biology items › MachineMachine /stream

Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge. But people—and politics and morality—cannot be described just by neural impulses

January 25 2012, 11:35am | Comments

Video

January 15 2012, 4:49pm | Comments

Twitter Links What We Learned About Our Human Ancestors in 2011

Genetic hints of extinct human lineages — and the benefits we might have received from having sex with them — were among the discoveries…

December 20 2011, 6:53pm | Comments

Link Mouse Trap: The dangers of using one lab…

"I began to realize that the ‘control’ animals used for research studies throughout the world are couch potatoes," he tells me. It's been shown that mice living under standard laboratory…

December 13 2011, 1:34pm | Comments

Portfolio Noise; Mutation; Autonomy: A Mark on Crusoe’s Island

December 7 2011, 9:50am | Comments

Link What happens to a caterpillar's brain during metamorphosis?

Basically, three things can happen to any given neuron in the central nervous system. It's a really complex proccess! A) some neurons are born very early in the caterpillar's life…

November 30 2011, 12:50pm | Comments

Twitter Links Paper On Super Flu Strain May Be Banned From Publication

"A Dutch researcher has created a virus with the potential to kill half of the planet's population."

November 29 2011, 7:53am | Comments

Link Is mental time travel what makes us human?

A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional…

October 28 2011, 10:32am | Comments

Link The Roots of Religion: Myth, Play and Human…

Robert Bellah, one of America's most distinguished sociologists, caps off his luminous academic career with "Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age" , a near 800-page…

October 19 2011, 3:17am | Comments

Tumblr (Quote) "What is an enemy, who is he to us, and how must we deal…

“What is an enemy, who is he to us, and how must we deal with him? Another way to put it, for example, is: What is cancer? - a growing collection of malignant cells that we must at…

September 14 2011, 5:01am | Comments

Biblio The Logic of Life by Francois Jacob

August 31 2011, 7:31am | Comments

Link Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history

By comparing individual DNA letters in multiple modern human genomes with those in the Neanderthal genome, the date of that interbreeding has now been pinned down to 65,000–90,000 years ago.…

August 15 2011, 2:45am | Comments

Link On Discovering Life

There is an aspect of life sciences that has been largely absent: the confrontation of fundamental questions of biology much as particle accelerators grapple with fundamental questions of physics. The…

July 27 2011, 3:05pm | Comments

Link New York - Empire of Evolution

Dr. Munshi-South has joined the ranks of a small but growing number of field biologists who study urban evolution — not the rise and fall of skyscrapers and neighborhoods, but…

July 26 2011, 1:55pm | Comments

Link What's human? What's animal? And what of the…

Friday's report by the Academy of Medical Sciences on the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the human and the animal is the latest in a long series of policy reflections on…

July 25 2011, 3:20pm | Comments

Link Regulations proposed for animal–human chimaeras

The increasingly sophisticated blending of different species to create chimaeras is pushing biology into a new ethical dimension. Last year, scientists used new stem-cell technologies to create a mouse with…

July 22 2011, 1:30am | Comments

Link A Home Before the End of the World

Our ignorance is truly staggering. According to some estimates, 95 percent of organisms in the soil alone are unknown to science. Many of them labor unseen, in the dark, serving…

June 29 2011, 4:11pm | Comments

Link Being human

Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email //= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) ==…

June 25 2011, 8:55am | Comments

Link Perfection Is Not A Useful Concept

Interview with Nick Bostrom Our long track record of survival–humans have been around for about 100,000 years–gives us some assurance that the natural risks have been rather small. If they…

June 20 2011, 9:21am | Comments

Link The Things, by Peter Watts

I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front. I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead. I am being…

June 20 2011, 5:13am | Comments

Link The Origin of Our Species

"If there has been no spiritual change of kind / Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man . . ." The poet Louis MacNeice was voicing a commonplace that was accepted…

June 16 2011, 4:18pm | Comments

Wikipedia Experiments in the Revival of Organisms Experiments in the Revival of Organisms is a 1940 motion picture which documents Soviet research into the resuscitation of clinically dead organisms. It is available from the Prelinger…

June 15 2011, 9:12am | Comments

Portfolio “Everything on the Face of the Earth”

June 12 2011, 10:36am | Comments

Link Biomathematics: The formula of life

Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great revolutions have changed the way that scientists think about life: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification…

May 11 2011, 3:32am | Comments

Link We are as gods and have to get…

The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as…

April 28 2011, 3:27am | Comments

Link Neandertal hybridization & Haldane’s rule

Mr. James Winters at A Replicated Typo pointed me to a short hypothesis paper, Neanderthal-human Hybrids. This paper argues that selective mating of Neandertal males with females of human populations which…

April 28 2011, 3:15am | Comments

Link Gigantic New SuperOrganism with 'Social Intelligence' is Devouring…

In 2000, Roy Cullimore, a microbial ecologist and Charles Pellegrino, scientist and author of Ghosts of the Titanic discovered that the Titanic --which sank in the Atlantic Ocean 97 years…

April 24 2011, 2:53am | Comments

Link The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings

If you try to describe the living processes of the cell in a rather more living language than is typically found in the literature of molecular biology — if you…

April 6 2011, 1:48pm | Comments

Link Where Do Animals Come From?

The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From single-celled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity.…

March 20 2011, 5:37am | Comments

Link Can the Brain Explain Your Mind?

Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological…

March 16 2011, 11:30am | Comments

Link The New Virology

Largely unseen by the world, two dangerous germs homed in on their targets in the spring and early summer of 2009. One was made by man to infect computers. The…

March 3 2011, 8:45am | Comments

Link The not so universal tree of life or…

According to this view, ancient viruses, as with the ones today, could only make copies of themselves by succesfully infecting a host. So they become engines of innovation, using every…

March 2 2011, 7:32am | Comments

Link The Loneliest Whale in the World

...this particular baleen whale has apparently been tracked by NOAA since 1992, using a "classified array of hydrophones employed by the Navy to monitor enemy submarines." It sings at 52…

February 25 2011, 11:04am | Comments

Link Technology Wants to Keep Evolving

Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology…

February 22 2011, 1:03pm | Comments

Link Unnatural: the Heretical Idea of Making People

We human beings persist in thinking of ourselves as a unique species, endowed with special insight into a universe that we can manipulate. In fact, this notion is based on…

February 21 2011, 2:23am | Comments

Metafilter The Soul Niche Swimming around in a mixture of language and matter, humans occupy a particular evolutionary niche mediated by something we call 'consciousness'. To Professor Nicholas Humphrey we're made up…

February 4 2011, 3:46am | Comments

Link Malaria caught on camera breaking and entering cell

The video above captures the moment when a malaria parasite invades a human red blood cell - the first time the event has been caught in high resolution. The Plasmodium…

January 24 2011, 3:54am | Comments

Link Paramecium video games

In a clever juxtaposition of biology and technology, Stanford physicist, Ingmar Riedel-Kruse and his team are creating paramecia-based versions of classic video games that you can play by controlling the…

January 20 2011, 5:16pm | Comments

Link What the science of human nature can teach…

We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the…

January 13 2011, 3:17am | Comments

Link Russian team prepares to penetrate Lake Vostok

Lake Vostok, which has been sealed off from the world for 14 million years, is about to be penetrated by a Russian drill bit. The lake, which lies four kilometres…

January 9 2011, 12:23pm | Comments

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