I was asked a couple weeks ago to contribute a piece to a special series of articles in Newsweek about the future of Wi-Fi. I must admit that a fair amount of the stuff that’s on the Wi-Fi horizon seems a little banal to me. It’s nice to know that I will be able to swallow a camera-pill that will wirelessly send pictures of my bowels to my doctor, but it hardly cries out paradigm shift. On the other hand, I’ve been deeply intrigued and a little disturbed by the possibility that the next digital device to go Wi-Fi is the human brain. Here’s my short essay on the subject.
Category: Blog
Please accept my apologies for the vile spam comments that keep showing up here. I hope that the folks at Corante and I can find a way to permanently shut down the flow of craven obscenity.
Jack Szostak, a scientist at Harvard Medical School, is trying to build a new kind of life. It will contain no DNA or proteins. Instead, it will based on RNA, a surprisingly mysterious molecule essential to our own cells. Szostak may reach his goal in a few years. But his creatures wouldn’t be entirely new. It’s likely that RNA-based life was the first life to exist on Earth, some 4 billion years ago, eventually giving rise to the DNA-based life we know. It just took a clever species like our own to recreate it.
On the east coast, we’re bracing for the howling emergence of a massive brood of 17-year cicadas in a couple weeks. Here’s a nice piece in the Washington Post about the evolution of this strange life history.
There are only a few places on the surface of Earth where you can find really old rocks–and by old, I mean 3.5 billion years old or older. The rest have gotten sucked down into the planet’s interior, cooked, scrambled with other rocks, and pushed back up to the growing margins of continental plates. The few formations that have survived are mere fragments, some the size of a football field, some a house. And generally they’re are mess, shot through with confusion such as intrusions of lava from more recent volcanoes. Paleontologists are drawn and repulsed by these rocks, because they may hold the oldest clues about life on Earth, or lifeless mirages that only look like clues.