Potato blight’s gene weaponry revealed
The blight that caused the infamous Irish potato famine of the 1840s has yielded its genetic secrets. An international team has sequenced the DNA of the microorganism that was to blame.
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The Sheep Shit Grass (or The End of Scarcity)
DOCTOROW: It’s not hard to think about a kind of nanotech future where virtually all objects are available on demand. In that kind of world, both the traditional Marxist and the traditional Keynesian analyses don’t make a lot of sense. These are predicated first and foremost on the regulation of scarce and valuable objects.
Read More »Post-Darwinian Hedonic Engineering
PEARCE: In maybe three or four decades or so, we’ll be choosing such traits as the average hedonic set point of our children. Over time, I think allelic combinations [suites of variant copies of mission-critical genes] that leave their bearers predisposed to unpleasant states of consciousness — unpleasant states that were genetically adaptive in our ancestral environment — will b...
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