Hive Mind

2006-02-05T18:16:00.000-05:00

Woman bites husband to death

I guess this is old news, but I thought it was amusing:

Modesto police said Kelli Pratt wanted her feeble 65-year-old husband to have sex with her the night of Oct. 7.

When Arthur Pratt refused, police said, his 45-year-old wife held him down and bit him repeatedly during a savage attack that ultimately killed him.

Arthur, whose skin was riddled with more than 20 deep tooth marks, died Sunday at Doctors Memorial Center in Modesto -- six days after the attack.

Detective Sgt. Al Carter said Wednesday that Dr. Jennifer Rulon, a Stanislaus County forensic pathologist, believes that the case will be ruled a homicide and that the bites are the likely cause of death.

"He was able to dial 911 that night," Carter said. "We have a tape recording of him screaming while she was biting him. When officers arrived, he was screaming that he'd been assaulted. She fought with the officers and tried to bite them, too."

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(Via Fortean Times).

2005-12-29T13:54:00.000-05:00

Biomimicry in Space Exploration

From the BBC article:

Ideas that could further exploration in space are coming from a surprising source - animals such as ants, fish and squirrels.
The future of space exploration could lie in biomimetics, where engineering meets biology. In effect, it steals nature's evolutionary tricks to create revolutionary applications.

Engineers like Dr Alex Ellery, head of the Robotics Research Group at the University of Surrey, are trying to find out how natural systems might inspire human-made technology in space.

"One obvious way is in the way nature, in particular plants, package themselves into very small volumes, and yet deploy large structures, like flowers and so on," he told BBC World Service's Discovery programme.

"We can learn about how to package things like spacecraft, and then have them deploy their solar arrays, antennae and so forth.

"The applications are essentially limited only by our own imagination."

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(Via Vortexegg).

2005-12-10T02:38:00.000-05:00

Gary Busey's feces on sale for only $23.00

Unfortunately I don't think this is real.

Link

2005-12-10T02:25:00.000-05:00

In case you forgot how fucking batshit crazy some people are

Here's a sample:

The reader must be aware of the evil mathematicians, because most of them are engaged in their fantasies, really believing that mathematics is "the Science that doesn't lie, the mother of all Sciences, the owner of the truth", and so on. If they were lovers of the truth they would reject the monstrous marriage of reality and unreality. The roots of this evil math spring out of Kabbalah, Sorcery, and Freemasonry

I've heard people attribute alot of things to the "diabolical machinations of those evil freemasons", but mathematics!? This guy also believes that the earth is flat, and his "proof" of this statement is AMAZING! His website is here.

2005-12-08T01:07:00.000-05:00

Liberate not Exterminate

I'm typically not too impressed with crimethinc's publications, but I have to admit that this pamphlet makes for a pretty sensible and refreshing read.

2005-11-02T22:41:00.000-05:00

20 percent of human genes have been patented

Think you own what's in your cells? Think again:

A new study shows that 20 percent of human genes have been patented in the United States, primarily by private firms and universities.

The study, which is reported this week in the journal Science, is the first time that a detailed map has been created to match patents to specific physical locations on the human genome.

Researchers can patent genes because they are potentially valuable research tools, useful in diagnostic tests or to discover and produce new drugs.

"It might come as a surprise to many people that in the U.S. patent system human DNA is treated like other natural chemical products," said Fiona Murray, a business and science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and a co-author of the study.

"An isolated DNA sequence can be patented in the same manner that a new medicine, purified from a plant, could be patented if an inventor identifies a [new] application."

Meanwhile, the anti-biotech crowd blathers on and on about how it's not "safe" to eat biotech foods. Now, as someone who's had a fair bit of training in biology, I can assure you that for all practical purposes, GMO-containing foods are just as safe to eat as any other type of food. But that's not the real point. In fact, it's that very type of technophobic discourse that obscures the real issues, such as the fact that access to this technology is denied to the general public. Furthermore, this denial of access is maintained through widespread scientific illiteracy, the spreading of corporate misinformation, and perhaps most crucially, the existence of an archaic and draconian system of intellectual property laws. Thus, I'd like to humbly make the tactical suggestion that anyone concerned about biotechnology should make dismantling the institution of intellectual property as we know it a primary focus of their efforts.

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2005-10-28T17:16:00.000-04:00

2005-09-26T22:11:00.000-04:00

Viral Batteries

Biomimicry - the technique of looking to living systems as inspiration for the design of materials, devices, or architecture - is a really cool idea. This example struck me as particularly interesting:

Material scientist and engineer Angela Belcher's interest in nanotechnology came from studying how nature makes materials. "Abalone just happened to be a great example of a natural biomaterial, and one of the reasons that it is such a great material is that it's constructed on the nano-scale," she says. "So I approached the question, can you use the same principles that nature's evolved and apply it to other materials that nature hasn't had the opportunity to work with yet, like electronic materials and magnetic materials?" Since then, her goal has been to grow inexpensive nanomaterials in her lab at room temperature and pressure, that, among other qualities, self-assemble, self-correct and generate little waste, but offer the possibility of ever smaller and more powerful electronic devices.

Copying how red abalone build their shells, Belcher and her team are developing a way to actually "grow" rechargeable batteries with the help of viruses — tiny microbes that multiply by infecting living cells. Their technique would take a matter of weeks, rather than the 15 years the red abalone needs to assemble a full-sized shell.

"We're forcing the viruses to interact with materials that they would never interact with, normally. So now the viruses are a template to actually grow that material… it incorporates these new materials into its coat surface," Belcher explains.

The team uses a type of virus that infect bacteria, called bacteriophages. When mixed together with a metal or other materials, millions of them can align and stack themselves into orderly layers, creating a new material.

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(Via Worldchanging).

2005-09-13T12:14:00.000-04:00

South African Inventor makes Anti-rape Female Condom

KLEINMOND, South Africa (Reuters) - A South African inventor unveiled a new anti-rape female condom on Wednesday that hooks onto an attacker's penis and aims to cut one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world.

"Nothing has ever been done to help a woman so that she does not get raped and I thought it was high time," Sonette Ehlers, 57, said of the "rapex", a device worn like a tampon that has sparked controversy in a country used to daily reports of violent crime.

Police statistics show more than 50,000 rapes are reported every year, while experts say the real figure could be four times that as they say most rapes of acquaintances or children are never reported.

Ehlers said the "rapex" hooks onto the rapist's skin, allowing the victim time to escape and helping to identify perpetrators.

"He will obviously be too pre-occupied at this stage," she told reporters in Kleinmond, a small holiday village about 100km (60 miles) east of Cape Town. "I promise you he is going to be too sore. He will go straight to hospital."

The device, made of latex and held firm by shafts of sharp barbs, can only be removed from the man through surgery which will alert hospital staff, and ultimately, the police, she said.

It also reduces the chances of a woman falling pregnant or contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases from the attacker by acting in the same way as a female condom.

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2005-09-08T21:34:00.000-04:00

Master P Launches Hurricane Relief Effort

New Orleans native Master P has started up a relief organization called Team Rescue. He's also organizing a Save Our Hood benifit concert and a benefit album. All I know is that I'd take him over FEMA any day. By the way, Team Rescue is accepting donations on their website.

Link

2005-08-22T21:20:00.000-04:00

Blue Gene to simulate rat neocortical column

Some say the most complex object in the universe is the human brain and that the brain’s most complex creation is the computer. With this in mind, a team of Swiss neuroscientists and computer engineers plan to go full circle: They want to program a computer to create a brain.

The scientists, in collaboration with IBM, are launching the effort by building a computer model of the neocortical column of a rat, a single circuit of about 10,000 cells, each of which is capable of thousands of connections. Rat brain information is being downloaded into IBM’s Blue Gene computer, which can crunch through 22 trillion operations per second. Although this first model will depict only the electrical activity of the neurons, future versions will also simulate chemicals in the brain, of interest because the combination of electricity and chemistry may cause thought. Eventually, as the simulations become more sophisticated and computer technology advances, the team hopes to replicate the entire rat brain.

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2005-08-02T15:48:00.000-04:00

Gen-pets

Gen-pets, by Canadian sculptor Adam Brandejs, consists of 19 plastic packages hung by hooks within a mock store set-up displaying streamlined, mass produced bio-engineered life. Each package consists of 3 layers of vacuum formed plastic surrounding a foam latex animatron: strange animals, grown and altered, by bioengineering, but obviously mammalian.

They are twitching, shaking, clawing, moaing and head-butting their packaging with twist ties to keep them held in place. Feeding tubes supply the creatures with nourishment, as well as electricity for the glowing "fresh strips" and fully working heart monitors.

(Via We-Make-Money-Not-Art).

2005-07-08T14:58:00.000-04:00

New company to research vat grown meat

Fuck Yeah! Environmentally friendly, cruelty-free beef and chicken:

One novel line of research is to produce meat in vitro, in a cell culture, rather than from an animal. The production of such "cultured meat" begins by taking a number of cells from a farm animal and proliferating them in a nutrient—rich medium. Cells are capable of multiplying so many times in culture that, in theory, a single cell could be used to produce enough meat to feed the global population for a year. After the cells are multiplied, they are attached to a sponge-like "scaffold" and soaked with nutrients. They may also be mechanically stretched to increase their size and protein content. The resulting cells can then be harvested, seasoned, cooked, and consumed as a boneless, processed meat, such as sausage, hamburger, or chicken nuggets.

I'm so excited about this that I signed up for their mailing list.

New Harvest Website

(Via Worldchanging).

2005-06-29T01:56:00.000-04:00

Zombie Dogs

SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans.
US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.

Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.

The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.

But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.

Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, according to the Safar Centre.

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(Via Kurtzweil AI).

2005-06-26T02:54:00.000-04:00

Vertical Farming

An alternative to conventional (rural) agriculture is urban agriculture. Urban agriculture establishes an agricultural practice in or near an urban setting. It develops modern, sustainable agricultural systems that establish productive, reusable, self-contained waste and nutrient cycles in metropolitan settings.vii They can include raising food crops, horticulture, poultry, fish farms, and other livestock in public and private open spaces, vacant lots, or, as in the case of our Vertical Farm, in “green” buildings.

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(Via BoingBoing).

2005-06-18T23:56:00.000-04:00

Supercomputers simulate quark behavior

Liverpool, UK -- Particle physicists are embarking on a new attempt to solve the mysteries of quarks with the completion of the three most powerful supercomputers ever applied to this problem, including one in Edinburgh which scientists at the University of Liverpool helped to design and build.

The proton consists of three quarks, two up and one down, living in a complicated soup of dynamical quarks, antiquarks and gluons, which have colour charges. (Image courtesy of University Of Liverpool)

Quarks are the fundamental particles that make up 99.9% of ordinary matter; yet it is impossible to examine a single quark in the laboratory. Consequently, some of the basic properties of quarks are not known, such as their precise masses or why they exist in six different types.

Quarks are bound together by the Strong Force, which is weak when the quarks are close, but increases steadily as you try to separate them, making it impossible to isolate a single quark. Instead, the theory describing the Strong Force, called Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), has to be simulated on huge computers.

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2005-05-24T15:05:00.000-04:00

Huge Archive of Conspiracy bittorrents

This is an oddly diverse collection of videos, ebooks, and mp3's. There's Paris albums, Michael Moore movies, lots and lots of paranoid NWO/Illuminati ramblings, UFO stuff, and yes, there are unfortunately a couple of creepy right-wing "zionist bankers that control the world" type theories featured here. Whoever maintains the archives doesn't seem to favor any of these theories over the others though. I suspect he/she is probably just cataloguing the wierdness. In any case there's loads of cheap entertainment available here, if, like me, you get a kick out of watching 40-year old balding guys who live in their parent's basements explain their pet theories about UFOs and the New World Order.

Check it Out

2005-05-21T00:20:00.000-04:00

myBio dolls

myBio dolls are a collection of educational dolls exploring the emergence of biological hybrids in biotechnologies, and our moral, social, cultural and personal responses to the strange and different in human biology and also "transhuman" creatures.

Learning from companies and organisations that produce educational dolls, designer Elio Caccavale and bioethicist Richard Ashcroft made twelve myBio dolls that could symbolise possible biofutures.

The use of narrative and myBio dolls can help children understand how to deal with applications of biotechnology, and with the social development of biotechnological knowledge. Tomorrow’s children will need to know the key methods used in biotechnology so they can learn to understand the many ambivalent possibilities of biotechnology.

Starting with a series of "What if" stories, the narrative process gives children a common language for talking about biotechnology. "Suppose that your life could be saved by a pig, what would happen to you and the pig?" or "Imagine you could have a glow-in-the-dark rabbit, would you relate to such a rabbit differently than a conventional one?"

(Via We-Make-Money-Not-Art).

2005-05-20T14:02:00.000-04:00

Gangs use voodoo in Nigeria sex trade

ATHENS, Greece (AP) -- If she runs away from her life of prostitution, her parents will become sick and die.

At least that's what this Nigerian woman believes. The threatened curse, she claims, was part of a voodoo rite performed in her homeland just weeks before she was brought to Greece by a prostitution ring.

"I have no doubt in its power," says the petite 24-year-old, who goes by the alias of Maria and described being forced into seven-night-a-week duty at a flophouse brothel on an Athens back street. "Even if I had a doubt, how could I risk the life of my mother and father?"

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(Via The Anomalist).

2005-05-19T13:58:00.000-04:00

Cheap D.I.Y. Water Filtration Tech

I love this sort of thing. This is an excellent example of dirt-cheap, easily made, and extremely useful technology. Clean water is already an extremey scarce and valuable resource in much of the world today, and there is every indication that this situation will worsen dramatically in the near future.This type of technology could help mitigate potentially violent conflicts over control of the world's clean water supplies. It could also help control any number of the diseases that are caused primarily by impure water source that kill huge numbers of people daily. Plus it's made using cow shit, matches, coffee grounds, and clay! Here's a link to a PDF about the filter with a step by step illustration of the process, and heres a link to an interview with the inventor.

(Via Worldchanging).

2005-05-04T21:57:00.000-04:00

Wired Magazine Article on Garage Biotech

Damn straight:

The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular biology lab on eBay. A mere $1,000 will get you a setof precision pipettors for handling liquids and an electrophoresis rig for analyzing DNA. Side trips to sites like BestUse and LabX (two of my favorites) may be required to round out your purchases with graduated cylinders or a PCR thermocycler for amplifying DNA. If you can't afford a particular gizmo, just wait six months - the supply of used laboratory gear only gets better with time. Links to sought-after reagents and protocols can be found at DNAHack. And, of course, Google is no end of help.

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2005-05-02T10:46:00.000-04:00

Googlesat Images of Area 51

They're not really that interesting, unfortunately..

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2005-04-28T09:55:00.000-04:00

Programmable Cells: Engineer Turns Bacteria Into Living Computers

In a step toward making living cells function as if they were tiny computers, engineers at Princeton have programmed bacteria to communicate with each other and produce color-coded patterns.

The feat, accomplished in a biology lab within the Department of Electrical Engineering, represents an important proof-of-principle in an emerging field known as "synthetic biology," which aims to harness living cells as workhorses that detect hazards, build structures or repair tissues and organs within the body.

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2005-04-14T17:30:00.000-04:00

Scientific American apologized for being so one-sided

This is really funny.

There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.
In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.
Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either-so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day.

(Via Busy Busy Busy).
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2005-04-12T12:01:00.000-04:00

Computer-aided proofs cause debate over what constitutes mathematical rigour

Through much of the 20th century, questions of mathematical rigour were passed off to logicians and philosophers—working mathematicians have been, for the most part, content to work with an intuitive definition of proof

This notion works when each step of a proof is transparent, and can be examined by all. Proof is then just a process of reducing one big, non-obvious step, to a bunch of small, obvious ones. However, if a computer is used to make this reduction, then the number of small, obvious steps can be in the hundreds of thousands—impractical even for the most diligent mathematician to check by hand. Critics of computer-aided proof claim that this impracticability means that such proofs are inherently flawed. However, its defenders point out that some theorems that many mathematicians consider to have been proved in the classical manner also have proofs which are so long as to be uncheckable.

The most famous case of this is something called the classification of finite simple groups. These are abstract objects with certain mathematical properties; the claim is that, over a 30-year span in a series of papers totalling some 15,000 pages, all possible such objects were enumerated. Though the mathematical consensus is that the classification (nicknamed the “enormous theorem”) is complete, there are sceptics who point out that the dispersed proof is essentially unverifiable.

(Via Futurismic).

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