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… Read More Doin’ the Horizontal Mambo
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… Read More Putting the Story in Science
I’ve written rather a lot over the years about biology and the human condition. We are driven by our endocrine system to some extent, we are shaped not only by nurture, but the nature of how our parents and grands and great-grands and so on lived – more and more we realize just how much… Read More Mother Moth
Part of my effort to dig up some of the old posts that became unlinked when I switched hosts. And because I have no time before work this morning. It’s a topic worth revisiting for discussion, though. There is some debate over what jobs men and women are best at. In the current cultural push… Read More [Repost] Hold my Beer and Watch This
In a recent post I mentioned my childhood battle with slugs, and John in Philly commented, infecting me with the delightful mental image of a small girl holding a ten-foot tall slug at bay with her salt sprayer. So why don’t we have ten-foot slugs? Elephants can get that big. Whales get even bigger, although… Read More Hydrostatic Skeletons: Or, why don’t we have ten foot tall slugs?