Trofim Lysenko was born of a peasant family from the Ukraine in 1898. He attended the Kiev Agricultural Institute and was trained as an agronomist. In 1927 he studied the effects of low temperatures on crop plant growth and development, and claimed that this treatment (called “vernalization”) increased crop yields and became an inherited trait in the treated plants.
In “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” Ihab Hassan uses the metaphor of the mythological Prometheus to frame his discussion on posthumanism and positions him as a trickster with a double nature that he wishes to reconcile.
A third party test of Rossi’s controversial E-Cat “cold fusion” reactor has now been reported, in a paper dryly titled “Indication of anomalous heat energy production in a reactor device containing hydrogen loaded nickel powder” …
Two dozen leading experts in the brain recently converged for a daylong meeting at Stanford University. The meeting focused on a review of the current state of research and scientific knowledge related to software products and approaches that aim to defend against age-related cognitive decline. This meeting follows a similar meeting held five years ago which resulted in the 2008 Expert Consensus on Brain Health.
Science is not magic, no matter what the movies might tell us. It operates under very real, and very palpable constraints. One of these is money. You can’t just recite equations like they’re incantations, and pull change out of the ether. It takes time, and time costs money.
An interesting series of discussions have appeared throughout the blogosphere over the last few days focused on the question of economics in a future dominated by Artificially Intelligence. An article by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones magazine ignited the debate claiming the human race would soon be out of work.
