Master of the Five Magics, by Lyndon Hardy. Probably one of the fantasy novels out there with the most well-clarified rules for magic, IMHO. Great book too, but I didn't dig the sequel as much.

Your wish is my command!

It's kind of ridiculous to argue that these places are doing work that competes with private industry. Genome sequencing projects are the sort of things that require significant infrastructure investment without the promise of immediately applicable results. Plants in particular can be very difficult to sequence…

That was a pretty cool idea, it's a shame it didn't pan out. I wonder how it would react to the alcohol in mouthwash (or booze for that matter), since he included an ADH to make up for the deficiency in lactic acid metabolism.

You can also have birds that are albino, but still have colored feathers. Some bird feathers are colored with pigments such as melanin, but many sorts of bird feathers actually acquire their coloration through the structure of the feather itself.

We already have self-replicating nanobots that turn just about anything they come into contact with into more of themselves. We call them bacteria, and they've been around for a few years.

Technology has also made it easier to communicate. While your position on this as a good or bad thing will no doubt vary, it has certainly altered how we exchange and talk about ideas. Without this technology and transportation technology, whenever there would be a famine there wouldn't even be the possibility of…

There are plants that do something similar, though probably not as vigorous as you are hoping :p Try googling the Spotted Touch-Me-Not or the Squirting Cucumber (be careful with that one, this is the internet after all) , the videos are pretty entertaining

Hal Clement's stuff sort of fits the mold, though most of his ecologies seem to be window dressing for those crazy planets he wrote about...definitely shows his astronomy background, though the chemistry makes a good showing too. It might also just be that many of the REALLY big breakthroughs in biology have only…

There are plenty of cases where the scientist IS the hero in real life. Check out Norman Borlaug, Alexander Fleming, or Jonas Salk. Sure, they didn't go out and apply their discoveries to the millions of people they saved directly, but without the discoveries there wouldn't have been any saving going on. Borlaug…

I've read Blood Music, but I wouldn't really call it hard biological science. I realize that science fiction isn't always about accuracy, but there are plenty of cool things that biology can do that could be world changing without resorting to extreme handwavium.

Having read the whole article, I find I quite have to agree. Science fiction is what got me into my current science career, and reading through the daily deluge of scientific articles makes me feel like we are living in the future already.

It is if you are a marathon runner :) For more sedentary folks like myself, not so much.

I get the whole "can't die no matter what" kind of immortality would suck, but that kind of immortality is pretty much impossible (brain damage would be game over without some crazy advanced technology).

They only really become bad for you if you don't do anything to get rid of them. If you have a reasonably active lifestyle and don't consume tons of them while being comatose on the couch, you will be fine. Getting most of your carbs from complex starches is no doubt healthier - love me some sweet potatoes - but…

Part of the problem isn't the amount of sugar (though that is an issue, to be sure) but also the composition of sugar that we eat. Modern diets in the US have pretty high levels of fructose in a lot of foods, and while a molecule of fructose isn't energetically much different than a molecule of glucose, the problem…

I'm not an abiogenesis specialist but I'll give it a shot, since what is the internet for if not claiming fluency in things outside your area of expertise? :) Also, I got most of this from Jack Szostak's lab's work in membrane chemistry at Harvard.

In the article, it's not so much that the fish are not responding to day-night cycles as that they have lost the ability to respond to them even if exposed. The humans in the study you mention quickly re-acquired their circadian cycles once re-exposed to normal rhythms, but these fish have lost the biological…

There was another cool case of something similar in tropical panic grass (which itself has a pretty cool name): the plant has a fungal symbiote that confers thermotolerance so the plant can grow in soils up to 65 C. When the researchers looked closer, though, they discovered that the fungus was inhabited by a virus,…

No love for Mayer Alan Brenner and the Dance of Gods series? Pretty good writing, and it pretty much hits this trope on the head. Several of the characters are magicians that are researching the basis of magic, and he gets quite detailed into the technical details of spell casting, such as where does the energy to…