Mapping Life

“All life is imperfectly transmitted code,” Enriquez began, “and it is promiscuous.” Thus discoveries like the one last month of an entire bacterial genome inside the DNA of a fruitfly is exploding the old tree-of-life models of evolution. The emerging map replaces gene lineages with gene webs.

“There is a whole. . .   Read More

Cool Tools Reader Michael Hohl figured out this wonderful way to make your computer Y10K compliant. That is, how to set your computer so that it displays the 5-digit date it will need when we reach the years after 9999: that is 10000 and beyond. In anticipation of that time, you can set this. . .   Read More

 
(This post was submitted by Roderick Jones, photo from Flickr user Dukal)
One of the stranger aspects of the explosion in the use of virtual worlds is when the avatar outlives the physical life of the gamer controlling it. People inhabiting virtual communities die in real life leaving their avatar and its property behind. . .   Read More

(Frozen bacteria found by Richard Hoover in the ice of the Fox permafrost tunnel)

From New Scientist:

Microbes can survive trapped inside ice crystals, under 3 kilometres of snow, for more than 100,000 years, a new study suggests. The study bolsters the case that life may exist on distant, icy worlds in our own. . .   Read More

 At the Singularity Summit earlier this month I came to see Paul Saffo’s talk.  Famed as a forecaster and future thinker, I was expecting to hear what lay ahead in the world as the steepness of the technology curve continues towards cliff like proportions.  Instead all were treated to a reminder that our new. . .   Read More

An excellent editorial by Long Now board member Paul Saffo on the Planktos carbon sinking project came out today. It is the first in a monthly series he is writing for ABC News. Saffo does an excellent job in clarifying what has become a characteristic battle in the green tech industry.
On one side are. . .   Read More

DVDs don’t. Tape doesn’t. Paper won’t. But rock does. In fact carved rock is about the only medium we have that might last 100,000 years. Most of our current electronic media will hardly last several decades. You need to continuously migrate info from one platform to the next as the current. . .   Read More

The BBC is reporting on a new super bright x-ray source called a “Diamond Synchotron” (yes really) that could be used to view previously unreadable ancient texts. The synchotron could even be used to finish reading the parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls that have yet to even be unrolled due to their fragility. . .   Read More

Jamais Cascio, friend of Long Now, and now a “foresight consultant” posted his recent speech to the Singularity Summit on his website.

Besides being a pretty fine manifesto for an open future, it started with a very long-now-ish quote:
I was reminded, earlier this year, of an observation made by polio vaccine pioneer. . .   Read More

Linden Lab releases new builds every week. Flickr releases them up to every half hour. Writer and publisher Tim O’Reilly writes that “the open source dictum, ‘release early and release often’ in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, ‘the perpetual beta,’ in which the product is developed in the open, with new […]