SITTING in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was "printed", using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering.

New Scientist News - Print me a heart and a set of arteries

Office Depot CEO Steve Odland remembers like it was yesterday working in an upscale French restaurant in Denver.

The purple sorbet in cut glass he was serving tumbled onto the expensive white gown of an obviously rich and important woman. "I watched in slow motion ruining her dress for the evening," Odland says. "I thought I would be shot on sight."

Thirty years have passed, but Odland can't get the stain out of his mind, nor the woman's kind reaction. She was startled, regained composure and, in a reassuring voice, told the teenage Odland, "It's OK. It wasn't your fault." When she left the restaurant, she also left the future Fortune 500 CEO with a life lesson: You can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she treats the waiter.

CEOs say how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about character - Yahoo! News

According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?"
...
by acknowledging that we do not "have clean hands ourselves," we would be in a far stronger position to condemn "the people who plunged the world into war and carried out gross crimes under its cover." As matters stand now, we are at the very least open to the charge of hypocrisy. ·

my German ex girlfriend's father when he was a child and a refugee pulled bodies out of the ruins of destroyed Dresden
he still won't talk about it even to his family
i believe WW2 was a battle of light against dark but we did not emerge pure
on certain occasions our moral integrity was a casualty of war

Among the Dead Cities

The world is likely to suffer a temperature rise of more than 3C, the government's chief scientist warned [UK government - adam].

That would put up to 400 million people worldwide at risk of hunger, said Professor Sir David King in a report based on computer predictions.

He told the BBC the world had to act now to tackle global warming expected to happen over the next 100 years.

He said even if international agreement could be reached on limiting emissions, climate change was inevitable.

The UK Government and the EU want to stabilise the climate at an increase of no more than 2C, but the US refuses to cut emissions and those of India and China are rising quickly.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Stark warning over climate change

Scientists find evidence of a perpetual evolutionary battle in the mind. The process, they suspect, is the key to individuality.

Brain's Darwin Machine - Los Angeles Times

Designing the right policy to deal with a democratically elected terrorist group that deserves to be spurned but has something you want is not in the textbooks.

The Hamas Dilemma - New York Times

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Samuel Johnson thought it took longer than ten years: "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." And Chaucer complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

A female secret service agent has been honoured by the Royal Air Force - 63 years after first complaining at the "injustice" of not getting her "wings".

Pearl Cornioley, formerly Witherington, became the leader of 1,500 French freedom fighters during World War II.

BBC NEWS | UK | War heroine honoured 63 years on

The Bush team tried to make history on the cheap in Iraq. But you can't will the ends without willing the means.

Condi and Rummy, by Tom Friedman

By making press freedom a condition for its loans, the World Bank would protect the media, allowing them to defend the public's right to transparency and accountable government.

my initial reaction is what a good idea

World Bank should link loans to press freedom - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune