Annalee Newitz's discussions

Fanfic is not written for publicity or money. Read more

A cowardly move would have been for me to stop running this column in secret, without ever coming clean about what happened. Instead I posted this so that you could insult me publicly, the way you have here. Read more

I disagree completely. We think Rob is incredible, and I asked him to continue running FFF when he came to io9. I made this decision to discontinue FFF after a lot of agonizing, in response to a massive outpouring of responses from io9's readers. Read more

But Ugg/Worf fanfic is my favorite kind! I weep. Read more

When I was in middle school, I always played chaotic neutral. I couldn't even imagine any other alignment! As I got older, I tended toward chaotic good. I'm just not into laws — sorry, clerics. Read more

Actually I would argue that you do need 40,000 years of cave paintings to get television. The whole point of my article is that there are many different time cycles operating at once. There is the short-term cycle, the human lifespan, in which television was developed. But there is the longer-term species cycle, in… Read more

I totally agree. My objection is to people who say "absolutely this will happen and therefore we should divert scientific resources to it." I think it could happen, but we need a lot more information first about our genomes and possibly the quantum behavior of cells. The point is, who knows what we need to know? We… Read more

I don't think it's evolutionary psychology when you're talking about the urge to reproduce. Every single living organism has that "urge," whether or not they have a psychology. My point is, there is just as much evidence to suggest we will care about the future as there is evidence that we won't. After all, many… Read more

I didn't say it would never happen. I just said it won't happen in our lifetimes. Happy to be proven wrong, but the science just really isn't anywhere near there yet. Read more

Ack — sorry I meant Andromeda. Fixed now. Read more

I think the field of evolutionary biology would disagree with you, since the entire point of reproducing is to create an offspring that lives on after you die. We are programmed to care about what happens beyond our lifespan. So I don't think it's unreasonable to think that people already have good incentives to care… Read more

What it shows is that there is a very long lag time between the invention of a technology and its ability to rapidly change us. Obviously the boat changed the world many times over — when we went to Australia and the Americas for example. But it wasn't until the past few centuries that it allowed us to have a global… Read more

We haven't actually changed the composition of our atmosphere, which is what cyanobacteria did over 2 billion years ago. So I would say we don't really deserve the honor of "altering the environment more than any other species." Read more

How is Ugg with a broadsword? Read more

Whatever. Fluffy head eagle wins. Read more

Each entry has a link to go to the vendor. Read more

If you follow the link in that entry, you'll see our post on the shirt where he describes his methodology: http://io9.com/5936427/the-evolutionary-history-of-dragons-illustrated-by-a-scientist Read more

Yep, these are incredibly cool. Read more

I own Quark on DVD. So it must have been out at some point. Read more

Yes and no. Certainly there are many plot developments that depend on magic. But the main theme of the story is power games. You could easily replace all the magical elements with expensive or innovative weapons and still tell the same story. And you could replace the magical seasons idea with either climate change on… Read more