Ethical discourse by science-in-fiction

Fiction informed by science.

Teaching Societal and Ethical Implications of Nanotechnology Through Science Fiction

Societal and ethical implications of nanotechnology have become a hot topic of public debates in many countries because both revolutionary changes and strong public concerns are expected from its development. Because nanotechnology is, at this point, mostly articulated in visionary and futuristic terms, it is difficult to apply standard methods of technology assessment and even more difficult t...

Science Fiction and Macdonald's Polynomials

This work studies the remarkable relationships that hold among certain m-tuples of the Garsia-Haiman modules M and corresponding elements of the Macdonald basis. We recall that in 10], M is deened for a partition`n, as the linear span of derivatives of a certain bihomogeneouspolynomial (x; y) in the variables x 1 ; x 2 conjecturedin 6], 10] that M has n! dimensionsand that its bigraded Frobeniu...

Organ printing: fiction or science.

Aggregates of living cells (i.e. model tissue fragments) under appropriate conditions fuse like liquid drops. According to Steinberg's differential adhesion hypothesis (DAH), this may be understood by assuming that cells are motile and tissues made of such cells possess an effective surface tension. Here we show that based on these properties three-dimensional cellular structures of prescribed ...

Science Fiction Prototyping at Work

C O M P U T E R 0 0 1 8 9 1 6 2 / 1 6 / $ 3 3 . 0 0 © 2 0 1 6 I E E E P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E I E E E C O M P U T E R S O C I E T Y A U G U S T 2 0 1 6 109 Autodesk is best known for making design software such as AutoCAD. So when people discover that we’re creating tools for molecular design and human–robot collaboration, their rst question is why. The answer usually involves a scienti c e...