Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
This is definitively the year of bacteria in terms of scientific discovery and ground-breaking experiments. It was only a few months ago that a new strand of DNA was engineered in a lab, creating an organism with semi-synthetic (“alien”) DNA. And it’s…
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In what seems more the plot of a SF novel than a scientific discovery, a new strand of DNA has recently been engineered in a lab (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v509/n7500/full/nature13314.html). The headlines have defined it “alien DNA”, technically a misnomer for what the…
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Prey (2002) is a novel by Michael Crichton, and, as others of the same author, presents unintended consequences of newly discovered technologies and scientific wonders. In this case, nanotechnologies, genetic engineering and swarm intelligence get the spotlights. Fascinating and scary.