Archives for the 'Biology' Category
Nature Abhors a Gradient
Published on 27 Nov 2007 at 3:54 am.
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Filed under Biology, Climate, Energy, Evolution, Philosophy, Physics, Social Justice.
I recall back to my first days in physics class where I read the quotation “Nature abhors a vacuum”. The phrase was accompanied by an image of two teams of horses trying to pull two hollow hemispheres apart after the air was pumped out from inside.
These were called Magdeburg hemispheres and the experiment was performed by [...]
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Collective Intelligence in Ant Colonies
Published on 18 Nov 2007 at 12:32 am.
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Filed under Biology, Information, Intelligent Systems.
I have always been fascinated by the idea that ant colonies may exhibit some kind of collective intelligence. Whether this is actually the case needs to be proven, however, I am not quite sure how one can prove such a hypothesis. As far as I am aware, there is no Turing Test for ant colonies. [...]
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Launch of Greener Still
Published on 8 Nov 2007 at 11:54 pm.
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Filed under Biology, Climate, Energy, Entrepreneurship, Green.
Launch of www.greenerstill.com, which is a site focused on keeping our world healthy.
Kevin Knuth
Albany NY
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Encyclopedia of Life
Published on 31 Oct 2007 at 2:32 am.
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Filed under Biology, Birds, Climate, Exploration, Green, Internet, Wildlife.
I recently learned of the project called “Encyclopedia of Life“, which endeavors to create an online encyclopedia featuring every known life form on Earth. From what I can see, this is going to be done in an open access manner.
Sample pages exist for the following organisms:
Death Cap Mushroom (Amanita Phalloides)
Rice (Oryza Sativa)
Yeti Crab (Kiwa Hirsuta)
and [...]
Plants and Animals: Chemists and Engineers
Published on 8 Aug 2007 at 2:26 am.
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Filed under Biology, Evolution, Philosophy.
Last winter I went to the Galapagos Islands. While there, I was wondering why plants have all sorts of medicinal properties, but it is rather rare that animals do.
A naturalist explained to me that plants evolved to use chemistry as their main defense; whereas animals developed locomotion. Two different kingdoms adopted two distinct technologies for survival: chemistry [...]
