---------------------------------------------http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/science-fiction-and-fantasy-writers-of-america-hold-annual-convention/2011/05/21/AF4vkK9G_story.html wrote:
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America hold annual convention
By Monica Hesse/ WASHINGTON POST - MAY 23:
<<Before Rachel Swirsky won the Nebula award for best novella Saturday, she went to an authors’ reception and learned some tips from veterans of the science fiction awards circuit. “Apparently the Hugo makes a great paper-towel holder,” Swirsky says. “And if you put a sock over the World Fantasy Award,” it looks like a profile of Jacques Cousteau. But what to do with a Nebula — a heavy glass block — no one knew. And so Swirsky, a first-time author whose novella, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window,” recounts the weary adventures of a resurrected magician, made a vow in her acceptance speech at the Washington Hilton: “I will figure out” what to do with a Nebula.
The Nebulas are the Screen Actors Guild of the sci-fi world, a prestigious, peer-selected award voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. They are the centerpiece of the SFWA’s annual three-day conference, held this past weekend in Washington. The SFWA gathering is no outlandish Comic-Con. There are no roaming Spock ears, no “Battlestar Galactica” tribute get-ups. This is a writerly conference for writerly people wanting to improve their craft. Joe Haldeman is here, and Paolo Bacigalupi, and a bunch of other people whose names prompt squealing in this crowd. Inside the Hilton’s lower level, a couple hundred happy-looking attendees wearing a preponderance of planet-themed neckties shuffle from session to session.
In “Using Science in Science Fiction,” a panel of astrophysicists and engineers from NASA takes questions from writers who are searching for their next great plot in NASA’s latest great discoveries. “Has anyone considered,” one participant asks the panel, “what calculation would be needed to measure the infrared heat exhaust from a Dyson sphere?”
Andrew Steele, a NASA astrobiologist, tells the group that no sci-fi alien can compete with the weirdness on planet Earth. What about the Cymothoa exigua, Steele suggests — a parasitic crustacean that crawls into the mouth of a fish, eats its tongue, then slowly becomes its tongue? Everyone writes down “Cymothoa exigua.”
Or what about the fungus that burrows itself into the brains of various ant species, causing them to behave in self-destructive ways? “The ant completely loses fear,” Steele explains, “then feels the need to crawl to the highest thing it can find, clamp to a leaf and die.” Everyone writes down “zombie ants.”
“There’s a movement afoot called the mundanes,” says Tom Doyle, a short-story writer based in Washington who’s attending SFWA. It’s a newer movement. The mundanes believe that science fiction rules should obey science fact rules. The mundanes will have none of your teleporting, none of your intelligent species traveling to Earth and enslaving the population with mind control. Says Doyle, with a hint of both admiration and exhaustion, “They don’t even do faster than light.”
Someone asks Connie Willis — who has won seven previous Nebulas in various categories — whether she has any advice for Swirsky’s quest to find an alternative use for the award. “If you got enough of them, you could use them like Legos,” says Willis doubtfully, weighing her solid, rectangular trophy in her hands. “But you would really need an awful lot.”>>
Art Neuendorfferhttp://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2011/05/tongues-they-do-more-than-just-lick/ wrote:Tongues: They Do More Than Just Lick
The dark color of a giraffe's tongue may protect it
from sunburn (courtesy of flickr user micheleart)
Smithsonian Magazine: May 4, 2011
<<The tongue helps us to taste and talk and swallow, but when compared with tongues in other species, ours are pretty boring. Here are some examples:
The alligator snapping turtle has a worm-shaped bit on the end of its tongue. The turtle lies motionless in the water, mouth open, until a fish swims in, lured by the tongue, and then the turtle quickly closes the trap.
Chameleons shoot their sticky tongues out of their mouths at high speed to catch a meal. Biologists using high-speed and X-ray photography calculated the chameleon’s tongue speed to be 13.4 miles per hour.
The tongue of a salamander shoots out to capture fast-moving bugs in an explosive burst of energy, reaching 18 watts of power per gram of muscle.
The shape of the snake‘s forked tongue, with which it both tastes and smells, gives it directional information.
A giraffe uses its tongue to reach around acacia thorns and grab the tasty leaves. The 18- to 20-inch-long tongue is blue-black, and the color probably protects it from sunburn.
The hummingbird drinks nectar with its tongue. For more than a century scientists thought that this tongue worked like a straw, but new research reveals that it is more like a fork with tiny fringes that trap the fluid.
Cats lap up liquid not like a ladle, scooping it up, but instead curl their tongues backward and use hydrodynamics to bring up a little milk or water in each sip. The sandpaper-like tongue also gets good use as a washcloth.
A blue-tongued skink uses its (yes, blue) tongue to startle and scare off enemies.
The giant anteater can cover its tongue with a sticky saliva to help it get ants. Up to two feet long but only half an inch thick, the tongue is one of few in the natural world that extends into the animal’s thorax.
And though it’s not a tongue, the tongue-eating louse (Cymothoa exigua) cannot go unmentioned. This tiny parasite enters a fish through its gills, attaches itself to the fish’s tongue and starts feeding on tongue blood. The tongue eventually atrophies and the louse replaces it in the fish’s mouth.>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua wrote:
<<Cymothoa exigua, or the tongue-eating louse, is a parasitic crustacean of the family Cymothoidae. It tends to be 3 to 4 centimetres long. This parasite enters through the gills, and then attaches itself at the base of the spotted rose snapper's tongue. It extracts blood through the claws on its front, causing the tongue to atrophy from lack of blood. The parasite then replaces the fish's tongue by attaching its own body to the muscles of the tongue stub. The fish is able to use the parasite just like a normal tongue. It appears that the parasite does not cause any other damage to the host fish. Once C. exigua replaces the tongue, some feed on the host's blood and many others feed on fish mucus. This is the only known case of a parasite functionally replacing a host organ. It is currently believed that C. exigua are not harmful to humans unless picked up alive, in which case they can bite.
In 2005, a fish parasitised by what could be Cymothoa exigua was discovered in the United Kingdom. As the parasite is normally found off the coast of California, this led to speculation that the parasite's range may be expanding; however, it is also possible that the isopod traveled from the Gulf of California in the snapper's mouth, and its appearance in the UK is an isolated incident. A tongue louse remains part of the collections of the Horniman Museum, although it is not currently on display.>>
(feeling the need to crawl to the highest thing he can find, clamp to a leaf and die.)
