Biology

bush on Science

This entry was posted in Biology Health Care Science on by

Yea, I know that bush can’t make an intelligent statement on science but there are a lot of folks who probably nodded their heads knowingly when he spoke about bannng human cloning and more during last nights stump speach. For all of those and any of the rest of you who haven’t found your way via /. PZ has a bit of science education:

These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.
George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.
He’s trusting that everyone will think he is banning monstrous crimes against nature, but what he’s really doing is targeting the weak and the ill, blocking useful avenues of research that are specifically designed to help us understand human afflictions. His message isn’t “We aren’t going to let the mad scientists make monsters!”, it’s “We aren’t going to let the doctors help those ‘retards.'”
Once again, the ignorance and the bigotry of the religious right wins out over reason and humanitarianism. I think I know who the real pig-men are.

Read it all!

Viva La Difference

This entry was posted in Biology on by

There has been much talk about the commonality between the human genome and that of other animals. Fir instance, human and chimpanzee genomes are 96% identical. Yet, that 4% is a lot of difference:

…it is the differences between the species�as many as 3 million of which fall in functional areas of the genomes�on which research now focuses.
According to the main study, the catalog of genetic differences includes about 35 million single-nucleotide changes, 5 million insertion/deletion events, and a number of other chromosomal rearrangements.

Yep, that should keep those researchers busy for a while.

Tomorrow is Arriving Quickly

This entry was posted in Biology Health Care Longevity Technology on by

Susan Crawford already has a copy of Ray Kurzweil’s new book The Singularity is Near. I’m a bit jealous.
Readers of science fiction and tech geeks are already familiar with the concept of the singularity. The rest of you may want to catch up a bit by taking a quick read of this Wikipedia article.
Luckily, it looks like Crawford will be posting a bit as she reads and it looks like there will be plenty to contemplate and discuss:

Kurzweil focuses on complexity, noting that evolution produces increasing order, and that technology can extend evolution by building ever-more-efficiently on this order. Very quick feedback loops are all around us, pushing the rate of technological change along and producing faster and smaller devices. Meanwhile, biological evolution continues, but at such a slow rate that it hardly matters.
He boldly predicts that computers as we know them will disappear by the end of this decade, to be replaced by virtual reality environments. No more offices by 2020. He suggests it’s time to invest in tiny sensors and natural language search engines that can topple Google.

As with all such futuristic discussions things are never quite as predicted however as Crawford notes:

Even if he’s only half right (or even less than half right), Kurzweil’s work suggests that it’s a good time to be alive and interested in the effect of technology on human beings.

Which is one good reason I’d like to see this program be dramatically successful. It really is fun to be alive!
Sadly, those of us not getting review copies will not get to see this book until after it’s September 22 release date.