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The proverbial 800-pound gorilla is the monster in the room that you just can’t ignore, although you might want to.  With this week’s debut of the long awaited Blio – Ray Kurzweil’s tablet-friendly eBook reader – the eBook reader market may have found just such a game changer.

A breakthrough — published in the September 15 online edition of Nature —  explains at last the mystery at the heart of the central dogma of molecular biology.

In 1958, climbing the double helix stairway to a Nobel Prize, Francis Crick explained (and elaborated in 1970) what we now call “The central dogma of molecular biology” that is the backbone of the theory of information in the nucleus of living cells. It states that information can’t be transferred back from protein to either protein or nucleic acid, because the normal flow of biological information has three steps:

Medical & military R&D are major drivers for emerging technologies. Both have big budgets and life-or-death motivations with frequently overlapping goals. These massive interconnected sandboxes churn out an abundance of tech hardware that eventually ends up on the street. Two announcements this week highlight how these industries are driving the ongoing convergence of human and robotic augmentation.

As I see cooling fans die and chips fry… as I see half the machines in a laundry room decay into despondent malfunctioning relics… as my car invents new threats every day along the theme of catastrophic failure, and as I hear the horrific clunk of a "smart" phone diving into the sidewalk with a wonderful chance of breakage, I wonder why we put up with it.  And why can’t this junk fix itself?

Want to slow the aging of your brain? Wear shoes with flatter heels.

Physicists at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) have measured a general relativity effect at a scale of 33 centimeters, or about 1 foot, proving, that you age faster when you stand a couple of steps higher on a staircase.  [“Pair of Aluminum Atomic Clocks Reveal Einstein's Relativity at a Personal Scale”]

Anthropologists and Exolinguists (also called Xenolinguists) argue about how to communicate with extraterrestrials, but we are still being surprised by the subtleties of communicating with humans.  For example, a new study in Psychological Science (in press), analyzes how Dutch and Japanese people assess others’ emotions.  Just watch their faces?  Not quite.  Akihiro Tanaka et al.

Hasan Alam and his team at Massachussets General Hospital in Boston have reported success in saving lives of animals suffering from critical injuries by pumping ice-cold fluid into their veins.   According to an article in England’s Daily Mail, “Dr Alam has successfully performed his ‘suspended animation’ technique in operations on hundreds of pigs and now hopes to begin tests on humans.”

Disagreement among individuals in a society, even on central questions that have been debated for centuries, is the norm.  Agreement is the rare exception.  How can disagreement of this sort persist for so long?  The question is even more acute in the Age of Social Networks.  With half a billion people using Facebook such disagreement is clearly not a consequence of lack of communication, nor some other factors leading to fixed opinions.  Disagreement remains even as individuals communicate and sometimes change their opinions in what cognitive philosophers call “Belief Revision.” What would the late Isaac Asimov have said about this?

Islands are romantic — ideal for lovers, pirates, and vacationers.  Surrounded by lapping waves, they’ve extracted themselves from the sprawling tedium of mainland geography.  There are currently 18,000 on the planet, but the future will deliver thousands more in ideal locales.  Will volcanic lava and coral growth provide us with this dreamy real estate?  No.  Tomorrow’s islands are going to be built by human engineers.

"This is a big step forward in a puzzle that biologists have been chipping away at for over 150 years,” said Ben E. Black, PhD, assistant professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine.