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Rogue Farm
Rogue Farm is a 2003 science fiction short story by British author Charles Stross. It takes place in a bizarre future sometime after the technological singularity. In a world of biological fabricators, eight-legged cows, talking dogs, microscopic surveillance bots, and mid-life genetic upgrades, the main character, Joe, and his wife Maddie must defend their small farm from a terrifying threat. Plot Joe and Maddie are squatting in a farmstead. One morning, they must drive off a "farm", a grotesque creature that was once human. This creature pleads with them, saying it is selling brains to prepare for its trip to Jupiter. While the farm leaves their property, it puts down tap roots in a nearby clump of trees just outside their property. It is clear that the farm plans to use this spot as a launch point; these farms use specialized enzymes to turn the sap of tall trees into explosives, which will destroy every living thing near the launch site. Joe goes off to a nearby bar and spea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, extraterrestrial life, sentient artificial intelligence, cybernetics, certain forms of immortality (like mind uploading), and the singularity. Science fiction predicted several existing inventions, such as the atomic bomb, robots, and borazon, whose names entirely match their fictional predecessors. In addition, science fiction might serve as an outlet to facilitate future scientific and technological innovations. Science fiction can trace its roots to ancient mythology. It is also related to fantasy, horror, and superhero fiction and contains many subgenres. Its exact definition has long been disputed among authors, critics, scholars, and readers. Science fiction, in literature, film, television, and other media, has beco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Short Story
A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest types of literature and has existed in the form of legends, mythic tales, folk tales, fairy tales, tall tales, fables and anecdotes in various ancient communities around the world. The modern short story developed in the early 19th century. Definition The short story is a crafted form in its own right. Short stories make use of plot, resonance, and other dynamic components as in a novel, but typically to a lesser degree. While the short story is largely distinct from the novel or novella/short novel, authors generally draw from a common pool of literary techniques. The short story is sometimes referred to as a genre. Determining what exactly defines a short story has been recurrently problematic. A classic definition of a short story ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Stross
Charles David George "Charlie" Stross (born 18 October 1964) is a British writer of science fiction and fantasy. Stross specialises in hard science fiction and space opera. Between 1994 and 2004, he was also an active writer for the magazine '' Computer Shopper'' and was responsible for its monthly Linux column. He stopped writing for the magazine to devote more time to novels. However, he continues to publish freelance articles on the Internet. Early life and education Stross was born in Leeds, England. He showed an early interest in writing and wrote his first science fiction story at age 12. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Pharmacy in 1986 and qualified as a pharmacist in 1987. In 1989, he enrolled at Bradford University for a post-graduate degree in computer science. In 1990, he went to work as a technical author and programmer. In 2000, he began working as a writer full-time, as a technical writer at first, but then became successful as a fiction writer. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Technological Singularity
The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good, I.J. Good's #Intelligence explosion, intelligence explosion model, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence.Vinge, Vernor"The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era", in ''Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace'', G. A. Landis, ed., NASA Publication CP-10129, pp. 11–22, 1993. The first person to use the concept of a "singularity" in t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Enzymes
Enzymes () are proteins that act as biological catalysts by accelerating chemical reactions. The molecules upon which enzymes may act are called substrate (chemistry), substrates, and the enzyme converts the substrates into different molecules known as product (chemistry), products. Almost all metabolism, metabolic processes in the cell (biology), cell need enzyme catalysis in order to occur at rates fast enough to sustain life. Metabolic pathways depend upon enzymes to catalyze individual steps. The study of enzymes is called ''enzymology'' and the field of pseudoenzyme, pseudoenzyme analysis recognizes that during evolution, some enzymes have lost the ability to carry out biological catalysis, which is often reflected in their amino acid sequences and unusual 'pseudocatalytic' properties. Enzymes are known to catalyze more than 5,000 biochemical reaction types. Other biocatalysts are Ribozyme, catalytic RNA molecules, called ribozymes. Enzymes' Chemical specificity, specific ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Surveillance
Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), or interception of electronically transmitted information like Internet traffic. It can also include simple technical methods, such as Human intelligence (intelligence gathering), human intelligence gathering and postal interception. Surveillance is used by citizens for protecting their neighborhoods. And by governments for intelligence gathering - including espionage, prevention of crime, the protection of a process, person, group or object, or the investigation of crime. It is also used by criminal organizations to plan and commit crimes, and by businesses to Industrial espionage, gather intelligence on criminals, their competitors, suppliers or customers. Religious organisations charged with detecting he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Liquid Nitrogen
Liquid nitrogen—LN2—is nitrogen in a liquid state at low temperature. Liquid nitrogen has a boiling point of about . It is produced industrially by fractional distillation of liquid air. It is a colorless, low viscosity liquid that is widely used as a coolant. Physical properties The diatomic character of the N2 molecule is retained after liquefaction. The weak van der Waals interaction between the N2 molecules results in little interatomic interaction, manifested in its very low boiling point. The temperature of liquid nitrogen can readily be reduced to its freezing point by placing it in a vacuum chamber pumped by a vacuum pump. Liquid nitrogen's efficiency as a coolant is limited by the fact that it boils immediately on contact with a warmer object, enveloping the object in an insulating layer of nitrogen gas bubbles. This effect, known as the Leidenfrost effect, occurs when any liquid comes in contact with a surface which is significantly hotter than its boiling ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Fiction Short Stories
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek man ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2000s Science Fiction Works
S, or s, is the nineteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ess'' (pronounced ), plural ''esses''. History Origin Northwest Semitic šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative (as in 'ip'). It originated most likely as a pictogram of a tooth () and represented the phoneme via the acrophonic principle. Ancient Greek did not have a phoneme, so the derived Greek letter sigma () came to represent the voiceless alveolar sibilant . While the letter shape Σ continues Phoenician ''šîn'', its name ''sigma'' is taken from the letter ''samekh'', while the shape and position of ''samekh'' but name of ''šîn'' is continued in the '' xi''. Within Greek, the name of ''sigma'' was influenced by its association with the Greek word (earlier ) "to hiss". The original name of the letter "sigma" may have been ''san'', but due to the complica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
