Wow, the summer is really flying by. I've been having a very nice bit of a holiday, topped by an excellent 4th of July BBQ: good friends, tasty food, cold beer and sitting by the pool discussing time travel paradoxes. I could do that every day, but alas, that's not possible. But what I can do is spend some of the cool evening hours reading stories by some new (or new to me) SF authors, and when I find stories available online I can share them with you.To start, here's a short tale by Australian SF writer Ian McHugh featuring whales and prions and aliens:
- Read "Requiem in D-minor (for prions, whale and burning bush)"
- Listen to "Requiem in D-minor (for prions, whale and burning bush)" at Escape Pod
And music has indeed been made based on the three-dimensional structure of biological molecules. Listen to human growth hormone. It's not much like humpback whale song, but it's nice.
Image: Human prion protein PDB structure 1i4m (Knaus KJ et al. " Crystal structure of the human prion protein reveals a mechanism for oligomerization." Nat Struct Biol 8:770-774) (2001)
Tags:science fiction, prions
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I am presenting a new science fiction writer Romualdas Draksas. His new book „Man.The Awakening“ has just been published. Here is a short presentation of the book.
ReplyDeleteMan—the galaxy’s most fearsome creature, constructed as a unique war machine, who rose up and escaped from his creators and ended up a captive on a planet inhibiting most of his powers. But what were to happen if Humans again found themselves beyond the limits of their incarcerating planet’s effects, and they regained all of the awesome abilities their creators had given them? In other words, what would it mean if they started the process that the other races of the galaxy referred to as “the awakening”?
Just as a single rock can suffice to set a lethal avalanche in motion, so can a lone awakened Human be enough to rattle the entire galaxy.
http://www.strategicbookpublishing.com/ManTheAwakening.html