Bag of Beans

Quite an incredible story about a powder being developed that can regrow body parts.

“I put my finger in,” Mr Spievak says, pointing towards the propeller of a model airplane, “and that’s when I sliced my finger off.”

It took the end right off, down to the bone, about half an inch.

“We don’t know where the piece went.”

The photos of his severed finger tip are pretty graphic. You can understand why doctors said he’d lost it for good.

Today though, you wouldn’t know it. Mr Spievak, who is 69 years old, shows off his finger, and it’s all there, tissue, nerves, nail, skin, even his finger print.

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Great retrospective looking back at Clarke’s most influential works.

But relatively little space has been devoted to Clarke’s writing—the notable exception being the essays of his collaborator and friend, Gregory Benford, an astrophysicist and author of many science fiction novels including Timescape, the Galactic Center Saga, and Beyond the Fall of Night (a collaboration with Clarke).

In many of Clarke’s obituaries, there is a subtext (occasionally text) suggesting that while his way of seeing the future was extraordinary, his writing was perhaps not very good. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though he wasn’t known for vivid character portraits, his prose was always elegant, and its style precisely suited to his purposes: prompting readers to think and to wonder.

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A nice memorial for the first dog in space.

Stories about how she was selected varied: Some said Laika was chosen for her good looks — a Soviet space pioneer had to be photogenic. Others indicated the top choice for the mission was dropped because doctors took pity on her: Since there was no way to design a re-entry vehicle in time for the launch, the flight meant a certain death.

“Laika was quiet and charming,” Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky wrote in his book chronicling the story of Soviet space medicine. He recalled that before heading to the launch pad, he took the dog home to play with his children. “I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live,” Yazdovsky said.

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