Rediscovering Bits of 1890s
“”Laurie Cox, a graduate student who works in the lab, held up the test tube with the 100-year-old bacterium. She explained that they can determine ...
Category: Long Now
World’s Oldest Fossils Found in Ancient Australian Beach – ScienceNOW
“Brasier and David Wacey, a geologist at the University of Western Australia in Crawley, say they have discovered 3.4-billion-year-old cells, possibly the...
Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history : Nature News
“The past months have seen a swathe of discoveries, from details about when Neanderthals and humans interbred, to the important disease-fighting genes tha...
Lucky find in Charlestown saves whaler’s restoration – The Boston Globe
“For the antiquarian shipbuilders who are painstakingly restoring the world’s only surviving wooden whale ship here, an essential ingredient can be very h...
Language May Have Helped Early Humans Spread Out of Africa – ScienceNOW
“The story of humanity’s prehistoric expansion across the planet is recorded in our genes. And, apparently, the story of the spread of language is h...
Book: The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
This is one great book. It’s set a few hundred years in the future, long after the oil-fueled “Exapansion” (that would be the time we are livi...
Sharing the experience of the Civil War, 150 years later – The Boston Globe
“Hearts still touched with fire – Stories of men who served in a Mass. regiment much-bloodied during the Civil War still resonate with relatives, 15...
Culture as Augmented Reality?
I was listening to Wade Davis' Long Now talk about the wisdom of ancient cultures. Like all Long Now talks, it got me thinking. One thing that Wade said th...
Redefining the concept of organism
A while back, I stumbled upon an article by Freeman Dyson on Carl Woese. Carl Woese is a long time scientist studying the origins of life and revolutionized thi...
Cool animation by 23andMe on Human Prehistory
For various reason I’ve been lurking around 23andMe, a personal genetics social service thingy out of SFO (I follow them on Twitter, of course). One big p...