About the mouse that Aubrey de Gray was looking for ...

It can run up to six kilometres at a speed of 20 metres per minute for five hours or more without stopping. It lives longer, has more sex, and eats more without gaining weight. Could the science that created this supermouse be applied to humans?

...

It lives longer and enjoys an active sex life well into old age – being capable of breeding at three times the normal maximum age.

"Our animals live longer and eat almost twice as much as ordinary mice – this is a model to study."

Be sure to watch the video. But whatever you do, don't think of these guys.

The mouse that shook the world

In 2004, to inform the drafting of memos on US policy against torture, Daniel Levin, who replaced Jack Goldsmith at the Office of Legal Counsel, underwent waterboarding at a DC-area military base. He found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

The White House was not pleased, and when Gonzales become AG, sources say Levin was "forced out."

ABC offers its own video of simulated waterboarding. (It seems these things are a dime a dozen, nowadays.)

White House Blocked Waterboarding Critic

Says Peter Thiel, co-founder and former CEO of PayPal:

"A lot of people who are not conventional are not serious. But the real breakthroughs in science are made by serious thinkers who are willing to work on research areas that people think are too controversial or too implausible."

Meet Aubrey de Grey:

"I was appalled. Utterly appalled. I began to realize the profound difference of motivation and mind-set between scientists on the one hand and technologists and engineers on the other hand."

de Gray is the founder of The Methuselah Foundation and author of Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime.

He says:

Try something and if it doesn't work, try something else. Science doesn't pave the way for engineering, it's the other way around.

... bringing pragmatism to biology ...

With adequate funding, de Grey thinks scientists may, within a decade, triple the remaining life span of late-middle-age mice. The day this announcement is made, he believes, the news will hit people like a brick as they realize that their cells could be next. He speculates people will start abandoning risky jobs, such as being police officers, or soldiers.

When he talks about people soon putting a higher premium on health than wealth, he twirls the ends of his mustache back behind his ears, murmuring, "So many women, so much time."

See also, Our Biotech Future, by Freeman Dyson. And recall Eric Schmidt:

Failure is an essential part of the process. "The way you say this is: 'Please fail very quickly -- so that you can try again'."

Finally, check out Tom Friedman:

The technologies we need ... are already here. The only thing we have a shortage of now are leaders with the imagination and will ...

The Invincible Man

The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds.

It was only a few months ago that I wrote:

Now is the time for all good men to quit their silos and adopt an open standard.

FC has a roundup; Steven Johnson says:

What a brilliant move by Google. (I suppose as a launch partner, I'm biased, but still: what a brilliant move.) That $15 billion Facebook valuation got a lot of abuse over the past few weeks, but in a way I thought it made sense. Obviously, there was risk involved, but if you thought that Facebook had a reasonable shot at becoming "the social operating system of the Web", then it was probably worth making the bet -- particularly given that Microsoft had other reasons to invest. A company that runs the web's "social operating system" could easily be worth $50B or $100B. But that seems entirely impossible now, just a few days later, thanks to OpenSocial.

Not everyone is so sanguine:

“Open Social” sounds a lot like an “Open Marriage” – on the surface some may think this sounds fun but after thinking about it for a minute you quickly realize it’s a bad idea.

NYT observes:

Developers may not see the advantage to writing programs that run across such remarkably different networks.

But Eric Schmidt is reassuring:

"If you are of a certain age, you sort of dismiss this as college kids or teenagers. But it is very real."

OpenSocial

It is the fractious, maddening approach to the conduct of human affairs that values equality despite its elusiveness, that values democracy despite its debasement, that values pluralism despite its messiness, that values the institutions of civic culture despite their flaws, and that values public life as something higher and greater than the sum of all our private lives. The founders of the magazine valued these things—and they valued the immense amount of effort it takes to preserve them from generation to generation.

Praise:

Walter Isaacson: "This is a glorious collection."

Including:

The American Forests | John Muir | August 1897 | The Atlantic
As We May Think | Vannevar Bush | July 1945 | The Atlantic
Broken Windows | James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling | March 1982 | The Atlantic
The Roots of Muslim Rage | Bernard Lewis | September 1990 | The Atlantic
Strivings of the Negro People | W.E.B. Du Bois | August 1897 | The Atlantic
Cloud, Castle, Lake | Vladimir Nabokov | June 1941 | The Atlantic
The Captivity of Marriage | Nora Johnson | June 1961 | The Atlantic

What is The American Idea?

It's not often that research results look this good. An elegant new way to visualize individual brain cells not only provides a major boost to scientists trying to understand how the brain works, but has also won one of its developers a major prize in science photography.

The brain is a beautiful thing.

Colours light up brain structure

Although he is often presented as a glorifier of technological progress, Marshall McLuhan painted a subtle, sometimes disturbing picture of the future. In one striking sentence from Understanding Media, he offered a dark view of the commercial exploitation of electric media:

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”

McLuhan's web | Nicholas Carr

Information security requires not only technology, but a clear understanding of risks, decision-making behaviors and metrics for evaluating business and policy options. How much should we spend on security? What incentives really drive privacy decisions? What are the trade-offs that individuals, firms, and governments face when allocating resources to protect data assets? Are there good ways to distribute risks and align goals when securing information systems?

While organizations and individuals face new and evolving technical challenges, we know that security and privacy threats rarely have purely technical causes. Economic, behavioral, and legal factors often contribute as much as technology to the dependability of information and information systems. The application of economic analysis to these problems has proven to be an exciting and fruitful area of research.

WEIS 2008 - The Seventh Workshop on the Economics of Information Security

Kaj Larsen investigates the practice of waterboarding, an interrogation practice allegedly used by the US government. Is it a legitimate technique or torture?

Getting Waterboarded

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered. For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed.