Called "Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness," the council's report concerns present and future interventions intended not to restore health but rather to alter genetic inheritance, to enhance mind or body, or to extend life span beyond its natural limits.

Bush's Advisers on Biotechnology Express Concern on Its Use

Los Angeles | 7:30 pm | Thursday, 9/25 | Barnes and Noble at The Grove (near Farmer's Market)

John Brockman has a new book out, and several members of the edge.org community will be in Los Angeles on Thursday for a panel session.

Turn off the television, step outside and look eastward: Mars is back and it's better -- and closer -- than ever. Closer, in fact, than at any time in recorded history.

Mars, Closer Than Ever in History

We propose a simple model of the evolution of a social network which involves local search and volatility (random decay of links). The model captures the crucial role the network plays for information diffusion. This is responsible for a feedback loop which results in a first-order phase transition between a very sparse network regime and a highly-connected phase. Phase coexistence and hysteresis take place for intermediate value of parameters. We derive a mean-field theory which correctly reproduces this behavior, including the distribution of degree connectivity and the non-trivial clustering properties.

The Rise and Fall of a Networked Society [PDF]

As remarkable as the cat-drawing lesson was, it was just a hint of Snyder's work and its implications for the study of cognition. He has used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experiment is more than just a great party trick; it's a breakthrough that may lead to a revolution in the way we understand the limits of our own intelligence -- and the functioning of the human brain in general.

Savant for a Day

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 Unpublished data from this and other groups suggest that the same problem may also thwart attempts to clone humans.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

Experts: "It's kind of a worst-case scenario for L.A." "This is the fault that could eat L.A."

If you're thinking about life extension when you're at the end of your days, you might want to steer clear of the City of Angels.

New Quake Threat Found Under LA

Here, we trace the development of highly visible and minimally perturbing fluorescent proteins that, together with updated fluorescent imaging techniques, are providing unprecedented insights into the movement of proteins and their interactions with cellular components in living cells.

An update on the wonders of GFP. Subscription is required for access to full text.

Development and Use of Fluorescent Protein Markers in Living Cells

Publishers Weekly writes, "This is a brilliant book that deserves a wide readership."

Echoes of Bill Joy ...

Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age

Brian Greene, professor, and author of _The Elegant Universe_: "wonderfully lucid and thoroughly entertaining"
Gilbert Strang, MIT: "a terrific book"
New Scientist: "inspiring"

Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order