The nymph's extendable mouth parts, housed behind serrated jaws, are the stuff of a science-fiction nightmare, part of the inspiration for HR Giger's creature from the film Alien, a fragment from the palaeozoic era projected on to a dystopian future.
They find it in works that foreground narratives that underscore the centrality of social connection, that describe how the quality of social life devolves from the quality of our social relations -- the real stuff of a soulful social science.
Creating a whole new organism from a single cell has been more the stuff of science fiction than of science.
And the devices now routinely do tasks that would have been the stuff of science fiction a generation ago.
Technology that allows us to augment, automate and network our most successful selves is not the stuff of science fiction; it is a guarantor of a more productive — and more human — future.
This vision, once the stuff of science fiction, took a significant step forward this month when Google unveiled a smartphone application called Goggles.
Building a libertarian, techno-utopian paradise in a city that floats on the ocean sounds like the stuff of science fiction or a joke on HBO's "Silicon Valley".
"The technology has improved, so it's easier to anonymise stuff," says Scott Knoll, the boss of Integral Ad Science, an analytics firm, who formerly worked at DoubleClick.
Smart contact lenses have been the stuff of science fiction for a long time, but as with jetpacks and faster-than-light travel, we're still waiting on them.
Among the approaches being talked about are some that have been the stuff of science fiction for years: a mass driver, a sort of electromagnetic conveyor belt that would be planted on an asteroid and hurl dirt from its surface, or a solar concentrator, a parabolic mirror that would orbit the body and heat up the surface, creating a plume of vaporized material.
I don't think there is more stuff in the universe than the stuff of physical science.
