Women should be breeding, not sciencing

You may have noticed the outrage over the recent announcement that there were no women among the researchers selected for the new Canada Excellence Research Chairs. In fact, there weren’t even any women in the shortlist. URNews offers its take.

“I’m trying to write a book that would last forever”

The Globe and Mail checks in with super villain poet Christian Bok about his ongoing efforts to insert poetry into the genetic material of bacteria — and teach them to create their own poetry. Some of us blog, others create new forms of life whose very soul is poetry….

Bök’s original inspiration was an experiment in which U.S. scientists translated song lyrics into genetic code and implanted them in various bacteria, retrieving them intact after several generations of reproduction. An article by physicist Paul Davies speculating about the use of such bugs as space travellers sealed the deal.

“We could image a civilization encoding information in genetic sequences that could be incorporated into spores and viruses,” the poet says, describing Davies’s idea. “And these spores and viruses would be transmitted into the interstellar void and survive and adapt to the various environments they encounter. And just sit and wait for a smart enough civilization to build computers fast enough to discover these messages and decipher them.”

Eureka. “I thought, Why wait? Why not be that civilization?”

Canadian scientists prepare to end the world

Oops, I mean work on the Large Hadron Collider.

More than 200 Canadian scientists are gearing up for work most of us don’t understand, carried out in a tunnel deep underground, in a country far away. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is only running at less than a quarter of its full power, yet already experiments are being carried out to probe the universe within the atom. And one of the first off the line is a group led by Dr. James Pinfold of the University of Alberta, who is searching for the mysterious magnetic monopole.

“Canada is failing to make the most of a key national resource”

Nature magazine gives Canada a failing grade when it comes to science. (Via Michael Geist.)

One reason for this apparent neglect of science may be that Canada is so big and its population so small. Bodies that help to inform the government about science, such as the Council of Canadian Academies, have neither the membership of their US equivalents nor the historical clout of those in Britain. Another reason may be that so much of Canada’s wealth comes from natural resources, including timber and the oil sands, rather than from technical innovation. Perhaps this leads the government to see scientists as just another interest group, rather than as crucial contributors to the economy.

Christian Bok’s Xenotext Experiment

Christian Bok wants to create a xenotext — a poem encoded into DNA that’s then implanted into bacteria.

I always knew Christian wanted to take over the world — what better way than using bacteria to infect and colonize us?

Part 2 of the video is here.

Also, Coach House Books has released an updated version of Bok’s Eunoia, with added material.