These canny engineers have at last realized that the proper model for robots is biological, and have built a soft-bodied walking robot. The future belongs to inflatable technology!
Have no fear. They’re mostly benign.
(Also on FtB)
These canny engineers have at last realized that the proper model for robots is biological, and have built a soft-bodied walking robot. The future belongs to inflatable technology!
Have no fear. They’re mostly benign.
(Also on Sb)
Cats are so undignified, yowling and screeching and spraying urine all over the place. They should take a lesson from the noble sea cucumber, rising erect, proud and firm from the sea floor, and quietly, affirmatively ejaculating long voluminous streams of gametes that gaily wave from the tip, like a pennon in the breeze.
There’s more at Echinoblog, if this sample of priapic holothurians is inadequate for you. Strangely, most of these videos come from Japan. I’m really beginning to wonder about what goes on in Japanese bedrooms.
(Also on Sb)
Somebody clone Attenborough, quick — the British nature program must continue forever! His latest documentary is Frozen Planet, and all I’ve seen of it is short clips on youtube and various other sites…which just makes me want to see more.
Here is a time lapse video of a brinicle forming: a column of cold water descending from the surface which is saltier than the surrounding sea, so it both sinks and remains liquid as it oozes downward, but it freezes the less briny water around it. It’s slow, but if you’re a slow-moving echinoderm, it’s like the icy finger of a vindictive god reaching down to destroy you.
(Also on Sb)
I have read the entirety of Hamza Andreas Tzortzis’ paper, Embryology in the Qur’an: A scientific-linguistic analysis of chapter 23: With responses to historical, scientific & popular contentions, all 58 pages of it (although, admittedly, it does use very large print). It is quite possibly the most overwrought, absurdly contrived, pretentious expansion of feeble post hoc rationalizations I’ve ever read. As an exercise in agonizing data fitting, it’s a masterpiece.
Here, let me give you the short version…and I do mean short. This is a paper that focuses with obsessive detail on all of two verses from the Quran. You heard me right: the entirety of the embryology in that book, the subject of this lengthy paper, is two goddamned sentences, once translated into English.
We created man from an essence of clay, then We placed him as a drop of fluid in a safe place. Then We made that drop of fluid into a clinging form, and then We made that form into a lump of flesh, and We made that lump into bones, and We clothed those bones with flesh, and later We made him into other forms. Glory be to God the best of creators.
Seriously, that’s it. You have just mastered all of developmental biology, as taught by Mohammed.
Sad news: Lynn Margulis, advocate of the endosymbiosis theory of eukaryotic origins, has died. She was smart, creative, and promoter of a lot of wild ideas…and to her credit, some of them were even right. I think her greatest strength was her eagerness to step right out to the edge of science and push, push, push — sometimes futilely, but sometimes she really did succeed in pushing back the frontier a bit.
(Also on FtB)
Sad news: Lynn Margulis, advocate of the endosymbiosis theory of eukaryotic origins, has died. She was smart, creative, and promoter of a lot of wild ideas…and to her credit, some of them were even right. I think her greatest strength was her eagerness to step right out to the edge of science and push, push, push — sometimes futilely, but sometimes she really did succeed in pushing back the frontier a bit.
(Also on Sb)
I’ve heard of the Scoville scale, which measures the potency of spicy peppers. Those boring green bell peppers get a 0; habaneros get a score of 350,000.
The stuff those UC Davis police officers so casually hosed into the faces of peacefully demonstrating students? between 2,000,000 and 5,300,000 Scoville units.
But we’ve taken to calling it pepper spray, I think, because that makes it sound so much more benign than it really is, like something just a grade or so above what we might mix up in a home kitchen. The description hints maybe at that eye-stinging effect that the cook occasionally experiences when making something like a jalapeno-based salsa, a little burn, nothing too serious.
Until you look it up on the Scoville scale and remember, as toxicologists love to point out, that the dose makes the poison. That we’re not talking about cookery but a potent blast of chemistry. So that if OC spray is the U.S. police response of choice – and certainly, it’s been used with dismaying enthusiasm during the Occupy protests nationwide, as documented in this excellent Atlantic roundup – it may be time to demand a more serious look at the risks involved.
Their goal is to cause intense pain. Where has the police gotten this bizarre idea that somehow inducing agony in protesters is somehow humane or reasonable?
(Also on FtB)
