m. c. de marco

In my ongoing zombie research, I came across a three-part YouTube video of Jan Sleutels expounding on Greek Zombies: not your average shambling undead, but Julian Jaynes’ pre-conscious ancient Greeks. If you don’t have time for all three parts, you can get a draft of the paper at his website.

Via plime: Discovery News reports on the successful sequencing of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. Neanderthal Park is not far behind:

Geneticist David Reich at the Harvard Medical School also agrees that the newly sequenced genome “is exciting and important.”

Via a mailing list: Demographic Winter, a pretty website about “the decline of the human family.” From their FAQ:

Question: What does the expression “Demographic Winter” mean?

Answer: “Demographic Winter” denotes the worldwide decline in birthrates, also referred to as a “birth-dearth,” and what it portends.

Someone mentioned melancholy on a mailing list, meaning by it nothing distinct from depression, but my ear picked it up and I wondered whether melancholy was still a legitimate affliction. (The answer appears to be no, it’s been replaced by melancholic depression.)

Besides the vampires, I loved the use of obscure neurological conditions (such as the titular one) in Peter Watt’s Blindsight. One that stuck with me especially was Cotard’s syndrome, in which one of the female characters believes that she is, in fact, dead. Understandably, she has a hard time convincing the other characters of this fact since, aside from her change in affect, she is very much alive.

This entry was intended to be a sequel to a previous entry about genetically engineered vampires, but I forgot to finish my thought and all that remains of it is a cool quote from the extended notes to Blindsight by Peter Watts:

In fact, the nonconscious mind usually works so well on its own that it actually employs a gatekeeper in the anterious cingulate cortex to do nothing but prevent the conscious self from interfering in daily operations. (If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.)

Via Technovelgy: scientists have discovered a new pair of molecules that fit into the double helix:

Romesberg set up experiments that generated thousands of potential bases at random, and then screened them to see of any would be treated normally by a polymerase enzyme. h the help of graduate student Aaron Leconte, the group synthesized and screened 3600 candidates. Two different screening approaches turned up the same pair of molecules, called dSICS and dMMO2.