three bacterial colonies, namely, PVAS-1, B3 W22 and B8 W22 were, however, totally new species. All the three newly identified species had significantly higher UV resistance compared to their nearest phylogenetic neighbours.

“So what,” you may be thinking. Well:

The precautionary measures and controls operating in this experiment inspire confidence that these species were picked up in the stratosphere. While the present study does not conclusively establish the extra-terrestrial origin of microorganisms, it does provide positive encouragement to continue the work in our quest to explore the origin of life.

Another potential prop for panspermia? [via SlashDot; image by country_boy_shane]

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Friday Free Fiction for 20th March

Five days of clear blue skies and fresh breezes have led me to suspect I’ve been displaced into a parallel dimension or simulated universe by some capricious deity or artificial intelligence… but hey, even a False Spring is better than no Spring at all, as far as I’m concerned.

And whatever reality I happen to be perceiving right now, it doesn’t seem to have any shortage of free fiction floating around in it…

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A lone classic novel at ManyBooks: Deathworld by Harry Harrison

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COSMOS Magazine presents “The Broken Hourglass” by Andy Heizler

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HUB Magazine presents “SBIR Proposal“ by Richard K Lyon

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Strange Horizons presents “Nira and I” by Shweta Narayan

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Tor.com presents “We Haven’t Got There Yet” by Harry Turtledove

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Jason Stoddard delivers chapter 3.1 of Eternal Franchise

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Jayme Lynn Blaschke is up to the 34th installment of Memory

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Chris Howard is giving away his novel Seaborn in digital form

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Jeffrey A Carver is giving away copies of his novel Sunborn in multiple DRM-free formats

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Subterranean Online presents “The Dry Spell” by James P Blaylock

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Weird Tales presents “All In” by Peter Atwood

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And as always our thanks to the tireless crew of the USS SF Signal, who boldly go further in search of free fiction online than almost anyone else:

  • Chris Dolley is making his book Resonance available as a free download [and an intriguing brain-bender of a story it is, too]
  • The latest issue of Concatenation has been posted and includes the story “The Invisible Hand” by Allan M Rees
  • Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist presents “The Best Monkey” by Daniel Abraham
  • The new issue of Ray Gun Revival features fiction by Adrian Simmons, Paula R Stiles, O Charles Swallows, Jr., Steven Gerard, Chip Meador, M Keaton, Keanan Brand, L S King, and Paul Christian Glenn
  • Book View Cafe presents chapter 1 of The Betrayal by Pati Nagle

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Once again my schedule means I’ll miss the bulk of this week’s Friday Flash, but as ever it’ll be collected up in next week’s post. Meanwhile, Sumit Dam came in early enough to make the cut with “The Black Dog“.

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And that’s it for another week, it seems. Don’t forget to let us know of anything you think merits inclusion in Friday Free Fiction; in the meantime, have a good weekend!

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Backyard biotech

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Lego DNAWe’ve mentioned garage-sized biotech start-ups before, but not everyone’s in it for the money. As the price barrier to genetic engineering falls, some folk are hacking genes in an attempt to make the world a better place – like Meredith Patterson, for example:

The 31-year-old ex-computer programmer and now biohacker is working on modifying jellyfish genes and adding them to yoghurt to detect the toxic chemical melamine, which was found in baby milk in China last year after causing a number of deaths, and kidney damage to thousands of infants. Her idea is to engineer yoghurt so that in the presence of the toxin it turns fluorescent green, warning the producer that the food is contaminated. If her experiment is successful, she will release the design into the public domain.

Great stuff… but as the article at The Guardian points out, easy-entry biohacking presents as many risks as it offers fixes:

… Helen Wallace of GeneWatch in the UK thinks biohacking could be dangerous. “It is increasingly easy to order genes by mail,” she says. “Something like smallpox is hard to get, but there are other organisms that could become harmful. If you change a living organism’s properties, you could also change its interactions with the environment or the human body.” She adds: “Scientists are notorious for not seeing the unintended consequences.”

“Where is the oversight?” asks another interviewee, and it’s a good point. Will a self-policing global community of genetic scientists emerge, keeping an eye on one another and sharing data in the hopes of collaborating their way to success? The tools are there to enable it, at least.

Of course, it would be easy for individuals to slip through the cracks if they really wanted to… but the same is true of the old system as well. Maybe the best way to make sure we don’t get wiped out by a rogue scientist is to do the best we can to avoid making them feel disenfranchised and unappreciated. [image by mknowles]

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Battlestar Galactica producers and cast address United Nations

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Battlestar Galactica cylonNo, seriously. The UN invited some of the cast and crew behind successful TV sf series Battlestar Galactica to the United Nations Economic and Social Council to discuss the similarities between the show’s storylines and real-life politics in a changing world:

Some of the thematic parallels seemed a bit forced, but the show’s scenes about human rights and terrorism fit particularly well. UN officials continually mentioned eerie echoes of the real world in “Battlestar.”

“I’ve heard these words from people before, and they weren’t actors,” said Robert Orr, a UN assistant secretary-general for policy planning. He singled out the “Battlestar” story arc on New Caprica that deals with issues of insurgency and terrorism, and thanked Moore and Eick for creating a show which gave people cause to think about such issues.

Moore said that he continually tried to use “Battlestar” to flip familiar situations and put the audience in uncomfortable spots — such as creating situations where humans resorted to suicide bombings and torture against the Cylons, the supposed “villains” at the start of the show who gradually become more sympathetic.

Quite how much impact this will have on UN policy (if any) remains to be seen, but it’s refreshing to see people taking science fiction seriously for its deep themes rather than snarking about its surface tropes. [image by chanchan222]

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Peer-to-peer open-source hardware funding

electronic hardwareIn a moment of pure blogging synchronicity – right after a commenter dismissed the story about Detroit artists buying cheap houses as irrelevant, using the phrase “[c]all me when it is a commune of semiconductor engineers” – here’s a story about open-source hardware engineers getting together and forming a communal bank to provide start-up loans:

… open source hardware requires more financial investment than open source software. It isn’t as easy as downloading a few open source programs on to your existing computer, explains Stack. “With open source hardware you don’t get a finished product until you have put in some money,” he says. For instance, there’s the cost of the printed circuit boards, the solder and the components.

“To build open source software you just need to set up a project on Sourceforge,” says Huynh. “But if you get open source hardware wrong, it burns a hole in the wallet.”

The Open Source Hardware Bank, which isn’t yet fully up and running as a federally regulated lending institution, allows those interested in open source hardware to make investments in specific projects, then (hopefully) reap returns ranging from 5 percent to 15 percent from the successful sale of the projects. For the creators, the bank offers funding that could bring down the costs of their project and give them the stimulus to try out new ideas.

So, a miniature investment banking system based around a community with common interests; financial mobility and specialist knowledge are the main differences from more traditional models.

“Groups of people that have strong shared interest are really the perfect place for peer-to-peer financing to work,” says Scott Pitts, former managing director of Zopa U.S. “As a group they are not out to make a billion dollars, they just want to fund their passion and do it in a sustainable way.”

Only time will tell whether it will stay the course, naturally (and they may not be working on VLSI chip fabrication) but there’s your proof that it’s not just “hippies” and drop-outs who are trying to extricate themselves from the old systems. [via BoingBoing; image by jpokele]