Temperate bacteriophages and the Abyormenites
Science fiction author Hal Clement (1922-2003) was known for creating aliens that are well-adapted to the often extreme physical conditions on their home planets. Clement is probably best known for his 1954 novel Mission of Gravity, which takes place on a planet with a surface gravity hundreds of times greater that of Earth. But that’s…
How Bing Could’ve Almost Beaten Google to “Instant” a Year Ago
Google’s shouting loudly about it’s new almost-as-fast-as-you-think Instant search powers, and it is indeed clever. But a programmer worked out how to do this for Microsoft a year ago. Could Bing have beaten Google? The clever geeky search guru we’re talking about here is Long Zheng. A year ago, he wrote a front-end engine for…
Halfthings (a.k.a. when will see centaurs and Mr. Spock?)
Mermaids. Angels. Mister Spock. Speculative fiction sure enjoys a good mash-up, but how likely are we to see genuine human/other hybrids? It depends on what one means by ‘hybrid’. Agriculture depends on hybridization, of course, but hybrids also occur in the wild. It happens most often between closely related plants, but DNA testing is revealing…