Greg Egan

I am a science fiction writer and computer programmer.
Latest novel: MORPHOTROPHIC.
Latest collection: SLEEP AND THE SOUL.
Web site: gregegan.net

Web site: https://www.gregegan.net
Location: Perth, Western Australia

Last Notes

2026-10-28 11:00:04 UTC

Bacteria should have shared the 2025 chemistry Nobel Prize on metal-organic frameworks!
It’s been known for a while that there are “cable bacteria” that extrude conductive filaments up to 1 cm long, which penetrate sediments on the sea floor and allow them to draw electrons from buried sulphides to power their metabolism.
But it turns out the filaments made by Candidatus Electrothrix gigas are based on MOFs “strikingly similar to those used by chemists”. This was not a case of deliberate biomimicry; these MOFs were created in labs before they were discovered in nature.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/bacteria-discovered-to-be-synthesising-metal-organic-frameworks-with-extraordinary-conductivity/4024399.article
[You can register/subscribe at the Chemistry World site if you wish, but if you just close the box they still let you read this article.]
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/117/518/149/895/670/065/original/5f524fe0b073fc21.jpg

2026-09-14 07:26:08 UTC

TIL from
[@dandkuniverse.bsky.social](https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/dandkuniverse.bsky.social )
that you can sometimes hear meteors burning up in the atmosphere *at the same time as you see them*, despite the discrepancy in the speed of light and the speed of sound.
How? Here is an abstract from a relevant paper:
“Recorded for centuries, people can hear and see meteors nearly concurrently. Electromagnetic energy clearly propagates at the speed of light and converts to sound (called electrophonics) when coupled to metals. An explanation for the electromagnetic energy source is suggested. Coma ions around the meteor head can easily travel across magnetic field lines up to ~120 km. The electrons, however, are tied to magnetic field lines, since they must gyrate around the field above ~75 km. A large ambipolar electric field must be generated to conserve charge neutrality. This localized electric field maps to the E region then drives a large Hall current that launches the electromagnetic wave. Using antenna theory and following, a power flux of over 10^{−8} W/m^2 at the ground is found. Electrophonic conversion to sound efficiency then needs to be only 0.1% to explain why humans can hear and see meteors nearly concurrently.”
“On the electrophonic generation of audio frequency sound by meteors”
Michael C. Kelley, Colin Price
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017GL072911

2026-06-04 04:37:38 UTC

NO, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS NOT CONSCIOUS
Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.
By Ted Chiang
https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/

2025-08-07 13:06:08 UTC

- reply

In this interview with the guy in charge of Pompeii, he said they’re deliberately leaving parts of the site unexcavated because they believe that will leave it in better shape for future archaeologists with improved technology to extract more information from it.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/pompeii-history-archaeology-2025-discoveries/105591342