It sounds like a crazy idea – but then that’s what they said about penicillin. Scientists from the UK are planning to use a close relative of the E. coli virus as a ‘targeted antibacterial agent’ to combat increasingly drug-resistant bacterial infections like the infamous MRSA. I’m sure they know what they’re doing … but I’m guessing doctors will want to keep fairly quiet on the antibiotic’s origins at first. [Image by Justin Baeder]
An electronic nose to sniff out explosives
The mammalian nose is a powerful and sensitive organ – just ask your dog. That’s why an Israeli company have decided to mimic the olfactory organ in an ‘electronic nose’ that can be used to detect trace amounts of explosive materials, among other things. Yet another device for the street to find a use for …[Engadget]
Friday Free Fiction for August 31st
First, the old-school:
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Warlord of Mars is available as a free audiobook, or a free e-book at Manybooks.net, who also have The Players by Everett B. Cole.
I’ve always meant to read The Complete Works of H.G. Wells. I didn’t realise there’s nearly five thousand pages involved, but the PDF linked to there should be a little easier to carry around.
Now the new-school:
The website for John Joseph Adams’ Wastelands anthology has the full text of M. Rickert’s “Bread and Bombs” as well as stories by Cory Doctorow and Richard Kadrey
Some slightly sad news: after ten years, Infinity Plus is calling it a day. But the archives will stay available for some time yet, and there’s masses of good stuff in there – Bruce Sterling recommends Paul Di Filippo’s “What’s Up Tiger Lily?”
Non-fictional extra:
Michael Swanwick wrote an essay to present at a convention; Dinosaurs, Space Flight, and Science Fiction talks about three of the more recent literary movements on the genre fiction landscape, namely Interstitial Arts, The New Weird and Mundane Science Fiction. Infernokrusher appears to have been missed out …
Enjoy!
Writers, editors and anyone else – if you want something you’ve written or published on the web for free mentioned here, drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address listed for me on the Staff page, and I’ll include it in next week’s round-up.
First 3D VDU launched
I’m still waiting for my flying car, my personal robot assistant and my complete meals in pill form, but a little bit of the science fictional future looks to have just finally arrived – the first affordable non-vaporware 3D computer monitor is on sale right now. Whether it’s actually any good, I have no idea – but it’s a start.
Economics2.0 – bandwidth as currency?
The planned launch in January 2008 of Tribler, a variation on the BitTorrent protocol, is being hailed by the software’s creators as a way of sharing the burden of peer-to-peer networks more fairly, by treating bandwidth as a commodity to be traded on a global market. Which sounds great to me, especially as it’s open source … but isn’t it somewhat inevitable that someone will make a hacked version with the altruism overridden?
But leeching is hardly a new phenomenon, and by and large the web’s development as a resource for the average user can be largely ascribed to altruistic behavior by participants – Victor Keegan at The Guardian thinks the gift economy of the web actually promotes overall economic welfare. I’m inclined to agree, but I can think of a few counter-examples – how about you? [Image by Peter Kaminski]