] Bioethicists and scientists contemplating the future fear
] that genetic engineering and other technologies are going
] to divide human beings into classes that may one day try
] to destroy one another.

Wired News: Will Genetic Engineering Kill Us?

Well you can put that big heavy copy of the CRC (http://www.crcpress.com/corphistory.asp) down. !Webbook is here, it's great! Research all your favorite chemicals, play w/ neat and interesting graph data for almost any chemical you can think of.

Chemical Formula Search

While governments debate how to prevent human reproductive cloning, it seems that nature has put a few hurdles of its own in the way. On page 297, a team reports that in rhesus monkeys, cloning robs an embryo of key proteins that allow a cell to divvy up chromosomes and divide properly. Unpublished data from this and other groups suggest that the same problem may also thwart attempts to clone humans.

Your methods are broken. Return to the drawing board. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

'The Primates Will Not Be Cloned' | Science Magazine

I keep thinking of this song when I'm reading SARS news:

NOFX - Just the Flu

Looking back to the past,
predictions of the end
Unseen ultra violet rays
are beating on my head
Nuclear threat wanna bet will be our demise
The day will come when we'll look to apocalyptic skies

When the news had spread, that soon we'd all be dead
Well it just blew our minds
No one could have guessed that our worst fears at best
Figments of our time

So it seems that our dreams will never come to be
How could such a stupid thing destroy humanity?
A few weeks till extinction and there's nothing we can do
A message sent to other worlds will say, "It was just the flu"

There's no lesson to be learned
There's no one left to learn it

The Spread of SARS: History of the Outbreak (3/17/03 - Present)

] Almost ten years ago, in 1994, David Burkhead, myself,
] and a mismatched crew of science-fiction writers, model
] rocketeers, and techno-junkies started a project to
] design a home-built suborbital rocket. We called it
] SpaceCub The idea of SpaceCub was sparked by the (then
] recent) success of the tail-landing DC-X rocket, and
] fueled by the thought, wow, wouldn't it be cool to have
] one of those to fly around in The key insight that gave
] the project momentum was the realization that, while
] everybody wants to go to orbit, it would not be nearly as
] hard to design a vehicle to fly to the edge of space
] (defined as 50 miles or 100 kilometers, depending on
] who's doing the definition). That task would be
] relatively simple, compared to the difficult challenge of
] getting into orbit-in fact, it might even be in the range
] of something you could build in your garage.

Remembering SpaceCub