Hijexx wrote:
] Listened to the Morning Edition NPR at this link (RealAudio
] req'd.) 5 minutes long. Pretty interesting blurbs from a
] battalion in northern Kuwait getting ready for combat.
] They're switching to MRE's, getting combat ammo, and breaking
] the seals on their biosuits. This battalion was scheduled to
] go home this week. Looks like they're staying and getting
] ready for war instead.
]
] A friend who served in Desert Storm said, "Sounds familiar."
] I think it will hit in the next couple of weeks, what do you
] think?

I think that the War is going to start on March the 17th. I mean...don't quote me or anything. But I just have a feeling thats when its going to start...

RE: Locked and Loaded

] While I'm on the topic of mediated personae, something
] that came up during that CBC taping, last night (for me,
] anyway) was the idea that blogging (or even posting to
] fora) represents the democratization of the mediated
] persona. Literally anyone can have one, now, or several.
] I am an exception to this, because I have mine via the
] printed word, the oldest mass medium on the planet, and
] this website is maintained by a publishing company that
] belongs to an even larger corporation owned in turn by
] shapeshifting reptiles from Beta Reticuli, but the rest
] of you, today, are free to mass-mediate your own
] personae. Which was formerly, hugely, not the case.
] Choose a handle, post: you're mediating a persona.

William Gibson - SOMEONE WONDERS... - Media perception and blogs

] The job of the hippocampus appears to be to "encode"
] experiences so they can be stored as long-term memories
] elsewhere in the brain. "If you lose your hippocampus you
] only lose the ability to store new memories," says
] Berger. That offers a relatively simple and safe way to
] test the device: if someone with the prosthesis regains
] the ability to store new memories, then it's safe to
] assume it works.

This is amazing stuff.

[This is freakin rad - Nano]

New Scientist: An artificial hippocampus

damn this is depressing.

Salon.com Technology | Take this tech job and shove it

I want these so bad!!!

Collectobil Catalogue - Playmobil® item 3180

] The Republican-backed measure would outlaw cloning
] experiments — or, more precisely, the scientific
] procedure known as somatic cell nuclear transfer — either
] for baby making or medical research. Scientists who
] cloned human embryos would face up to 10 years in prison
] and a $1 million fine. The bill would also prohibit the
] importing of medical therapies derived from cloning
] research.

A blanket ban on all cloning is a Bad Idea as it will cripple
US biotech interests compared to e.g. China which has no such
compunctions.

The medical technology that will develop
from cloning in the next 50 years will be spectacular. Need
a new heart? Give us some blood, come back in a few weeks
and we'll implant a fresh, new cloned one. No immunosupressing drugs, no waiting for a donor, no compatibility. Its your own damn tissue! Congenital heart defect? We'll patch the bugs in your DNA.

House Is Set to Make Cloning of Humans a Crime

This just affirms that I made the right choice when I chose Emory:)

Atlanta biotech, Atlanta biotechnology, Atlanta pharmaceutical

] The CDC is still analysing the bacteria responsible for
] these outbreaks. But Bancroft says initial tests show the
] same strain is responsible for all the outbreaks in Los
] Angeles, and that it appears to be the same as a strain
] first isolated in New York in 1997. It may be more
] virulent because it has a gene called PVL, which codes
] for a potent toxin.

More info on the Superbug

New Scientist - Superbug strain hits the healthy

] Instead, most robots remain human-dependent machines that
] can perform only specialized tasks, like welding parts in
] a factory, searching through the rubble of a collapsed
] building or vacuuming a living room. Few display what
] could be considered sensitivity to people, and those that
] do tend to be toys, like Sony's Aibo pet, that serve only
] to entertain.
]
] Robotics researchers are realizing that the journey to
] more autonomous, adaptable robots will require more than
] just improvements in mechanical, sensory and computing
] capabilities. Equally important, they say, is improving
] the way people and robots interact: after all, they say,
] that may be how robots will learn, and to be truly
] useful, robots must be acceptable to people.
]
] "Now that robots are beginning to come into

Making Robots More Like Us

] Lung cancer may be caused by a faulty repair mechanism
] triggered by smoking, according to a new study.
]
] US researchers have found that a primitive cell pathway,
] which is crucial for the development of lungs in the
] embryo, could be the major culprit in small cell lung
] cancer (SCLC).
]
] The pathway is found in all creatures, from worms to
] humans. It is called Sonic Hedgehog, after a mutant form
] in fruit fly embryos that leads to the sprouting of hairs
] all over their bodies.
]
] "The hypothesis was that smokers chronically injure their
] airways and pathways such as hedgehog get turned on to
] repair damage - but chronic injury results in persistent
] pathway activation, which leads to cancer," says Neil
] Watkins, team leader at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive
] Cancer Center, part of Johns Hopkins University in
] Maryland.
]
] The group's experiments showed that the Sonic Hedgehog
] pathway was indeed activated in half of 10 SCLC human
] tissue samples. Furthermore, they successfully stopped
] tumour growth in mice by blocking this pathway and
] believe this may lead to potential therapies in humans.

This article is particularily interesting to me for several reasons. One is that I am learning about this particular pathway in my Animal Development class (and learned a bit about it in other classes as well), so its just cool to see something in the news about it. Also, what makes this interesting is that lung cancer is the cancer that nobody has seemed to make much headway on in the way of cures...
At the end of this article, they talk about the cells differentiating into adult lung cells...and that means that this could be an important find for other areas of biology as well...such as organogenesis.

New Scientist - Faulty repairs blamed for lung cancer