Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of…
Augmented reality app for librarians instantly shows which books are misfiled
E-books, iPads and Kindles may be the way of the future, but most of the world’s knowledge is still stored in millions of good old paper books on library shelves. So researchers at Miami University have created an augmented reality app that makes all those books easier to organize. ShelvAR instantly analyzes an entire shelf,…
The Spaces Between Stars: The secret connection between crime fiction and science fiction
Acclaimed science fiction and comics writer Warren Ellis just signed a two-book deal with Mulholland Books to publish two novels, starting with The Gun Machine in 2012. To celebrate, he explains why science fiction and crime fiction are the same. My name’s Warren Ellis. I’m mostly a science fiction writer. I’m sometimes also a crime…
Book covers have been telling us to fear extraterrestrial visitors for over a century
Our total destruction at the hands (or tentacles) of alien visitors has been gloriously featured on book covers since the dawn of science fiction. Writing in Granta Magazine, Jeremy Sheldon explores why so many book covers feature horrifying extraterrestrials. That we should fear extraterrestrial beings in real life makes perfect sense. Consider that for this…