science

In which I am yet again inspired by gaming tech:

Remember this? Jon lay on a white leather divan, utterly unaware. The two girls who sat beside him every day in literature class were drawing on him with calligraphy brushes. They had duct taped tracked pens to each brush. A little remote infrared camera sat atop a humming portable projector. Another camera sat on a […]

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Quotable quotes:

Today, I thought that I would share this article on the death of rave culture and how Frederic Jameson predicted it, originally posted by Bruce Sterling. But then at Scalzi’s I saw, this, er, piece on why human penises look the way they do. Which led to this particular money shot: Hopefully you’re thinking as an

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the rules of fitness

I’ve been thinking about natural selection a lot, lately (and not just because I picked up Natalie Angier’s The Canon the other day). Turns out Bruce Cohen explains Darwin’s concept of “fitness” pretty well: Survival or mortality selection – Organisms that survive at least to the end of their reproductive phase are fitter than those

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Everything old is new again. Like Lamarckism.

Via Futurismic, we hear of demonstrable Lamarckism in mice: The effects of an animal’s environment during adolescence can be passed down to future offspring, according to two new studies. If applicable to humans, the research, done on rodents, suggests that the impact of both childhood education and early abuse could span generations. The findings provide

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Inside your brain is an abusive soccer dad.

Via Pink Tentacle, some news about one of the mortal sins (and everybody’s favourite Homunculus), envy: New research from Japan shows that the human brain treats feelings of envy like physical pain, while schadenfreude — the pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune — triggers the brain’s reward circuits. The findings, published in the February 13

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Build your own supercomputer! With PS3's!

DIY guide now available! Mr. Ashby IM’d me frantically this afternoon to let me know about this little development, and I sent it along to BoingBoing with equal haste: Last year, Khanna’s construction of a small supercomputer using eight Sony-donated Playstation 3 gaming consoles made headlines nationwide in the scientific community. On the consoles, he

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