The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

'Barely Imagined Beings' is taking a break.

"You have no idea what life would be like in a universe with different constants," [says Fred Adams]...[He] reckons his results, w...

A couple of reminders this week that belief in the presence of alien beings on earth [1] is widespread and/or goes deep in parts of the cul...

...To this day, when tucking into a pork chop, I always feel as if it is my intellectual equal. Then there were the geese, the most admirabl...

in A robot 'love story' .

Jungle shrews take a tipple, but eschew (ha ha) intoxication ( It’s Always Happy Hour for Several Species in Malaysian Rain Forest ): The f...

Deep Sea News praises manta ray research in Mozambique that "takes a holistic, nearly ideal approach to science and community-based co...

Few beings are more bizarre when you come to them for the first time than the Crown of Thorns Starfish ( COTS ). What could be stranger tha...

'Yeti hair' to get DNA analysis - a resolution for Kevin Kelly's bet ? Maybe. Maybe not.

Overall, seagrasses are in a vulnerable state. Seagrass habitats are already declining due to increasing water temperatures, algae growth a...

Quietly [Gilbert] adds that the soldiers also murdered 37 members of his family. "My little cousins," he says, "I still can...

Graeme Lloyd...and his team studied all of the existing dinosaur taxonomic literature to produce a 'supertree' of dinosaur species. ...

Deep Sea News notes that the practice of "dynamite" or "bomb" fishing has spread recently to Central America. Seven haw...

Our gregarious great ape cousins — chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas — along with dolphins and Asian elephants, have passed the ...

We must contemplate the possibility that some regions of the Earth will experience high levels of warming (>4°C) within the next 100 year...

In 2003 Kevin Kelly bet Stewart Brand that: by 2025 the scientific evidence of a hither-to-unknown large bi-pedal great ape will be suffici...

...And he went back to meet the fox . "Goodbye," he said. "Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a ve...

Many bioconservatives are addicted to a notion of humanness that is very specific to Judeo-Christianity. [But] when you look at India and T...

This is a story for the likes of Shifting Baselines : Irrational preferences for caviar from rarer species are likely to drive the few remai...

Brian Aldiss 's 1962 novel Hothouse (shortly to appear in a new edition ) portrays a world of fantastic, semi-sentient carnivorous plan...