Mssv

The Atlantic ran an anti-genetic enhancement article this month called The Case Against Perfection. Written by Michael J. Sandel, a member of the notorious President’s Council on Bioethics, the article is cogent and well-argued.
Essentially Sandel believes that embryonic or hereditary genetic enhancements would remove the ‘giftedness’ of every child - in other words, the fact [...]

An excerpt from a BBC News story about a new Russian missile:
“Colonel Baluyevsky gave few details of the new missile which was tested on Wednesday, but said it was one that moved five times the speed of light.”
Wow, that’s some seriously good engineering they’ve got over there in Russia. If I lived in the US, [...]

The feeling of total, horrified incredulity is not one that I get to enjoy very often, but this afternoon I had a stiff dose of it. For the past week or so I’ve been working on some tissue samples that have probably seen close to a dozen hours of solid work going into them. Today, [...]

After a week of dismal weather and tiring winds that sap all of the enjoyment out of cycling, not to mention dozens of niggling problems at the lab and a whole host of other things, things have finally started to improve here in Oxford. Yesterday I found out that I’ll be going to a vision [...]

The Guardian’s Life section (science) has an article about the impenetrable writing favoured by scientists when writing in journals. This is hardly a new development but it’s no less interesting or disappointing for it; what is disappointing is that the author, Chris McCabe, has reduced this interesting subject to a directionless and misguided article, which [...]

So many things have happened in the past week! A final success at badminton, boardgame tournaments, computational neuroscience, strange and wonderful things happening on the next planet out, lots of good new books, and tutorials. I will deal with them all in time, but first, tutorials.
One of the distinguishing features of Oxbridge is the tutorial [...]

My first chemicals arrived today! It may come as a surprise to many, but it isn’t the case (not entirely, anyway) that I just hang around in Oxford waiting for interesting things to happen - occasionally I do some real research. In preparation for an experiment on the mouse visual system, I’ve ordered a bunch [...]

Bruce Sterling, SF writer, has pointed out that the Gobi Desert is far more hospitable than Mars, so before we ever settle Mars we’ll have settled the Gobi Desert (i.e. not any time soon). He also points out that by the time we have the ability to terraform Mars, we’ll be doing much more interesting [...]

It’s not often that I see a piece of science writing that concisely explains a difficult concept in an accessible way, but this article at Wired on a pill that could prevent hearing loss had some well-written passages. The reporter, Noah Shachtman, used a nice turn of phrase to describe how a buildup of free [...]

BoingBoing linked to this interview about ‘brain technologies’ today which I think will inevitably give people a completely wrong impression about the field. The interviewee, David Pescovitz (a science writer, not a scientist) touches on all the popular stuff at the moment including the laughable ‘neuromarketing’:
Volunteers in one study completed a survey about their likes [...]