Recommended reads

Looking for a dose of sanity? Chris Wren's blog is for you.

Elsewhere, Mike Clelland articulates some of my own suspicions and wonders if the Internet (and its attendant telecommunications apparatus) has the potential for sentience:

Is there an evolving giant life form of synaptic fibers emerging within cyberspace? Is it a new set of neurotransmitters, allowing and encouraging an alternative web of synchronistic happenings?

Incidentally, Web-based consciousness is the premise of "Wake," the new novel by Robert J. Sawyer (who hosts "Supernatural Investigator").

Techno-nature

Humans may be losers if technological nature replaces the real thing

Modern technology increasingly is encroaching into human connections with the natural world and University of Washington psychologists believe this intrusion may emerge as one of the central psychological problems of our times.

"We are a technological species, but we also need a deep connection with nature in our lives," said Peter Kahn, a UW developmental psychologist and lead author of a new study exploring how humans connect with nature and technological nature.

Writing in the current issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Kahn and two of his UW graduate students, Rachel Severson and Jolina Ruckert, look at the psychological effects of interacting with various forms of technological nature and explore humanity's growing estrangement from nature.

The sky's the limit.

Discovery of New Microorganisms in the Stratosphere

Three new species of bacteria, which are not found on Earth and which are highly resistant to ultra-violet radiation, have been discovered in the upper stratosphere by Indian scientists. One of the new species has been named as Janibacter hoylei, after the Distinguished Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, the second as Bacillus isronensis recognising the contribution of ISRO in the balloon experiments which led to its discovery and the third as Bacillus aryabhata after India's celebrated ancient astronomer Aryabhata and also the first satellite of ISRO.

(Via Futurismic.)

650 Million Years In 1:20 min

(Thanks to Cliff Pickover's Twitter feed.)

Pink Tentacle explains what we're seeing:

Here is some terrific video of a bioluminescent deep-sea siphonophore -- an eerily fantastic creature that appears to be a single, large organism, but which is actually a colony of numerous individual jellyfish-like animals that behave and function together as a single entity. The individual units, called zooids, all share the same genetic material and each perform a specialized role within the colony.

In other words, it's a undersea Borg.

None of these creatures are exactly cute, but I find the giant coconut crab positively horrifying.

One I managed to miss:

Giant amoebas found rolling on sea floor

Using a research submarine, marine biologists in the Bahamas have discovered large numbers of an unknown, grape-sized, single-celled animal slowly rolling across the sea floor.

"[It's] huge for a single cell. If I had cells that big I'd be six kilometres tall and weigh three trillion kilograms," said Sönke Johnsen, a biologist at Duke University in North Carolina, and the expedition's chief scientist.

(Via Futurismic.)

Alien-like Squid With "Elbows" Filmed at Drilling Site

A mile and a half (two and a half kilometers) underwater, a remote control submersible's camera has captured an eerie surprise: an alien-like, long-armed, and -- strangest of all -- "elbowed" Magnapinna squid.

(Via Futurismic.)

Now that's what I call an eldritch horror.

Earth's Many Voices -- a Unified Theory for Pre-Earthquake Signals

Paging Michael Persinger . . .

Shrimp defense: glowing blue spit cloud (video)

Smooth nylon shrimp (Heterocarpus laevigatus) inhabiting the dark depths of the Pacific employ a brilliant method of defense. When threatened with attack, the creature spits a cloud of bioluminescent blue fluid from its mouth, temporarily blinding its predator and allowing escape.

The Official Larva Art Appreciation Page

For some reason, I just love artistic photos of insects and other larvae, and art that is literally created by living larvae. Do you? The larvae call to me. The images tell me something about art, technology, and the wonderful panoply of nature. Images of larvae remind us of the intricacy of evolution and the awesome biological universe in which we live.

Gorgeous photos of houses consumed by kudzu.

Enough surfing. I'm going to bed now.

Gaia Hypothesis: Could Earth Really be a Single Organism?

When you stop to think about it, our planet does act like a huge organism. If you look at the interrelationship between plants and atmospherics, animals and humans, rocks and water, a complex pattern of symbiotic processes seem to complement each other perfectly. Should one system be pushed out of balance by some external force (such as a massive injection of atmospheric carbon dioxide after a volcanic event), other processes are stimulated to counteract the instability (more phytoplankton appear in the oceans to absorb the carbon dioxide in the water). Many of these processes could be interpreted as a "global immune system".

Could Gaia be sentient in some unrecognized sense? If so, how might it communicate (assuming it wanted to)? In David Brin's "Earth," Gaia achieves self-awareness via the electronic nervous system we call the Internet, but perhaps it doesn't need anything so fragile or human-friendly. A global consciousness might manifest in the planet's ambient EM field, in its chemicals, in the molecular architecture of its organisms.