Wired has a report on the new bandages made out of [tag]shrimp[/tag]:
More importantly, they will not cause a deadly reaction in people who are allergic to shellfish. Allergic reactions are triggered by protein — chitosan is a carbohydrate.
Does sound pretty cool. Not to mention fodder for a whole new slew of [tag]sci-fi[/tag] man/insect mutant movies.
Caught a bit of the Battlestar Gallactica marathon this morning (the 70s version). I’d forgotten about that creepy robot dog, Muffit. Wonder Woman had a robot dog, too. Battle of the Planets, although a cartoon, still had a robot pooch named 1-Rover-1. Buck Rogers was more progressive, instead of a robot dog they had gay humanoid robots, but that’s really the subject of a whole other post.
We didn’t have television in my house for part of the 70s so my memories of 70s TV shows are a bit dodgy. I was searching for more instances of robo-dogs of the 70s, and chasing rumors about Muffit being played by chimpanzees but I got distracted by a post at sciencefictionblog titled Dog of the Bride of the Reanimator?, which linked to an article about The University of Pittsburgh’s Safar Center for Resuscitation Research and their work re-animating dogs.
[The original link is dead, but I swear the project is real. This link added August 23, 2018. “Reanimated chickens and zombie dogs.”]
I consequently got distracted contemplating the ramifications of zombie dogs. Then I lost interest in the whole 70s robot dog thing altogether. Zombie dogs are way more interesting.
Now this is news: I was watching hurricane coverage and just saw this in the crawl at CNN: Muppets Dr Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker defeated Dr Strangelove, Dana Scully of “X Files” fame and Star Trek’s Mr Spock to be voted Britain’s favorite screen scientists on Monday.
That’s when Husband threatened to make me turn off the TV.
So I turned to the Internet to learn more. The poll was sponsored by the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Cult TV site at BBC.com.
I liked this bit from the Reuters story:
“They are accessible, humorous and occasionally blow each other up,” said Roland Jackson, of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
Today I saw my first cicada from Brood X. And I realized that my brother and I – being rather poor as children and lacking things like television to keep us entertained – used to love collecting their shells into huge jars. We were also morbid little beasts – as befits the children of a homicide investigator, I suppose.
I’m looking forward to recording the cicada symphanies. I like bugs. I hate snakes, but I like bugs. I don’t really like them in my hair, though, and so I may need a new floppy hat for cicada season.
I’m up to Buffy season 5 (and rewatching Angel season 2 so that it all makes sense) and now I understand the whole “spike with a chip in his head thing.” That, in addition to the usual ethical digressions I would go on, dulls my enthusiasm for the latest developments in brain implants a bit.
Cyberkinetics, the company developing the neural prosthetics, has set up a brief informational site about their BrainGate system, but the good scientific articles are all in proprietary databases and I really don’t have the energy, strength, or coordination to type up any excerpts today so there will be no discussion of bioethics here today.
I have a feeling it’s going to be a while before they develop the technology to enable me to shoot laser beams out of my eyes. Keep trying, boys.