Craig Venter had better watch out – he’s got some competition. Experts in the field predict we’ll see the first successful attempts at creating “wet artificial lifeforms” within three to ten years.
Tag Archives: science
Speed of light exceeded? Er, probably not.
You may have noticed the widely reported story that a team of German scientists have managed to make photons exceed the speed of light in the course of an experiment. Well, let’s just say that’s probably not exactly what happened. [Engadget]
Testing panspermia
Panspermia is the theory that life on Earth may have arrived in a nascent form from outer space, carried through the void as bacteria in comets or asteroids. It’s controversial, certainly, but persistent too (as well as being a classic science fiction trope). A Scottish scientist has decided to test the theory for plausibility by sending a chunk of rock into orbit and back on an ESA spacecraft, to determine whether microbes can survive not just the cold and vacuum of space, but also the violent physics of atmospheric reentry.
Update! This just in: Centauri Dreams pours water, or rather radiation, on the plausibility of panspermia.
Wolfram’s Magnum Opus Online
Stephen Wolfram’s immense tome “A New Kind of Science” is now available online, for free, in a really sharp, full color format. I won’t even pretend I’m going to read it, but if I ever do get the gumption to tackle it I’ll probably try it out online before I refinance my house to buy the book. [boingboing]
Where art meets science – the pickled frog webserver
It’s all there in the title, basically. “Experiments in Galvanism” is an art installation that consists of tank of mineral oil containing a dead frog … which has been rigged up with a miniature webserver, so that you can control the twitching of its limbs from anywhere in the world. [BoingBoing]
