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The Coming Death Shortage

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:33:49 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: "Why the longevity boom will make us sorry to be alive" a must read.
Though I fail to agree with many of the premises of this article, the critical views it presents are important and the issues need be taken into consideration seriously

Clip Source: www.theatlantic.com

Stem-cell banks, telomerase amplifiers, somatic gene therapy—the list of potential longevity treatments incubating in laboratories is startling. Three years ago a multi-institutional scientific team led by Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical geneticist at Cambridge University, argued in a widely noted paper that the first steps toward "engineered negligible senescence"—a rough-and-ready version of immortality—would have "a good chance of success in mice within ten years." The same techniques, De Grey says, should be ready for human beings a decade or so later. "In ten years we'll have a pill that will give you twenty years," says Leonard Guarente, a professor of biology at MIT. "And then there'll be another pill after that. The first hundred-and-fifty-year-old may have already been born."

The critical issue, in Goldman's view, will be not the costs per se but determining who will pay them. "We're going to have a very public debate about whether this will be covered by insurance," he says

Tags: longevity, death, economy, future, public debate

15 Funniest Police Blotters - these are really funny

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:07:05 GMT

clipped by: constantskeptic
clipper's remarks: Wow... It must be very interesting to be a cop.

Clip Source: www.oddee.com

15 Funniest Police Blotters

"Police receive a report of a newborn infant found in a trash can. Upon investigation, officers discover it was only a burrito."

"A man came to the Sheriff's Department to 'find out how to legally kill' a person who was harassing him."

He didn't want to break any laws or anything...

"The Learning Center reports a man standing at his window for hours, making parents nervous... Police ID the subject as a cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger."

Tags: police, blotter, funny, humor

Life in Blue

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:29:25 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: photography.nationalgeographic.com

Life in Red

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:29:30 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: photography.nationalgeographic.com

Seven reasons why people hate reason

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:45:46 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Very interesting reflections on reason and why people are still prejudiced about it. See the videos...

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

From religious fundamentalism to pseudoscience, it seems that forces are attacking the Enlightenment world view – characterised by rational, scientific thinking – from all sides.

The debate seems black and white: you’re either with reason, or you’re against it.

Editorial: How to make reason more reasonable

1: Reason stands against values and morals

Shaping a moral and humane world requires more than reason, says Archbishop Rowan Williams

2: No one actually uses reason

If we had to think logically about everything we did, we’d never do anything at all, says neuroscientist Chris Frith.

Watch a related video

I hear "reason", I see lies

Science is routinely co-opted by governments and corporations to subvert people’s ability to make their own decisions, say sociologist David Miller and linguist Noam Chomsky.

Watch a related video.

4: Reason excludes creativity and intuition

5: Whose reason is it anyway?

6: Reason destroys itself

7: Reason is just another faith

Tags: philosophy, reason, psychology

Alcohol, not only for humans :)

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:16:52 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

It’s Always Happy Hour for Several Species in Malaysian Rain Forest

German scientists have discovered that seven species of small mammals in the rain forests of western Malaysia drink fermented palm nectar on a regular basis.

For several of the species, including the pen-tailed tree shrew, the nectar, which can have an alcohol content approaching that of beer, is the major food source — meaning they are chronic drinkers.

researchers estimated that the tree shrews consumed enough alcohol that they had about a 36 percent chance of being intoxicated (by human standards). But the researchers never saw any signs of inebriation

the nectar of the bertam palm becomes fermented by yeast carried on the flower buds.

tree shrews and other animals have some efficient means of metabolizing the alcohol.

The findings also suggest there must be benefits to having chronic low levels of alcohol

Those benefits may be psyc

perhaps enabling the animals to cope with stress of some sort.

Tags: nature, alcohol

Life in Green

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:29:44 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: photography.nationalgeographic.com

Life in Purple

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:29:53 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: photography.nationalgeographic.com

HYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE) A Talk By Mark Pesce

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:21:06 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and 'rebooting' them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.

Clip Source: www.edge.org

Introduction

In his well-received talk at this year's Personal Democracy Forum (organized by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry), "digital ethnologist" Mark Pesce makes the point that "we have a drive to connect and socialize: this drive has now been accelerated and amplified as comprehensively as the steam engine amplified human strength two hundred and fifty years ago. Just as the steam engine initiated the transformation of the natural landscape into man-made artifice, the 'hyperconnectivity' engendered by these new toys is transforming the human landscape of social relations. This time around, fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty.

"we may have had great hardware, but it took a long, long time for humans to develop software which made full use of it"

"where sharing had been a local and generational project for fifty thousand years, it suddenly became a geographical project across nearly half the diameter of the planet".

Tags: hyperpolitics, talk, digital ethnology

The mineral that started a war

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:23:54 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: skywalker.cochise.edu

As the world's demand for technology increases, so to does the demand of the materials to build the equipment. One such material is columbite-tantalite. This mineral is commonly used to make cell phones and computer chips. So what is this magic mineral and where does it come from?

Also called Coltan, columbite-tantalite is a metallic ore made up of niobium and tantalum. When refined, columbite-tantalite becomes heat resistant tantalum and has distinctive electrical storage properties. In 1998 alone the USA used 525 tons of tantalum, 60% which was used in tantalum capacitors that are essential to control current flow in cell phone circuit boards.

Columbite-tantalite found chiefly in eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire. It is estimated that the DRC holds 80% of the world’s supply of columbite-tantalite.

Because of the high demand of tantalum its value rose from $65 a kilogram to about $600 a kilogram. Its value per kilogram is now about $100.

Micropbes Under Sea Floor Shows Possibility of Alien Life

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:50:34 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: However, this population lives at an unusual rate. Single-celled organisms usually consume food for energy and then rather than grow larger, simply divide and reproduce themselves. While the Bacteria Escherichia Coli, as an example, doubles its numbers every 20 minutes, these Archaea double on the order of hundreds or thousands of years and consume very little energy.

"In essence, these microbes are almost, practically dead by our normal standards," says House. "They metabolize a little, but not much."

According to House, organisms metabolizing at such slow rates is what we could expect to find in other areas of our solar system because such environments have much less energy available than on Earth. Perhaps, similar organisms may be in hydrothermal vents beneath the ice of Europa -- the second moon of Jupiter -- or in subsurface aquifers of Mars.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Tiny microbes beneath the sea floor, distinct from life on the Earth's surface, may account for one-tenth of the Earth's living biomass, according to an interdisciplinary team of researchers, but many of these minute creatures are living on a geologic timescale.

"Our first study, back in 2006, made some estimates that the cells could double every 100 to 2,000 years,"

Now we have the first comprehensive look at the genetic makeup of these microbes.

found that a large percentage of the microbes were Archaea, single-celled organisms that look like Bacteria but are different on the metabolic and genetic levels.

If the rest of the world is like the Peruvian Margin, then at least one tenth and as much as a third of the Earth's biomass could be these tiny microbes living in the mud.

For example, how do they die?" asks Biddle. "It is a simple question that we cannot answer."

These microbes influence the Earth's long-term carbon cycle

Tags: biology, arrchea, microbiology

Socialist America

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:15:52 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: online.barrons.com

LOWER THE FLAGS ALONG WALL STREET TO HALF-STAFF. Play a dirge and hang out the crepe. Market capitalism is dead. Our financial system, for all intents and purposes, has been federalized, with taxpayer-financed "backstops" stretching as far the eye can see. Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac (ticker: FRE), Fannie Mae (FNM) and their mortgage-industry brothers-in-ARMs all are beneficiaries of this corporate-welfare scheme. Other reckless lenders with sob stories almost certainly will be added to the list.

Wall Street -- the proud, powerful and symbolic American landmark that Osama bin Laden repeatedly has vowed to destroy -- used to be about the invisible hand, risks and rewards, and the late economist Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction."

It was creative, alright. Now the incubator of financial innovation turns out to be part wax works, a place where dead companies are made to look life-like by the very visible hand of the government.

Tags: corporate scroungers, nationalisation

Homo roboticus

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:51:30 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: How to build a brain

From the start, the group knew that sensitivity, dexterity, and strength were not enough. They had to provide the biomimetic arm with a high degree of intelligence.

Their ultimate goal is to create a microchip that will allow the arm to carry out tasks requiring human-level skills in a real-world setting.

The researchers are currently using software to simulate important aspects of how the cerebellum processes and integrates information.

“It’s the first neural-network-based controller that can control the dynamics of a robotic system in its full operational range,”

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Meet Robo Habilis: Robot Has Human-like Hand Controlled By 'Brain' Modeled After Human Cerebellum

Hollywood did a bad job for us,”

Existing robots

can perform repetitive actions quickly and precisely. However, says van der Smagt, “they are not very intelligent or flexible

best way to make a robot that is intelligent, flexible and sensitive is to model it on the human body and brain.

This approach, called biomimetics

After two-and-a-half years of research, and €6.5 million in funding

scientists have designed and tested a human-like arm with a dextrous and sensitive hand, controlled by a computer program inspired by the human cerebellum

To develop robotic skin as sensitive as human skin, the researchers started by studying how human skin senses not just pressure and position but features such as the direction pressure is coming from

The artificial arm they built and are now experimenting with uses a total of 58 motors in opposing pairs, coupled with non-linear springs, to control the arm.

Tags: robotics, neuroscience, future