Josh Braun

Well, sort of. Fans of classic science fiction and/or campy Disney films will recall that squid and humans have a score to settle. But Captain Nemo will be happy to hear that our cephalopod friends may have finally repaid their debt to humankind.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara, my alma mater, have discovered a property of squid beaks that may lead to breakthroughs in the design of medical devices. They've answered a long-standing, deceptively simple conundrum: "Why don't squid hurt themselves?"

See, squid beaks are nasty, hard, sharp little things. Or, as UCSB biologist Herbert Waite so eloquently put it to the Associated Press:

"A dozen of them could eat you, or really hurt you a lot."

Squid, on the other hand, are soft, pulpy, boneless little creatures. How is it that they can clamp down on their prey with these knifelike little things and not hurt themselves at the same time? It'd be sort of like you or me trying to cut up a piece of cardboard using a pair of scissors that was missing a handle. The sharp part may be aimed at the box, but the ragged end that digs into your hand still hurts like hell.

The back end of that sharp beak, figured biologists, must be like ragged scissor handle on squishy squid body. But squid don't seem to mind, and so scientists asked that most fundamental question: "What's up with that?"

Continue reading 'Squid to Serve Humans' >

I love public television. Still, it's not known as an outlet for thrill seekers. It seldom provides its viewers with an adrenaline rush. Nonetheless, PBS does stage memorable television events, and one of them was the documentary, Cadillac Desert, accompanied by Marc Reisner's best-selling book of the same name.

Reisner chronicles in mostly-riveting, though sometimes mind-numbing, detail the great Westward Migration in America and its dependence on a dwindling, non-renewable water supply. The intrigue and politics of water, says Reisner, have been the driving force in shaping the American West, and in the end there simply will not be enough of it. When it runs out, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed inevitably by a great Eastward Migration.

Readers of Cadillac Desert will remember one of the most notorious events in California History, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, which occurred eighty years ago this week. Early Twentiety-Century celebrity, Los Angeles water engineer William Mulholland (as in Mulholland Drive) had just watched a proposal to strip yet more water from the Owens Valley go sour. He desperately needed to find a way to satisfy LA's growing water addiction, and in the end he decided to expand the size of an already-large dam in the nearby San Francisquito Canyon. This proved to be a lousy idea.

Continue reading 'Dam! California celebrates a notorious anniversary.' >

The last couple weeks have been filled with news on Microsoft. Microsoft attempts to acquire Yahoo! Microsoft invests $3 million in the development of healthcare applications. Microsoft gives away high-end software development tools to college students. Microsoft takes sides in the high-def DVD format war. Microsoft may partner with Netflix.

Microsoft was famously late to the Internet business, and has always lagged behind one online giant or another, whether it be Google, AOL, Yahoo!, take your pick. Now, as many people begin shifting their digital lives from their desktops to their homepages, online applications of the Google Docs variety have the potential to eat away at the supremacy of Office. Now, the European Union has slapped Microsoft with a $1.3 billion fine for noncompliance with a 2004 antitrust ruling.

Continue reading 'What will happen to Microsoft?' >

Just a note to say that Internet law scholar John Palfrey and friends have begun a campaign to get Lawrence Lessig to...campaign. For Congress. They want the man behind the alternative copyright system, Creative Commons, and the book/online social movement, Free Culture, to run for a seat, rather than merely criticizing Congressional decisions (which he does quite well—his blog shows him to be a master of the political flame).

Continue reading 'In other election news...' >

Much to the joy of small children everywhere, scientists from the University of Chicago have unearthed two new species of dinosaur in the Sahara desert and given them awesome names. To their gift shop pantheons of cool plastic figurines, museums can now add "fierce-eyed dawn shark" (Eocarcharia dinops) and "old hidden face" (Kryptops palaois)—which both sound suspiciously like old kung fu movies.

Continue reading 'Paleontologists discover new carnivorous dinosaurs in the Sahara, 7-year-olds rejoice' >

No, that's not what they're calling Christian Bale. At least, not that I know of.

"To everyone interested in bat conservation," was the subject line of a letter I turned up in a Google search this morning. So I read it—because, really, who isn't interested in bat conservation?

Don't answer that. Anyhow, it's the story that has Bruce Wayne in tears. Apparently, a somewhat mysterious fungal pathogen is wiping out bat colonies throughout the Northeast. It's called White Nose Syndrome (WNS), because the disease leaves a white moldy-looking ring around an infected bat's nose (insert off-color joke here).

Continue reading 'White Death' >

I got star legal-scholar-type-person Cass Sunstein's new book, Republic.com 2.0 as a stocking stuffer this Christmas. Sunstein's a leading advocate of the idea of "cyberbalkanization" —the notion that the Internet may one day do in democracy. He suggests the presence of an exploding number of interest-based online communities, personalized search, personalized news, Amazon-style book recommendations, and such, which seem to offer something for everyone, will ultimately encourage Internet users to wall themselves into ever-smaller interest-based groups.

You've probably heard of this idea. It's the notion that the more personalized our information universe gets, the less likely we are to encounter points of view unlike our own, the more comfortable we'll get that we're right in everything we think, and the more fragmented and polarized our society will become. It's sort of the antidote to early Utopian visions of the Internet that painted it as the future home of perfect democracy—a place where class divisions, gender and racial stereotyping, and all other forms of prejudice would magically disappear. The real Net isn't so simple, of course, but neither does it seem to mesh so well with Sunstein's version of events. He laments the decline in influence of the mass media, saying that un-personalized sources of information are ultimately what holds us together as a democratic society, exposing Democrats to Republican arguments, cat-lovers to televised dog shows, and football fans to baseball championships.

Continue reading 'Something for everyone? A review of Republic.com 2.0' >

A couple goodies for geeks that the new year has ushered in...

1. SciBook—Social Networking for Life Scientists. After you've improved your image by deleting all the unattractive friends from your Facebook profile, you can lower your reproductive fitness again by adding this fun application. SciBook matches scientists with prospective friends and collaborators on Facebook based on their research interests, favorite journal articles, disciplinary training, research methods, "favorite proteins," and "favorite scientists of all time." I'm unsure whether to describe it as "a breakthrough tool for collaborative research," or "kind of like eHarmony for people who don't get out much." You be the judge.
2. io9.com—Strung Out on Science Fiction. Gawker Media, the people who brought you Wonkette and Lifehacker, has officially acquired io9.com, a snarky blog that threatens to do for science fiction what engadget did for technology. The site is full of snarky and incisive commentary, along with plenty of random and hopelessly inside jokes. It also contains a healthy dose of science writing alongside science fiction, and according to the site's editor, Annalee Newitz, it aims to celebrate the blurring of the line separating the two. She told the New York Times, "The present is thinking of itself in science-fictional terms. You get things like George Bush taking stem cell policy from reading parts of Brave New World. That’s part of what we are playing with. We are living in world that now thinks of itself in terms of sci-fi and in terms of the future." Whether you buy Newitz's idea here, enjoy snarky humor, or you're just one of those people whose subscription to Omni got canceled every time the magazine went under, io9.com is probably worth checking out.

Not long ago, a friend wrote me to ask who I'd like to hear opine on the future of scientific inquiry. Without hesitating, I said Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is the author of the book Free Culture and the chair of Creative Commons (CC) (which just ended a wildly successful fundraising drive, exceeding its donation goal by 20%). One project that will continue happily under the CC umbrella is Science Commons, which aims to curb threats to scientific progress from intellectual property law. By that CC folk don't just mean patent wars over AIDS drugs in developing nations (though that's certainly something they care about), but problems that crop up here in the U.S., too.

Continue reading 'Science and Common(s) Sense' >