Ingrained Sense of Right and Wrong

"Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has built on this idea to propose that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution...."

"People are generally unaware of this process because the mind is adept at coming up with plausible rationalizations for why it arrived at a decision generated subconsciously."

"The proposal, if true, would have far-reaching consequences. It implies that parents and teachers are not teaching children the rules of correct behavior from scratch but are, at best, giving shape to an innate behavior. And it suggests that religions are not the source of moral codes but, rather, social enforcers of instinctive moral behavior."

Yes, this seems to make perfect intuitive sense. How many times are you deeply emotionally conflicted over a biological desire and a biological sense of right and wrong? Certainly, this would seem the definition of addiction.

Very interesting article though.

An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong - New York Times

Live an Extra Twenty Years

Wow, if only I didn't crave those cookies so much! Yikes!

One for the Ages: A Prescription That May Extend Life - New York Times

Male Manliness Varies By Generation

"'Male serum testosterone levels appear to vary by generation, even after age is taken into account,'"

Could this be a similar effect to the spottedness of mice varying by generation?

Yahoo! Health News: Testosterone Tumbling in American Males

More Bee Buzz

Oldest fossil bee preserved in amber...

"Experts believe pollen-dependent bees arose from carnivorous wasp ancestors. With the arrival of pollinating bees, flowering plants blossomed on Earth. Prior to 100 million years ago, the plant world was dominated by conifers which spread their seeds on the wind."

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Bee fossil, DNA generate a buzz

Evolution of Bees

According to this article, bees are far more sophisticated than other similar insects, but show a much lower rate of genetics changes and substitutions.

"Despite diverging from human ancestors more than 600 million years ago, the bee shares a number of genes with its vertebrate cousins that its insect brethren lack, such as those involving RNA interference, aging, DNA methylation and circadian rhythms."

"The honeybee genome is already yielding some other surprising conclusions, such as a very slow rate of evolution. 'There are fewer changes and substitutions in the honeybee when compared with Drosophila and Anopheles,' explains geneticist Martin Beye of the Heinrich-Heine University in Dusseldorf, Germany, but he also notes that the bee has a relatively high rate of exchange of DNA between chromosomes, or recombination, to preserve diversity with only one breeding female in a hive. 'The existence of recombination is still one of the major biological questions,' he adds. 'We can test theoretical predictions on the basis of a 10 times higher recombination rate.'"

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Social Honeybee Shares Genetic Secrets

Good Girls Go Bad, for a Day - New York Times

I'm not big on using my blog for social commentary. However, this article caught my eye. If women want to look sexy on Halloween, go for it. Men and women are both likely to dress to catch the attention of that someone special. Halloween is one of those few days where women can push the edge without being castigated.

Now the New York Times is castigating those women.

"Obviously, however, many women see nothing wrong with making Halloween less about Snickers bars and SweeTarts and more about eye candy." -- Implying they should see something wrong with it.

"Indeed, many women think that showing off their bodies 'is a mark of independence and security and confidence,'" -- Implying that they shouldn't think that.

"'It’s not a good long-term strategy for women,' Dr. Tolman said." -- Implying that women really shouldn't do this if they thought of the bigger social picture.

"'I’m not going to go and say this is bad for all women.'" -- Implying that this is definitely bad for some or most women.

"Perhaps, say some scholars, it could even be good." -- Implying that on the surface it is clearly bad, but maybe there's a silver lining.

"Still, women may be buying racy outfits because that is all that is available." -- If women had a choice, clearly they wouldn't choose *those* outfits. (Seriously!)

"Besides, she said, men are less interested in accessorizing. 'They’re happy grabbing a mask and a robe and being done,' she said." -- Let's just throw in a swipe a men at the end! Of course men don't care about their appearance at all.

"'We’re not just risking our dignity here,' she said. 'We’re risking frostbite.' -- I see, dressing sexy hurts women's dignity. Geez.

Good Girls Go Bad, for a Day - New York Times

Value Erosion Through Corporate Investment

Illuminating article about how companies investing in new directions could be just eroding shareholder value.

"So I'm growing and I put in $100 million to fund the growth. Now, there are three possibilities. One is that I'm beating my head against a highly competitive market where other people are frankly better positioned than I am. Suppose my cost of capital, what I had to pay to raise that $100 million, was 10%. Well, I'm going to earn a lot less than that 10% in that market. So I'm going to pay 10 million a year, which is 10% of 100 million to raise the money. I'm going to invest it at 8%, which is 8 million a year. I'm going to lose 2 million a year. So the growth destroys value in that case for the existing shareholders. And the way it gets disguised, of course, is that they are taking it away from themselves. They don't go out and raise the money. They just reinvest their earnings in a way that loses money. Anyway, but it still dissipates value."

Fool.com: Identifying Franchises [Commentary] August 12, 2004

Charge your electric car in 5 minutes!

Power your electric car with a big capacitor? Cool!

"If it works as it's supposed to, it will charge up in five minutes and provide enough energy to drive 500 miles on about $9 worth of electricity"

Business 2.0...Big Innovations: EEStor - Sep. 18, 2006:

Living off half a genome

My fears that there's no need to reductionist thinking seem pacified after reading this!

"The microbe is missing almost half of the genes thought to be essential for its kind to persist, raising the possibility that it is becoming an organelle similar to a mitochondrion or chloroplast, according to researchers..."

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Tiny Genome May Reflect Organelle in the Making:

Math at work

This is a very cool mathematical trick.

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Camera Reconstructs Image from Single Pixel

30x More Aggressive Flys in 21 generations!

"More aggressive males started to appear after only 5 generations, and by the 21st generation, Dr. Dierick found that the aggressiveness of male fruit flies had increased more than 30-fold, according to a scoring system he developed."

Flyweights, Yes, but Fighters Nonetheless: Fruit Flies Bred for Aggressiveness - New York Times

More Fun With Magnets

Cheap and cool little toy.

Magnet Launcher

Direct Brain->Atari Interface

They did this with monkeys a few years ago...

Teenager moves video icons just by imagination

Canadian invents VR bird

I seriously want this. Doesn't look that hard.

Remote Flying with VR Goggles and a Camera - Gizmodo

Magnetic Flinger

Combining magnets and space flight is just about every 10yr-old-science-nerd's dream scenario!



Huge 'launch ring' to fling satellites into orbit - space - 03 October 2006 - New Scientist Space

Fun with Big Balloons!

Launch your own balloon and take lots of pictures. These guys did!

GeoCam - An off-the-shelf Imager for Rapid Response Remote Sensing Monitoring

Ian Pearson, Futurologist: The ITWales Interview

This looks like a fun job! What we really need though is a mechanism for measuring the accuracy of futurologists. Pure speculation is fun, but we're not going to get better ate predicting the future until we know how good we are at it.

ITWALES.COM - Ian Pearson, Futurologist: The ITWales Interview

Gems Among the Junk

This is an amazing article concerning how little we still know about much of our DNA and some theories for how that additional DNA might be used.

The Unseen Genome: Gems among the Junk by W. Wayt Gibbs [PDF]

Here is an interesting articles that follow from this:

The Alternative Genome by Gil Ast [PDF]

Seahorses in Love

When Seahorses pick their mate, is it a neurochemical sensation that leads to Assortive Mating?

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Male Pregnancy May Spur Seahorse Speciation

Impressive Predictions

September 1995 from Scientific American

"In a decade or two, travel by automobile in some advanced countries may very well involve the kind of technology and intelligence gathering once reserved for tactical warfare. Onboard navigational aids, fed by satellite tracking systems, will give directions in soothing digital voices. In big cities, roadside screens will flash messages about distant traffic jams and alternative routes. Computerized control and guidance devices embedded underneath heavily trafficked corridors will allow appropriately equipped cars and trucks to race along almost bumper to bumper. Special debit cards will let motorists enter tollways without stopping, park downtown without fumbling for change, and hop on trains and people movers by swiping their cards through electronic turnstiles. Some experts even foresee customized tractor trailer-style "car-buses" that carry up to 20,000 cars per hour per freeway lane--10 times the current capacity."

Why Go Anywhere? -- Scientific American

Rapid Speciation

From 2000: "Now new research, reported today in the journal Science, describes a run of salmon that colonized a river and a lake beach, and evolved partial reproductive isolation in fewer than 13 generations. Natural selection, it appears, can spur the emergence of new species far faster than expected."

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: High-Speed Speciation

Speciation by Hybridization?

Yet another potential wrinkle in the complexity of the evolutionary process.

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Wandering Fly Gene Supports New Model of Speciation

Rocket Belts: Ripe for Innovation

Seems like with the right control system you could make Rocket Belts far easier to control and consequently much safer. Air-Segway!

The men who want to fly. By Larry Smith - Slate Magazine

Big Brain

"Scientists say they have discovered a gene sequence which appears to play a central role in giving humans their unique brain capacity.

"The area, called HAR1, has undergone accelerated evolutionary change in humans and is active during a critical stage in brain development."

Research finds 'unique human DNA'

More Genetic Craziness

How Human Cells Get Their Marching Orders - New York Times

Plants respond to stress by increasing their rate of mutation

Stressed Plants Pass On Ability to Quickly Adapt

"The plants survived the ordeal by upping the frequency of homologous recombination (genetic swapping) during cell division... 'We propose that the environmental influences that lead to increased genomic dynamics even in successive, untreated generations may increase the potential for adaptive evolution.'"

More evidence that genetics is more complicated than we think

Scientists Say They’ve Found a Code Beyond Genetics in DNA

String Theory Is Distracting

Has string theory tied up better ideas in physics?

Robot Dogs Talk to Each Other

Remember the binars from Star Trek? These AI dogs are almost there!

Robot Dogs Evolve Their Own Language

Parent RNA expression affects mice coloration

Again, I reiterate: genetic evolution is not as simplistic as we make it out to be.

Is this not very similar to Darwin's theory of pangenesis?

Spotty Mice Flout Genetic Laws -- BBC NEWS

My Pain, My Brain - New York Times

This is the most amazing and in many ways the most frightening thing I've read, perhaps ever. The implications are incredible.

My Pain, My Brain - New York Times