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Category: science
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Windows into the Past
A pair of papers came to my attention this last week, and they are fascinating to me on several levels, as a scientist, a writer, and one who dabbles in history. Science and technology working hand in hand have been advancing mightily in the last few years toward being able to see more and…
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Doin’ the Horizontal Mambo
Passing on one’s genetic material is perhaps the driving force behind life as we know it. It is as close to immortal as any of us, unicellular or multicellular, can get. Viewing biology in these terms, it should not have surprised us to discover that organisms have loads of other ways to pass themselves into…
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Science Fiction… Sweaters?
Over the last century or so of science fiction writing and film, there have been many iterations of garments posited for the far future. From sleek jumpsuits, to nakedness, to Dejah Thoris’s jeweled harnesses to the Star Trek redshirt… Now that we are living in the science fiction present, what does the reality for…
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Quantum Mechanics
From Derek Lowe’s excellent blog, we see this fascinating bit of the intersectionality of math, chemistry, and biology. Now what, you are asking yourself, does all this have to do with chemistry or biology? Well. . .if Grover-algorithmic processing is some sort of fundamental property of nature, then you might expect the genetic material to…
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Myth Busting: Cell Phone Cancer
It seems every time you turn around there’s another menacing lurking threat to our health. Or is there? Chances are, if you look a little closer at the headlines, past the sensational sell-the-papers hype, and past the quacks who turn a profit by pitching woo, you’ll find that the truth is closer to… nothing wrong…
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Putting the Story in Science
One of the biggest challenges I face as a science fiction writer – and one of the biggest reasons I tend to write Space Opera rather than Hard SF – is staying ahead of the science. As a scientist, most of my work is very industrial. I’m not in research, nothing bleeding-edge is going on…
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Superposition of Time
What if time isn’t linear? What if time can be pooled upon itself, offering a way to dive into the now, then, and what-will-be? What if? Time has a fundamentally different character in quantum mechanics and in general relativity. In quantum theory events unfold in a fixed order while in general relativity temporal order is…
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Guppies and Population Growth
In the second stream, the rapid infusion of new fish almost completely eliminated pure residents—an outcome conservationists usually hope to avoid. That result suggests “a slow trickle of immigration might be preferable,” Fitzpatrick says Genetically speaking, populations of species that are separated from one another begin to diverge fairly rapidly. In as many as eight…
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Pharmacognosy and Magical Thinking
There’s a long ongoing debate about the state of healthcare in these United States of America. I’m not going to hold forth on it for long, but there are some things I think could stand to be repeated and emphasized in the hopes they might sink into the minds of the general population. Is American…
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The Pearly Cities of Luna
It’s like something straight out of a pulp novelist’s wildest dreams. Colonies on the moon, roofed over by nacre. But it’s got a slim possiblity of becoming a reality, if you read this paper on the generation of mother-of-pearl by bacteria. I have to shake my head a little over the concept of a spacesuited…
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Wild, Safe, non-Organic Greens
So I hang out in several online groups intended to help people learn to identify plants. Some of those are tilted toward identification and determination of edibility. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time lurking (and occasionally offering an ID) it’s that people ought to be dead, a lot. Misidentification of wild edible…
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The Disordered Brain
The Ginja Ninja approached me recently to ask a question. She has a friend, she explained to me, who may need someplace to stay for a while. Her friend struggles with mental illness, her friend’s parents don’t believe in mental illness, and as her friend turns 18, she may find herself on the street as…