Hive Mind

2006-02-05T18:16:00.000-05:00

Woman bites husband to death

I guess this is old news, but I thought it was amusing:

Modesto police said Kelli Pratt wanted her feeble 65-year-old husband to have sex with her the night of Oct. 7.

When Arthur Pratt refused, police said, his 45-year-old wife held him down and bit him repeatedly during a savage attack that ultimately killed him.

Arthur, whose skin was riddled with more than 20 deep tooth marks, died Sunday at Doctors Memorial Center in Modesto -- six days after the attack.

Detective Sgt. Al Carter said Wednesday that Dr. Jennifer Rulon, a Stanislaus County forensic pathologist, believes that the case will be ruled a homicide and that the bites are the likely cause of death.

"He was able to dial 911 that night," Carter said. "We have a tape recording of him screaming while she was biting him. When officers arrived, he was screaming that he'd been assaulted. She fought with the officers and tried to bite them, too."

More...

(Via Fortean Times).

2005-12-29T13:54:00.000-05:00

Biomimicry in Space Exploration

From the BBC article:

Ideas that could further exploration in space are coming from a surprising source - animals such as ants, fish and squirrels.
The future of space exploration could lie in biomimetics, where engineering meets biology. In effect, it steals nature's evolutionary tricks to create revolutionary applications.

Engineers like Dr Alex Ellery, head of the Robotics Research Group at the University of Surrey, are trying to find out how natural systems might inspire human-made technology in space.

"One obvious way is in the way nature, in particular plants, package themselves into very small volumes, and yet deploy large structures, like flowers and so on," he told BBC World Service's Discovery programme.

"We can learn about how to package things like spacecraft, and then have them deploy their solar arrays, antennae and so forth.

"The applications are essentially limited only by our own imagination."

More...

(Via Vortexegg).

2005-12-10T02:38:00.000-05:00

Gary Busey's feces on sale for only $23.00

Unfortunately I don't think this is real.

Link

2005-12-10T02:25:00.000-05:00

In case you forgot how fucking batshit crazy some people are

Here's a sample:

The reader must be aware of the evil mathematicians, because most of them are engaged in their fantasies, really believing that mathematics is "the Science that doesn't lie, the mother of all Sciences, the owner of the truth", and so on. If they were lovers of the truth they would reject the monstrous marriage of reality and unreality. The roots of this evil math spring out of Kabbalah, Sorcery, and Freemasonry

I've heard people attribute alot of things to the "diabolical machinations of those evil freemasons", but mathematics!? This guy also believes that the earth is flat, and his "proof" of this statement is AMAZING! His website is here.

2005-12-08T01:07:00.000-05:00

Liberate not Exterminate

I'm typically not too impressed with crimethinc's publications, but I have to admit that this pamphlet makes for a pretty sensible and refreshing read.

2005-11-02T22:41:00.000-05:00

20 percent of human genes have been patented

Think you own what's in your cells? Think again:

A new study shows that 20 percent of human genes have been patented in the United States, primarily by private firms and universities.

The study, which is reported this week in the journal Science, is the first time that a detailed map has been created to match patents to specific physical locations on the human genome.

Researchers can patent genes because they are potentially valuable research tools, useful in diagnostic tests or to discover and produce new drugs.

"It might come as a surprise to many people that in the U.S. patent system human DNA is treated like other natural chemical products," said Fiona Murray, a business and science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and a co-author of the study.

"An isolated DNA sequence can be patented in the same manner that a new medicine, purified from a plant, could be patented if an inventor identifies a [new] application."

Meanwhile, the anti-biotech crowd blathers on and on about how it's not "safe" to eat biotech foods. Now, as someone who's had a fair bit of training in biology, I can assure you that for all practical purposes, GMO-containing foods are just as safe to eat as any other type of food. But that's not the real point. In fact, it's that very type of technophobic discourse that obscures the real issues, such as the fact that access to this technology is denied to the general public. Furthermore, this denial of access is maintained through widespread scientific illiteracy, the spreading of corporate misinformation, and perhaps most crucially, the existence of an archaic and draconian system of intellectual property laws. Thus, I'd like to humbly make the tactical suggestion that anyone concerned about biotechnology should make dismantling the institution of intellectual property as we know it a primary focus of their efforts.

More...

2005-10-28T17:16:00.000-04:00

2005-09-26T22:11:00.000-04:00

Viral Batteries

Biomimicry - the technique of looking to living systems as inspiration for the design of materials, devices, or architecture - is a really cool idea. This example struck me as particularly interesting:

Material scientist and engineer Angela Belcher's interest in nanotechnology came from studying how nature makes materials. "Abalone just happened to be a great example of a natural biomaterial, and one of the reasons that it is such a great material is that it's constructed on the nano-scale," she says. "So I approached the question, can you use the same principles that nature's evolved and apply it to other materials that nature hasn't had the opportunity to work with yet, like electronic materials and magnetic materials?" Since then, her goal has been to grow inexpensive nanomaterials in her lab at room temperature and pressure, that, among other qualities, self-assemble, self-correct and generate little waste, but offer the possibility of ever smaller and more powerful electronic devices.

Copying how red abalone build their shells, Belcher and her team are developing a way to actually "grow" rechargeable batteries with the help of viruses — tiny microbes that multiply by infecting living cells. Their technique would take a matter of weeks, rather than the 15 years the red abalone needs to assemble a full-sized shell.

"We're forcing the viruses to interact with materials that they would never interact with, normally. So now the viruses are a template to actually grow that material… it incorporates these new materials into its coat surface," Belcher explains.

The team uses a type of virus that infect bacteria, called bacteriophages. When mixed together with a metal or other materials, millions of them can align and stack themselves into orderly layers, creating a new material.

More...

(Via Worldchanging).

2005-09-13T12:14:00.000-04:00

South African Inventor makes Anti-rape Female Condom

KLEINMOND, South Africa (Reuters) - A South African inventor unveiled a new anti-rape female condom on Wednesday that hooks onto an attacker's penis and aims to cut one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world.

"Nothing has ever been done to help a woman so that she does not get raped and I thought it was high time," Sonette Ehlers, 57, said of the "rapex", a device worn like a tampon that has sparked controversy in a country used to daily reports of violent crime.

Police statistics show more than 50,000 rapes are reported every year, while experts say the real figure could be four times that as they say most rapes of acquaintances or children are never reported.

Ehlers said the "rapex" hooks onto the rapist's skin, allowing the victim time to escape and helping to identify perpetrators.

"He will obviously be too pre-occupied at this stage," she told reporters in Kleinmond, a small holiday village about 100km (60 miles) east of Cape Town. "I promise you he is going to be too sore. He will go straight to hospital."

The device, made of latex and held firm by shafts of sharp barbs, can only be removed from the man through surgery which will alert hospital staff, and ultimately, the police, she said.

It also reduces the chances of a woman falling pregnant or contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases from the attacker by acting in the same way as a female condom.

Hive Mind

Woman bites husband to death

Biomimicry in Space Exploration

Gary Busey's feces on sale for only $23.00

In case you forgot how fucking batshit crazy some people are

Liberate not Exterminate

20 percent of human genes have been patented

Viral Batteries

South African Inventor makes Anti-rape Female Condom

Master P Launches Hurricane Relief Effort

Blue Gene to simulate rat neocortical column

Gen-pets

New company to research vat grown meat

Zombie Dogs

Vertical Farming

Supercomputers simulate quark behavior

Huge Archive of Conspiracy bittorrents

myBio dolls

Gangs use voodoo in Nigeria sex trade

Cheap D.I.Y. Water Filtration Tech

Wired Magazine Article on Garage Biotech

Googlesat Images of Area 51

Programmable Cells: Engineer Turns Bacteria Into Living Computers

Scientific American apologized for being so one-sided

Computer-aided proofs cause debate over what constitutes mathematical rigour

New retroviruses jump from monkeys to humans

R.I.P. Hunter S. Thompson

Watch Baby Giant Squid, Live via Squidcam!

Two badass articles from the super-badass PLoS Biology

Algorithmic Self-Assembly of DNA Sierpinski Triangles

Mathematics Is Biology's Next Microscope, Only Better; Biology Is Mathematics' Next Physics, Only Better

Fractal Broccoli

Excellent Critique of Primitivism, fom an Anarchist Perspective

Two cool new distributed computing projects

Meatprinters

Even More Hot Bug Porn

UNUSUAL REPRODUCTIVE BEHAVIOR OF ODD ANTS SURPRISES SCIENTISTS

Major advance made in transparent electronics

UFO's Spotted Over Iranian Nuclear Facilities

Xmas

Microbe's Genome Promises Insight Into Earth's Carbon And Sulfur Cycling

Toward an Anti-Authoritarian Islam

School distributes satanic sex calendar

New Links

Fractal patterns may reduce stress

Flu pandemic inevitable, plans needed urgently -WHO

Open Source Currency

Google Launches 'Google Scholar'

Go fuck yourself

Pot-smoking physicist hermit found squatting in a nuclear weapons facility!

Biotechnology Rant

Whoever wins, we lose.

New Propulsion Concept Could Make 90-day Mars Round Trip Possible

People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid

Next Step To The Quantum Computer: University Of Bonn Physicists Build Quantum Data Memory

Two wierd stories

Scientists propose using microbes to clean the Earth's atmosphere

An atom-smasher on your desk?

$14m diamond theft at Paris show

GLOR #13 Now Online

"Vandal" daubs DNA code in street.

Ninja teens spark terrorist alert

WTF?

Spinach May Soon Power Mobile Devices

Bacteria Turn Toxins Into Plastic

Quantum chip circuitry demonstrated

Giant Squid To Go On Show

Sandia experiments may reduce possibility of future water wars

UC Davis Medical Center Tests Robot That Brings Your Doctor To You After Surgery

Patented process preserves transplant tissues/organs

Professor calls for a new branch of learning

Children With ADHD Benefit From Time Outdoors Enjoying Nature

New ARG to launch tommorrow

Study Shows How Consensus Is Attained In A Noisy World

Five Projects by Xu Bing

Hakim Bey has become a grumpy old man.

Xenolingual autoeroticism.

Minding the Planet: Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

Guns and Dope Party Position Paper #23

The Cactus Project