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Monthly Archives: July 2010

Magazine Writer All-Stars

Kevin Kelly recently compiled this list of the 100 best magazine articles EVER. Minor quibbles — too much David Foster Wallace, Calvin Trillin; too few women — but there is great, great stuff in here, and some pieces (with links!) that I really must make time for. This would be a perfect job for my […]

Big Hopes for Algae

Andrew Pollack had a long piece in the New York Times yesterday on the race to develop a viable process for making fuel from algae. The article focuses on Sapphire Energy, which has raised $100 million from investors including Bill Gates and is getting another $100 million in federal financing to build a demo project […]

Startup Nation: Revitalizing the Entrepreneurial Network

“Bring on the Entrepreneurs,” the article that Amy Barrett and I co-wrote for the July/August issue of Inc. magazine, has been generating a steady stream of comments on Inc.’s website — mostly positive, but with some dissenters to be sure. To generalize, the critics of the policies we prescribe in the piece take a predictable […]

The Multitudes

“I am large, I contain multitudes,” wrote Walt Whitman, in Song of Myself. Little did he know just how right he was. Interesting stuff by Carl Zimmer on the human microbiome in today’s New York Times. All of us, islands of microbial life — mountains, valleys, caves. The article also contains one of the most […]

Visualizing a New “Tree” of Life

New visual musings on synthetic life from artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg. Below, the “3-D Table Matrix,” one of several classification systems Ginsburg proposes.

The New Creative Commons: Part 2

In a recent Inc. magazine story, I wrote about the Tech Shop and La Cocina, a kitchen incubator in San Francisco, as examples of physical spaces whose shared tools and resources are making possible a new wave of innovation and, with it, entrepreneurial activity. In my research I came across information on another project that […]

MicroGlobalScope

I recently posted about a great project in New York City called the Biobus. In August, the Biobus, in conjunction with the awesome science advocacy and investment group the Science House, will commence an ambitious program to distribute high-quality microscopes to schools around the world (free!), encouraging students to share and compare their discoveries online. […]

Discover Feature on George Church

Too bad Discover waited such a long time to put this March story online. Anyway, a really great profile of Harvard’s monk-like reader and writer of the genome, George Church. It’s written by Ed Regis, a guy who’s been following cutting-edge synthetic biology work from the beginning.