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mad genetic engineering
No, Bitches, It's Not a Designer Baby
It's inevitable: the media has not only confused human reproductive cloning with "designer babies," but in fact they have confused a stem cell experiment with designer babies too. I love my sensationalist science as much as the next person, but the London Times has gone batshit with its reports that a GM human embryo could lead to "designer babies" out there in the wilds of science land. Now all these anti-baby engineering groups are going nuts because nobody has bothered to explain the science to them. Even Wired picked up the story, though thankfully without the "designer baby" crap. So what's the deal? When will you get your designer baby with wings and mutant powers? More »
mad science
Clones Bred to Sniff Drugs
It's hard to find dogs that have just the right set of attributes to sniff for drugs, which is why South Korean Customs officials got their favorite drug-sniffing dog cloned. The seven clones (four are pictured here) have all grown up to be excellent sniffers — though only one in ten dogs usually passes drug-sniff training, all seven passed. All seven dogs are called Toppy, and each cost over $100,000 to clone, plus $40,000 extra to train. Over at Technovelgy, Bill Christensen points out that the cloned drug-sniffers have a precedent in a science fiction whose representation of cloning was so inaccurate that you'll be surprised it got anything right. More »
clones
Feeling Scared? Just Clone Yourself and Become Smaller
It's a popular defensive strategy at the bottom of the ocean: If you're scared, just clone yourself. The process will make you smaller and harder to find, as well as doubling the chance that your genes will survive. Sand dollar larvae are rampant self-cloners, but they only do it when they sense danger. That means there's a kind of conscious intent behind their cloning — it's not just an ordinary part of their reproductive cycle. How easy would it be to port this trait to humans, so we could just pop out a new self when the old one is about to be offed? More »
fringe
New Secrets Of J.J. Abrams' X-Files Revamp
More details are emerging about Fringe, J.J. Abrams new Fox show. The more we hear about it, the more Fringe sounds like a slightly tweaked X-Files clone. One piece of news: John Noble (Denethor from Lord of the Rings) will star. Click through for a new plot summary. More »
found footage
Repli-Kate Teaches You How Genetic Engineering Really Works
The 2001 movie Repli-Kate is so many things: a ripoff of Weird Science, a comedy of cloning, and the only movie I've ever seen where Eugene Levy yells "PENIS PENIS PENIS" really loudly, over and over, for reasons I can't even remember. Here's a great scene where one of the gene geeks uses his amazing high-throughput sequencer to create a clone of a hot chick from some blood drops on a CD-ROM. Even the genechip whiz kid Michael Eisen, whom I know for a fact has watched this movie, agrees that this is the most thrilling representation of genetic engineering ever captured on film.
mad science
First Clone Made from an Adult Human
Yesterday, the chief executive at biotech company Stemagen became the first adult human to see his clone mature into a viable embryo. No, Samuel Wood isn't planning to raise his own baby clone — he's just doing research into a new way of creating stem cells from adult DNA. But scientists pointed out that the embryo he created was viable enough to be implanted in a woman's uterus, IVF-style. There's no reason to believe it wouldn't mature into a human baby. More »
mangobot
Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), creator of Astro Boy and over 700 manga series, is often called the God of Comics or the Disney of the East. But neither title acknowledges the mark he's left on science fiction. If you don't know who he is, then you should get to know him — now. For decades, Tezuka's works weren't accessible to the non-Japanese-reading public. NBC aired over half of the Astro Boy anime series in the sixties, but the original manga wasn't published in English until 2002. At last, a handful of publishers is actively translating and releasing some of Tezuka's lesser known titles into English. One of the best is Apollo's Song, published in English for the first time a few months ago by Vertical Inc. Its an elegant, compact representation of Tezuka's scifi genius — and a milestone in Japanese free expression due to its frank depiction of sexuality in a postapocalyptic world.
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Can Clones Learn To Love? Japan's Manga God Breaks Taboos to Answer
Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), creator of Astro Boy and over 700 manga series, is often called the God of Comics or the Disney of the East. But neither title acknowledges the mark he's left on science fiction. If you don't know who he is, then you should get to know him — now. For decades, Tezuka's works weren't accessible to the non-Japanese-reading public. NBC aired over half of the Astro Boy anime series in the sixties, but the original manga wasn't published in English until 2002. At last, a handful of publishers is actively translating and releasing some of Tezuka's lesser known titles into English. One of the best is Apollo's Song, published in English for the first time a few months ago by Vertical Inc. Its an elegant, compact representation of Tezuka's scifi genius — and a milestone in Japanese free expression due to its frank depiction of sexuality in a postapocalyptic world.
More »
9:05 AM on Fri Jan 11 2008
By LISA KATAYAMA
2,452 views,
6 comments
Latest by Kissyfur66: Wow this is a great tip, storm took out my Directv. Out of movies time to start reading agian. more »
clones
By Next Week, You Could Be Eating Clonesteak
The FDA is on the verge of approving cloned cows as safe for eating. That means you could be eating cloned cow's milk and thick beef clonesteaks by next Friday. Yum! According to a rather sober assessment in the Wall Street Journal, however, it's not likely that Black Angus will start having clone cuts on their menus. It's so expensive to clone cows that the consumer market will see few of them. Instead, companies are planning to use them as breeding stock. The whole thing makes me think of Margaret Atwood's chickie knobs in Oryx and Crake. More »
smallville
Why Smallville Needs to Die
Last weeks's mid-season finale of Smallville just helped underscore everything that's been going wrong with the show over the slow trainwreck of the last few seasons. Smallville won't be dying a painful death due to the writer's strike, because there are six more episodes completed and ready to air, but last week's finale does make us wonder if the show should go on. Here's why. More »
art
Neasden Control Centre, a London artist project that quickly became a cult favorite after doing funky commercial prints for hot shot clients like MTV and Esquire in the early 2000s, has a cool new book out. It's called Lost Control, and it features 192 pages of full-color art, mostly original, 99% hand-drawn, depicting a range of neat-o concepts like diagrammed astronauts and a woodblock print-like greyhound running through bubble-letters. The picture above is my favorite. It's a summit of clones.
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Welcome to the First World Clone Summit
Neasden Control Centre, a London artist project that quickly became a cult favorite after doing funky commercial prints for hot shot clients like MTV and Esquire in the early 2000s, has a cool new book out. It's called Lost Control, and it features 192 pages of full-color art, mostly original, 99% hand-drawn, depicting a range of neat-o concepts like diagrammed astronauts and a woodblock print-like greyhound running through bubble-letters. The picture above is my favorite. It's a summit of clones.
More »
clones
United Nations Urges Human Rights for Clones (Sort Of)
Now that human clones are everywhere, how should we treat them? It's not just Clonaid asking anymore. The United Nations has just released a policy report saying that if we cannot reach global consensus on banning human cloning, we'll have to cope with a world full of human clones. And you know what that means. We could be facing a massive Clone Lib movement! So what does the most powerful body of international wonkitude recommend we do about the coming clone peril? More »
entropist
Who Speaks For Clones?
While all the attention given to human cloning has focused almost solely on questions of morality and bioethics - or on religion and the nature of government power - little energy has gone into questioning the literary impact a human clone might someday have.Yet it's an interesting question: Will clones someday write novels? More »
