You don't need this, but so what? Sealed Air is giving away
free samples
of bubble wrap to North Americans, for a "limited time" (Javascript
required).
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
You don't need this, but so what? Sealed Air is giving away
free samples
of bubble wrap to North Americans, for a "limited time" (Javascript
required).
The US Senate has voted--by
unanimous consent as an amendment to a spending bill--to
restrict the
Bush administration's "Total Information Awareness" project. (The current
headline on this story says the exact opposite of the text: it reads "Senate
Blocks Privacy Project".)
This is about the only good news we (Americans) have had on such matters in years. It now goes over to a House-Senate conference committee.
This
is weird and beautiful: new fossils from China are of
a dinosaur
with four rudimentary wings. Unlike earlier
Microraptor fossils, the new specimens have clearly
visible feathers. The discoverer thinks it climbed trees and
then glided down.
Part of the weirdness is that the feathers farthest from the animal's body are the longest, the reverse of the usual pattern in living birds.
The latest entry in the World Trade Center design competition
is gorgeous
Art Nouveau, polychrome marble and resembling a spaceship. It's based on
sketches made by Antonio Gaudí around 1908. The people
supporting the project claim that the sketches were intended for
what eventually became the WTC site.
[NY Times link, so registration required]
This is still several years away from human testing, at best, but
researchers working with a mouse model of multiple sclerosis have
used adult stem cells to
replace
damaged myelin in the brain. The scientists produced the
necessary oligodendrocytes in vitro, then injected them into the
mouse brains, where they replaced the lost or damaged myelin sheathes
of the nerve cells.
Sabre-toothed cats
evolve every so often, then die out again, but this is the first I'd heard
of a sabre-toothed salmon.
This link is cool in itself, and it's also a handy place to introduce you to the underappreciated work of Ray Troll, who has created all sorts of cool images of animals, especially prehistoric sea life. Alas, there's still no t-shirt of the "Trilobite Hunters" image I fell in love with years ago at a Seattle museum, and the Web site design is flawed (some of the links that should produce images of t-shirts leave you at the page you started from). Nonetheless, when I have a steady job again I'll probably be adding to my Troll t-shirt collection.
Filtering water through
old sari cloth
can cut the incidence of cholera in half. This is slightly better than
nylon filters made specifically for the purpose.
An Australian power company plans to build a
kilometer-tall
tower as part of a solar power plant. A large, low glass roof will use
sunlight to heat air, which will then rise and drive electric turbines. When
it's built, it will be the world's tallest free-standing structure by a wide
margin, at twice the height of the CN Tower.
The
Canadian
government is appealing an Ontario court decision that Canada's laws against marijuana
possession are invalid. In the meantime,
Brian McAllister, the teenager's lawyer, says the case he won on Thursday leaves Ontario's legal system in a quandary.Back in July 2000, a judge effectively gave the Canadian government a year to write a new law that allowed for medical use of marijuana. The new regulations were written by the federal cabinet, not parliament, and Judge Douglas Philips has now ruled that that isn't sufficient: banning possession would require parliament to pass a new law. There's little political backing for such a move, at least within Canada."I don't see why any judge would want to hear any other cases involving the issue until this appeal has been adjudicated," Mr. McAllister said in an interview yesterday.
Analysis of
decades of field observations shows that
orangutans
have culture. Some of the differences seem directly practical--there are
orangutans that use tools, and others that don't--and some involve games
and differing amounts of social interaction.
Since orangutans are more distantly related to us than chimpanzees are, this puts the origins of culture much earlier. (A less likely alternative would be that culture evolved independently in each species after they separated.)
This should be cool and interesting:
J. R. R. Tolkien's translation
of, and commentary on,
Beowulf. It's been sitting in a box at the Bodleian since the
1930s, and will be published sometime in 2004 if all goes well.
I've never read Beowulf, and this seems like both a fine way to do it and a plausible excuse to wait another year. [via Making Light]
Americans for Insurance Reform has
issued a study showing that jury awards in malpractice cases
are increasing at the
same rate as other medical costs, but malpractice insurance rates correlate
with the bond market. Also, when Nevada gave them the limits on malpractice
awards that they wanted, two major insurance companies announced that they would
not be lowering their rates.
The New York City Comptroller is going to do a
complete audit of
the New York City Transit Authority, which may be the only way to get
anything like a real budget out of that agency--which wants to raise fares
by as much as one-third.
In a letter to Peter S. Kalikow, the M.T.A. chairman, Mr. Thompson wrote: "While the glaring deficiencies in the M.T.A.'s presentation of the T.A.'s budget proposal may not constitute a breach of the M.T.A.'s fiduciary responsibilities, it does constitute a breach of responsibility to the citizens of New York City."The MTA's most recent "budget" doesn't include the subsidies it receives as income, or list debt service on capital projects as an expense.
Finally!
New York State now has a gay-rights bill, after the governor pushed the
leader of the Republican-controlled State Senate to allow a vote.
The "USA Patriot" Act says that
librarians can't tell anyone if the FBI has
demanded information on what books they read or borrowed. Librarian.net has
five signs that it believes are technically legal for libraries to post,
including "The FBI has not been here (watch very closely for the removal of this
sign)"
[via BoingBoing]
The last time New York City did mass-vaccination
against smallpox, the
public health authorities did their best to downplay the possible side
effects, and there are no really good data on how many people were affected, but
one of
the children who developed encephalitis is now a newspaper editor, and
describes his experience.
A University of Michigan medical team reported in March in the journal Effective Clinical Practice that the data presented from the 1947 campaign in New York were of limited value in judging the adverse effects of mass smallpox vaccinations "because of differences in disease classification and inconsistency in case-finding efforts." We will never know the collateral damage from the 1947 program.The study noted that smallpox had a 30 percent death rate, but that a mass vaccination of 179 million people ages 1 to 65 could be expected to cause about 4,600 serious side effects and 285 deaths, even if it excluded those at risk for problems, like pregnant women and people with immune deficiencies. That is not a lot of illnesses compared with unchecked smallpox, but we don't face unchecked smallpox. We face the unknown. Smallpox vaccine fights smallpox; the truth fights terror.
The boxes labeled "Fear" that led to the evacuation of Union Square subway station
last week turn out to be some clueless git's idea of a
public
art project. Three months in the city, no idea that a strike was being
discussed--no idea of anything, as far as I can tell. The only thing
he did right was turn himself in. Memo to all SVA freshmen: to be public art,
it isn't enough for something to be public--it also has to be art.
Fifteen percent of the cells in mouse brains
have either
missing or extra chromosomes. The researchers suspect that the
same may be true of humans, and that this could affect the chances of
many kinds of disease.
Team member Mike McConnell argues that the cellular phenomenon - thought to arise when chromosomes are divvied up inaccurately at cell division - must serve some biological purpose in the brain. Immune cells and blood cells they have examined appear not to show the same effect, so "It doesn't seem to be a mistake".Losing genes "changes what a [nerve] cell can do," says McConnell, perhaps slowing the speed that they communicate. Some bacteria, for example, shuffle their genomes when they are in uncomfortable conditions, to create a new mutant that can survive.
Copyright 2003 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.