Turf Wars

Ooh, handbags:

At first glance it seems that this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has gone to a biologist. Roger Kornberg at Stanford University, California, won the prize for unravelling the mysteries of transcription — getting information out of DNA and into proteins via RNA
[...]
Unofficial mutterings from chemistry department corridors confirm some surprise at the choice of recipient. “It is certainly on the biological side of biochemistry,” says Malcolm Green, an inorganic chemist from the University of Oxford, UK.

I’m not impressed by the way they cite “bloggers”, though. You’re online: you can link!

Health in the Middle East

A special issue of the BMJ:

We learnt a lot from putting this issue together, not least about the difficulty of avoiding causing offence. We have repeatedly been accused of anti-Zionism. We also met hatred, from the unprintable response of one Arab reviewer to a request to review a paper from a US author and the Lebanese professor who would not write for us because the issue contains Israeli voices. But we have felt the warmth, inspiration, and fortitude of many more. As editors we weekly brace ourselves for highly critical online rapid responses (and braced we are, gentle reader, although “we come not to offend”). Some of this week’s contributors risk bullets.

Full contents.

The Inner Life of the Cell

See here.

Via Tom, ages ago, who says:

the challenge is to see how many processes and/or molecules you can identify.
there’s probably a decent drinking game in this.

I got about half a dozen. Weak, I know.

Good news, everyone!

The smelloscope is a reality!

They’re not all Brokeback Mountain parodies, either

The Trailer Mash collects together all your favourite trailer mashups on one site. A common theme is converting musicals into horro movies (check out Liesl’s scary zombie eyes from The Sound of Music), but my favourite is this A-Team/Lost mashup.

“Page 7, at the bottom”

Reactions to the Battlestar Galactica season three premiere.

Wheeeee!

Tate Modern’s new Turbine-Hall-filling exhibit, opening tomorrow (following the sun, that vaguely obscene red PVC thing, and the maze of twisty turny boxes all alike): slides! Yes, slides!

For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.

To date Höller has installed six smaller slides in other galleries and museums, but the cavernous space of the Turbine Hall offers a unique setting in which to extend his vision. Yet, as the title implies, he sees it as a prototype for an even larger enterprise, in which slides could be introduced across London, or indeed, in any city. How might a daily dose of sliding affect the way we perceive the world? Can slides become part of our experiential and architectural life?

As we approach the washing-machine singularity…

…we must beware.

Implicit Associations

Via Malcolm Gladwell’s pop-science book Blink, a bunch of tests from those nice people at Harvard to see what your implicit associations are to race, disability, sexuality, women in science (pointedly, one suspects), and Arabs/Muslims.

Mr Cheerful

An interview with Peter Watts:

SFRevu: Do you think happiness is not a normal state? What about your characters — will they ever achieve happiness?

Peter: Kenny and Lenie kind of did, at the end of the rifters books. I was always worried I’d sold out and grafted a Hollywood Happy Ending onto that series.

The problem with happiness is, once achieved, you acclimate to it. Things that used to make you happy don’t quite cut it after a while: your brain calibrates its happiness thermostat to some more ambitious threshold. Happiness is, therefore, transient by neurological definition. Enough is never enough for long.

We’re funny that way.