Even a buffalo separated from the herd has reasonable chances. At one point we saw a lone bull that was trying to get back to the herd, which was about a half mile away. In between him and the herd were four lionesses, sacked out asleep. This looked like the perfect opportunity for a kill, but the buffalo surprised both us and the lions. He crept up on the sleeping lions, then when he got close he lowered his horns and charged. The lions awoke, panicked and scattered into the bushes. The buffalo then trotted victorious back to the pride. It was a perfect illustration of the adage that the best defense is a good offense.

This essay carries the following warning at Edge.org:

WARNING: some of the photos are a bit gory, and one shows explicit lion sex.

See also the latest research on fight-or-flight, using fMRI on video-game-playing humans.

You may also be interested in Wildebeest vs. wild dogs.

Lions: Africa's Magnificent Predators | By Nathan Myhrvold

Recollections of Bill Joy.

There is increasing concern amongst a wide range of commentators that human nature is in the process of being irrevocably changed by technological advances which either have been achieved or are in the pipeline. According to a multitude of op-ed writers, cultural critics, social scientists and philosophers, we have not faced up to the grave implications of what is happening. We are sleep-walking and need to wake up. Human life is being so radically transformed that our very essence as human beings is under threat.

Of course, apocalypse sells product, and one should not regard the epidemiology of panic as a guide to social or any other kind of reality. The fact that one of the most quoted panickers about the future is Francis Fukuyama, who has got both the past wrong (The End of History) and the present wrong (recovered neo-con Pentagon hawk), should itself be reassurance enough. Nevertheless, it is still worthwhile challenging the assumptions of those such as Fukuyama who are trying to persuade us to be queasy about the consequences of the various technologies that have brought about enhancement of human possibility and, indeed, want to call a halt to certain lines of inquiry, notably in biotechnology.

Don't think of a fluorescent fish.

Enhancing Humanity

One of the things I was doing on my recent sabbatical was asking myself "what the heck am I working on, and why?" I was taking a bit of a breather to more clearly figure out what I want to focus on, and what direction I want to take my life and career.

Today I want to blog about having your own Personal Research Agenda. A Research Agenda is a list of questions to focus on -- they are the destinations you are tacking towards, the organizing principle around which you work. You might not be focusing on all of them all the time, but just formulating a list and putting it down will cause your mind to roll over them in the background like a kind of background thread.

Creating a Personal Research Agenda

What percentage of your ancestors were men?

No, it’s not 50 percent, as I’ll explain shortly.

Is There Anything Good About Men? And Other Tricky Questions

Alun Anderson, former editor of Nature, Science, and New Scientist replies to Dyson's Heretical Thoughts.

Knowing that Arctic climate models are imperfect, it would be reassuring for me, if not for the scientists, to be able to write that scientists keep making grim predictions that just that don't come true. If that were so, we could follow Dyson's line that the models aren't so good and "the fuss is exaggerated". Scarily, the truth is the other way around. The ice is melting faster than the grimmest of the scientist's predictions, and the predictions keep getting grimmer. Now we are talking about an Arctic free of ice in summer by 2040. That's a lot of melting given that, in the long, dark winter the ice covers an area greater than that of the entire United States.

The Changing Arctic: A Response To Freeman Dyson

Practitioners of a strange trade, friends, enemies, ladies and gentlemen: Before starting with my talk, let me explain to you how it came into existence.

About a year ago I was short of funds. So I accepted an invitation to contribute to a book dealing with the relation between science and religion. To make the book sell I thought l should make my contribution a provocative one and the most provocative statement one can make about the relation between science and religion is that science is a religion. Having made the statement the core of my article I discovered that lots of reasons, lots of excellent reasons, could be found for it. I enumerated the reasons, finished my article, and got paid. That was stage one.

Next I was invited to a Conference for the Defence of Culture. I accepted the invitation because it paid for my flight to Europe. I also must admit that I was rather curious. When I arrived in Nice I had no idea what I would say. Then while the conference was taking its course I discovered that everyone thought very highly of science and that everyone was very serious. So I decided to explain how one could defend culture from science. All the reasons collected in my article would apply here as well and there was no need to invent new things. I gave my talk, was rewarded with an outcry about my "dangerous and ill considered ideas," collected my ticket and went on to Vienna. That was stage number two.

Now I am supposed to address you.

How To Defend Society Against Science

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch

I begin with three cautionary tales, one from each of the three worlds into which our planet is divided. These tales will have various morals. One of the morals is that human nature is the same in all three worlds. We are the same people making the same mistakes, whether we happen to belong to the third world, the second world, or the first world. But let me tell you the stories first. The stories should speak for themselves. After you hear the stories you can decide what the morals ought to be.

Six Cautionary Tales for Scientists | Freeman Dyson

A new ultraviolet mosaic from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows a speeding star that is leaving an enormous trail of "seeds" for new solar systems. The star, named Mira (pronounced my-rah) after the latin word for "wonderful," is shedding material that will be recycled into new stars, planets and possibly even life as it hurls through our galaxy.

Mira appears as a small white dot in the bulb-shaped structure at right, and is moving from left to right in this view. The shed material can be seen in light blue. The dots in the picture are stars and distant galaxies. The large blue dot at left is a star that is closer to us than Mira.

Mira's comet-like tail stretches a startling 13 light-years across the sky. For comparison, the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri, is only about 4 light-years away. Mira's tail also tells a tale of its history – the material making it up has been slowly blown off over time, with the oldest material at the end of the tail having been released about 30,000 years ago.

More here.

See also:

The Sombrero Galaxy - 28 million light years from Earth - was voted best picture taken by the Hubble telescope. The dimensions of the galaxy, officially called M104, are as spectacular as its appearance. It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across.

Johnny Appleseed of the Cosmos

When humans are offered the choice between rewards available at different points in time, the relative values of the options are discounted according to their expected delays until delivery. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the neural correlates of time discounting while subjects made a series of choices between monetary reward options that varied by delay to delivery. We demonstrate that two separate systems are involved in such decisions. Parts of the limbic system associated with the midbrain do- pamine system, including paralimbic cortex, are preferentially activated by decisions involving immediately available rewards. In contrast, regions of the lateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex are engaged uniformly by intertemporal choices irrespective of delay. Furthermore, the relative engagement of the two systems is directly associated with subjects’ choices, with greater relative fronto-parietal activity when subjects choose longer term options.

Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards