If the genome of an extinct species can be reconstructed, biologists can work out the exact DNA differences with the genome of its nearest living relative. There are talks on how to modify the DNA in an elephant’s egg so that after each round of changes it would progressively resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The final-stage egg could then be brought to term in an elephant mother, and mammoths might once again roam the Siberian steppes.

The same would be technically possible with Neanderthals, whose full genome is expected to be recovered shortly, but there would be several ethical issues in modifying modern human DNA to that of another human species.

Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million - NYTimes.com

“In return for any direct government aid,” he wrote, “the board and the management [of G.M.] should go. Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible. That will mean tearing up existing contracts with unions, dealers and suppliers, closing some operations and selling others and downsizing the company ... Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake.”

Op-Ed Columnist - How to Fix a Flat - NYTimes.com

Mr. Roberts is president of Connect Ithaca, a volunteer group that works on community issues like sprawl, and the heavy traffic is one reason he was hooked when he heard about the next generation of automotive technology — personal rapid transit, more commonly known as pod cars.

I'm not sure how I missed this article a few months ago. I was really enamored with the idea of PRT for awhile but I now think that as it's typically formulated, it's a non-starter:

"Stations" are an Achilles' heal. They add a lot of cost esp. when you want to make them ADA compliant, etc. Since they're on rails one way or another, the blind octogenarian with a heart condition who gets her umbrella stuck in the door bogs everything down. If you put all stations on a siding, they cost that much more and take up that much more space. If you don't, then the problem with one car stops the whole line.
You can't possibly build enough stations to avoid a last-mile problem.
The guideways are an eyesore and people don't want them around.

I now think robotic taxis are the answer for urban areas. If we can figure out a way to power them in-situ, from overhead lines, say, like the buses in SF, all the better. Maybe just inductive charging when you're stopped at an intersection. You pull out your smartphone and push a button and the system dispatches one to your location. I don't know the breakdown but I would have to guess the vast majority of the cost of a cab fare is the driver and the overhead of the cab company, not gas or the car. And maybe these don't even need to go more than 30mph, can be a "skateboard" car with in-hub motors, very few moving parts, low-maintainence, low-power, etc.

Unfortunately, noone seems to be taking a pragmatic approach to autonomous driving. The academics, as usual, are chasing the "unobtainium" solution. The Grand Challenge attracts a lot more attention than something as simple and inexpensive as burying magnetic reference markers in the street. There actually is some work going on at Berkeley (PATH) and UC Davis under the heading of "intelligent roadway" but it doesn't seem to be nearly as flashy as Grand Challenge. And it's a bad chicken+egg problem: automakers aren't interested unless the infrastructure exists and road agencies can't afford to blow money on pie-in-the-sky visions like this much less even afford to maintain the roads and bridges they have.

Ithaca Takes a Hard Look at Pod Cars - NYTimes.com

Michael Lewis:

The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over.

There’s a long list of people who now say they saw it coming all along but a far shorter one of people who actually did. Of those, even fewer had the nerve to bet on their vision. It’s not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to believe that most of what’s in the financial news is wrong or distorted, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded—without actually being insane. A handful of people had been inside the black box, understood how it worked, and bet on it blowing up. At the top of a very short list was Steve Eisman.

The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism.

The End

"The best way to measure spam is to be a spammer," wrote the researchers in a paper describing their work.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Study shows how spammers cash in

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 authorized the Department of Energy to develop a research and development program that could deliver a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor prototype to increase domestic energy supplies, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and move more quickly towards a national hydrogen economy. Westinghouse and its partners plan to build a pebble bed modular reactor that uses fuel balls surrounded by a hollow sphere of graphite moderator. These are stacked in a close-packed lattice and are cooled by helium, not water. The term "pebble bed" derives from the use of spheres. Rods are used to control fission in conventional nuclear reactors.

I didn't know the US even had a PBMR project. That we at least have one is something though they're now saying 2021 :/

Watch Idaho Nuclear Project to Gauge Obama's Energy Plan - 2008-11-06 09:53:26 - Design News

So far, SpaceX has lined up at least one customer for the first DragonLab flight planned for 2010. Although Vozoff would not tell Space News anything about its anchor customer, SpaceX told other space officials here that it had signed up a classified U.S. government customer for DragonLab's debut.

SPACE.com -- SpaceX Seeks Customers for DragonLab Spaceship

LONDON — A 65-year-old private pilot who was left almost entirely blind when he suffered a stroke while flying solo at more than 5,000 feet was guided to a safe landing after the pilot of a Royal Air Force training plane talked the stricken flier down, R.A.F. officials said Friday.

Stricken Blind, Solo Pilot Is Guided to Safety - NYTimes.com

Our agenda puts the interests of America’s farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry’s. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more “populist” or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative “economies” depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced — it is in fact unconscionably expensive.

Gold star.

The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com

If you’re like most of us, you were taught the importance of warm-up exercises back in grade school, and you’ve likely continued with pretty much the same routine ever since. Science, however, has moved on. Researchers now believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes’ warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but actually bad for you.

Phys Ed - Stretching - The Truth - NYTimes.com