In the SG-article The Una-Bombers life in prison you get a picture of the life in an american High Security Prison and the life of the Una-bomber Ted Kaczynski in his life-sentence.
He is a model prisoner and surely just cope with his life inside the penitentiary and bad working postal service (remember that he was using the postal service to send his deadly packages). And of course he also have things to say about the food and that sort of things.
" 'The question of, 'Why sex?' is a very central one to biology,' says David Mark Welch of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass."
And of course have the geneology-science found out that the asexuality isn't the deadend that was believed during the years.
The question is how the variation of genes fostered by sex. A flexibility of the genetic pattern in a population have been seen as only possible through breeding.
"an entire class of organisms, containing 360 species, seems to have evolved perfectly well without sex. This group of tiny water creatures, called bdelloid rotifers, is thriving in fresh water and soggy land worldwide despite, seemingly, no sex for at least 40 million years."
One shouldn't be sad when not getting some in a couple of weeks. (Science News Online)
There's not only your soul you can sell. "Jonathon Keats, a 32-year-old conceptual artist and novelist, has announced plans to auction off futures contracts on 6 billion neurons in his brain, which he copyrighted this spring. The copyright, like all copyrights, lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years." And the way of doing it was to copyright it as a sculpture which made it as an unique piece of art.
But Keats have also made Berkley to consider to pass the A=A-law: that everything in Berkley should be mandate to be equal to themselves. Keats, who is sort of a performance-actor in thinking, have really done a solid research to let the shareholders of his brain make a sustainable prediction of the financial value in buying his brain.
But the problem is that if the shareholders should get value from their investment Keats have to find a way to let his brain live after his bodily death. And he truly have the problem that he faces possible pressure not to endanger their investments. The days of hard partying could be over though "Thing is, though, if you get drunk enough, you can get lost and fall into the ocean and disappear, and then there is no brain. So the contract says you get a refund at full purchase price if the brain goes missing." (Wired News: He Thinks, Therefore He Sells)
Pretty interesting article about the discussion of the extinction of the great dinosaurs and of the theroy that made Gerta Keller a scientist of discussion:
"Keller and a growing number of colleagues around the world are turning up evidence that, rather than a single event, an intensive period of volcanic eruptions as well as a series of asteroid impacts are likely to have stressed the world ecosystem to the breaking point. Although an asteroid or comet probably struck Earth at the time of the dinosaur extinction, it most likely was, as Keller says, "the straw that broke the camel's back" and not the sole cause."
Mash up wellknown disco-hits and slice and cut some hitflicks.
That's the new idea in a lot of sites where the slice&cut-technique have been taken to new heights with the help of the digital equipment and computers.
Dsico Archives is one of them.
An article about Robert Moog and the updating of the analog syntheziser.
Minimoog Voyager is the new version of the classical syntheziser and wired have a interview with Robert Moog. 69 years old he is still active and probably the most important person in modern music. (Wired 11.07: Heart and Soul in the Machine )
A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements. The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview.
The atheists' is branding themselves and trying to make themselves a little more in the style of New Age. (The Brights)
Wired News: Sexual Identity Wired by Genetics "Sexual identity is rooted in every person's biology before birth and springs from a variation in our individual genome," a UCLA genetics professor, said in a statement. His team has identified 54 genes in mice that may explain why male and female brains look and function differently.
Well, the fundamentalists who try to explain homosexuality to be a choice is wrong.
"The aim of the Molecular Media Project is to use cells and atoms to perform useful computational tasks at the micron (10-6m) and/or nanoscales (10-9m) of organisation. molecular computing is a practical use of nanotechnology for generating glitch and error. However, it differs from traditional cut-and-paste technique or granular synthesis by exploiting chaos, self-organisation and emergence at the resolution limit of the digital bits that make-up sound! There are 1000mm in a metre (10-3m), there are 1,000,000um in a metre (10-6m), there are 1,000,000,000nm in a metre (10-9m)!"
""The sound is rather like a large jet plane flying 100 feet above your house in the middle of the night,"
An article from New Scientist about how the big bang really sounded. At the Washington Univ is sound-files that somehow can give you an idea of how it sounded in the beginning.
At first glance I thought it was a cool thing: setting up a sort of How-To about making your own campaign. And the fact that it's the well-reputated BBC that is hosting it would be a guarantee for quality.
But when I reviewed the site of I Can I sort of felt it like being some sort of Campaigning For Dummies.
"iCan is a new BBC website to help you do something about issues that matter to you.".
An instant FAQ of starting an opinion. Is that needed? Is it just another way of making questions of our life shallow and exchangeable?
BBC NEWS | 'Brain itch' keeps songs in the head: "Research in the US has found that songs get stuck in our heads because they create a 'brain itch' that can only be scratched by repeating the tune over and over. "
Totally awesome... the mystery is solved! Then it's the problem of the badly muzak that always get stuck in the head... how to solve that?
"It's hard to predict what the ethical concerns will be in 10 years' time, as we can't imagine what science will be capable of; all we can say is that they won't be the ethical concerns that bother us now."
An article about the fact that the borders of the ethical discussion in science is moving and is pushed forward: "When the first heart transplant took place in the 1960s, there was widespread condemnation and revulsion," says Dr Peter Cotgreave, director of Save British Science. "Now it's accepted as a standard medical practice. Partly this is because we have come to see there have been no long-term harmful side-effects to the individual or society, but also because science has moved on."
1977 did Beauchamp put down ethical guidelines for biomedical science: Beauchamp suggested that all experiments should be evaluated according to four principles: non-maleficence, beneficence, autonomy and justice. Which, loosely translated, means they should not do harm, they should be in society's best interests, there should be freedom of choice and that equal cases should be treated equally and unequal ones unequally. The problem is that the interpretation of the guidelines varies and the need for a bigger transparency in the work of the scientists is needed, a need that collides with the development of big bucks in the biogenetic industry. "The traditional separation between scientists, who supposedly produce objective 'facts', and politicians, who deal in power, has obscured the means by which the goals of scientific and technological research are set even more than in other areas of public policy."
The scientists is often rather worried about that the genetic tests and production of GM-food already have gone to far. But the fact that the contracts often are short do that scientists are unwilling to rock the boat. And of course the fact that a scientist is driven by his or hers curiosity gets him to sometimes take the opportunity to do the test even if it's in the borders of ethics.
The end of the road today is this: "You want some matured eggs from an aborted foetus? There's an Israeli-Dutch team of scientists only too happy to consider it. You want a hybrid embryo? No problem, there's a private fertility clinic in the US that has created chimeras by merging male cells with female embryos. You want a perfect stem cell tissue match for your seriously ill child? Just stay Stateside for your IVF treatment. And remember to bring your chequebook.". (EducationGuardian.co.uk | Research | Pushing back the frontiers)
