Scientists hooked a squid up to an iPod. This is what happened.
Jane Austen responds to Michael Chwe naming her a master of Game Theory.
“This, then, is the story of Maxwell Knight—the man called M—and a cuckoo called Goo. Knight was a tall, patrician British intelligence officer in charge of MI5 departments dealing with counter-subversion on home ground. And yes, as ‘M’ he was the inspiration for James Bond’s controller.” Helen MacDonald recounts the story in an excellent piece. [...]
Garann writes a tribute to Hackers‘ Acid Burn for Ada Lovelace Day: “There are real women who did hard, under-appreciated work who instilled in me a belief that computer science was noble and beautiful and that I could be a part of it. They came later, though. I found them only because of an absurd [...]
Scientists make a feature film about radiation zombies and film it at CERN. It’s educational and you can watch it here.
Nefertiti the astronaut spider has died. She had lived aboard the International Space Station for three months. PBS has an obituary. (Thanks, Andrew!)
MSN/MSNBC is reporting on bigfoot mitochondrial DNA and here at The Gutter, we really don’t care that there is no evidence shared yet: “For her study, Ketchum obtained three “whole nuclear genomes from purported Sasquatchsamples. The genome sequencing shows that Sasquatch mtDNA is identical to modern Homo sapiens, but Sasquatch nuDNA is a novel, unknown [...]
The discovery of a skeleton found with metal spikes through its shoulders, heart and ankles, dating from 550-700AD and buried in the ancient minster town of Southwell, Notts, is detailed in a new report.”More at The Telegraph. (via Disinformation)
“It was the dawn of World War II when [Jack] Parsons, who’d also co-founded the missile manufacturing firm Aerojet around the same time as [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory]’s inception, took to the Ordo Templi Orientis….But soon enough the young explosives guru was running with another OTO buck, a young writer named L. Ron. Hubbard. ” [...]
Read Omni Magazine at the Internet Archive. (via io9)
BBC Radio 4 presents dramatizations of Frankenstein and Dracula, as well as extras including discussions of the difficulty of performing Frankenstein’s Creature, Vitalism, and who Stoker might’ve based his Count on. Click through to The Gothic Imagination. (via @booksadventures)
The Smithsonian Magazine investigates the vampires and vampire panics of 18th and 19th Century New England. “In Manchester, hundreds of people flocked to a 1793 heart-burning ceremony at a blacksmith’s forge: ‘Timothy Mead officiated at the altar in the sacrifice to the Demon Vampire who it was believed was still sucking the blood of the [...]
“[T]he Reflectance Transformation Imaging System, which uses a combination of 76 separate photographic lights and computer processing to capture every groove and notch on the surface of the clay tablets.” Dr. Jacob Dahl, director of the Ancient World Research Cluster, and a team of researchers capture images of proto-Elamite to help translate the world’s oldest [...]
Kitties with their own cameras. Find out what they’re doing out there.
Astronaut and physicist Sally Ride has died. Dr. Ride was the first American woman in space and flew aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. Boston.com has an overview of Ride’s life. NASA has an obituary and footage of Ride talking about her experience in space. “Ride left NASA in August 1987 to join the faculty at [...]
Knit your own favorite amino acids according to these charts of all 20 at ChemKnits!
“One of the unlovely things that has been happening in Anglophone SF/F … is the resurrection of unapologetic – nay, triumphant – misogyny beyond the already low bar in the genre. The churners of both grittygrotty ‘epic’ fantasy and post/cyberpunk dystopias are trying to pass rape-rife pornkitsch as daring works that swim against the tide [...]
A panoramic view of a recently excavated room in the Mayan city of Xúltun. (Thanks, Mike!)
In 1997, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published an article, “Clinical findings in three cases of zombification” by Roland Littlewood and Chavannes Douyon. Mo Costandi at NeuroPhilosophy provides cultural context and discusses anthropologist Wade Davis’ work on the ethnobiology of the Haitian zombie. And Patrick D. Hahn writes about a Clairvius Narcisse, provides [...]
At a panel discussion, Octavia Butler reveals how she became a writer, watching a movie and thinking, “Jeez, I can write a better story than that!” Butler is interviewed by Charlie Rose in 2000. And a clip of her from a television documentary on science fiction.
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