Back to sheltering from the damnable heat this week
Happy invoicing!
- How to edit a human - Profile of Jennifer Doudna, whose team at Berkely discovered the technique of gene editing using CRISPR: "The eureka moment came in 2012. Doudna remembers the instant when she realised what she had found… Realisation now dawned that its function was supremely elegant: it chopped up the DNA of invading viruses. What made that discovery important was that the tool could also be programmed to cut up DNA of any kind. Doudna’s team had worked out how to edit the genome of every living thing – even humans."
- Blueberry Earth: The Delicious Thought Experiment That's Roiling Planetary Scientists - "Supposing that the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries, what would happen from the perspective of a person on the surface?" Physicist Anders Sandberg has addressed this important question; you can find a more detailed explanation of the maths on his blog
- Killed by a Corset? The Tragic Tale of Kitty Tyrrell, a Victorian Actress - "The lives of most Victorian jobbing actresses are largely forgotten, their performances barely recorded apart from a few brief mentions in the theatrical papers. And this would no doubt have been the fate of Kitty Tyrrell, if she had not had the misfortune to be killed by her corset."
- I Made Blood Sausage Using My Own Blood - First we had the sourdough starter made with a vaginal yeast infection, then the chap who made tacos from his amputated leg; and now this: "When I told people that I wanted to make blood sausage using my own blood, their nostrils flared as though they'd smelled something awful… My own blood has many of the same nutrients—the iron, vitamins, and minerals—as the pig's blood that usually goes into blood sausage, but it only harms me, not any animals." (I'd suggest sticking with the animals.) (Oh, and her recipe is terrible: lentils won't absorb blood properly. She needs a desiccant like breadcrumbs or rusk or something in there. This is why we don't let vegetarians cook.)
- Gargantuan Gastropods - "Were you aware, dear reader, that the Malibu coast is currently playing host to large numbers of the world’s largest gastropod? While that sounds alarming like the plot of a 1950s B movie, this celebrity among slugs is a peaceful vegetarian, despite a passing resemblance to that movie monster favorite, The Blob." Presenting the remarkable Aplysia vaccaria:
- Real-Life Schrödinger’s Cats Probe the Boundary of the Quantum World - "Schrödinger’s kittens have never been very cute, and the latest litter is no exception. Images of nebulous clouds of ultracold atoms or microscopic strips of silicon are unlikely to go viral on the internet. All the same, these exotic objects are worth heeding, because they show with unprecedented clarity that quantum mechanics is not just the physics of the extremely small." I suppose there has to be a boundary somewhere if quantum effects apply at small scale but not at large, and people are working out where the edge is.
- How evil happens - What neuroscience can tell us about genocide: "In 1941, en route from a ghetto to a concentration camp in Ukraine, a Nazi soldier beat my grandfather to death… Still the question nags away: how are ordinary people capable of such obscene acts of violence?"
- Physicists’ simple spanks economists’ complex in economic growth forecasts - "Take economic ideas, add a touch of dynamics, get accurate GDP predictions." Or, make economics an actual science rather than a bunch of vague prognostications by adding science
- The mysterious heart of the Roland TR-808 drum machine - How transistors that were not quite right became the source of an iconic 1980s sound: "The transistors pictured in this article are some of the small batch of transistors that were rejected as “out of specification” by the manufacturer and purchased by Roland. The little patch of paint that you can see on the top of each transistor marks them as being very special and very, very rare indeed. The paint mark was applied at the Roland factory in the late 1970’s to identify these transistors as having a unique characteristic to be used as the noise source for Roland’s new drum machine, the TR-808 Rhythm Composer."
- We love microchips - "That's why we boil them in acid." Lots of transistors in this wonderful gallery of silicon chips, such as the square ones in this Ti SE555P Single Precision Timer from 1996. (Click through to the individual posts and then the individual images for huge versions.)
Happy invoicing!
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