Thursday, June 19, 2003

Deflation William Greider writes: At the risk of sounding like Chicken Little, I am going to describe the economic situation in plain English. The United States is flirting with a low-grade depression, one that may last for years unless the government takes decisive action to overcome it. This would most likely be depression with a small d, not the financial collapse and "grapes of wrath" devastation Americans experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But the potential consequences, especially for the less affluent and the young, would be severe enough--a long interlude of sputtering stagnation, years of tepid growth and stubbornly high unemployment, punctuated occasionally with a renewed recession. Depression means an economy that is stuck in a ditch and cannot get out, unable to regain its normal energies for expansion. Japan, second-largest economy in the world, has been in this condition for roughly twelve years, following the collapse of its own financial bubble. If the same fate has befallen the United States, the globalized economy is imperiled, too, since America's market for imports and its huge trade deficits keep the global trading system afloat. Most authorities, I should add, do not regard any of this as likely. The great difficulty for policy-makers is that this doesn't much feel like a crisis--not yet anyway, for most Americans. So where's the urgency to undertake radical remedies? Some of Wall Street's best forecasters, for instance, are predicting 4 percent US growth in the second half of 2003. But Japan experienced false recoveries, too. Nobody knows what will unfold if nothing is done, but the consequences of waiting to find out could be horrendous for the broad ranks of Americans. (06/19/03) Mammals and the Further Rise of Mind Howard Bloom writes: It's currently popular in evolutionary psychology to believe that the modern mind evolved in the Pleistocene, the hunter-gatherer stage of man's existence. Yet most of what we are, of our personal emotions, our ways of doing things, and the manner in which we transmit and sum them, we share with far more primitive relatives. Memes are one key to the next jump in networking. And memes come in two stripes: implicit, that means those which belong to the animal brain; and explicit, those which depend on hominid neural add-ons, the cranial gizmos responsible for syntactic speech. Implicit memes - the ones transferred by spiny lobsters, birds, octopi and squid - are housed in a very old part of the brain indeed. Yet they dominate our lives, handling everything from the way we drive to our autopilot greetings, quarrels, reconciliations, unspoken cultural quirks, frustrations, and our joys. Even language is less our monopoly than we think. And the very queen of the brain's humanity, the cerebral cortex, home of that narrative summarizer we call our consciousness, is not entirely human either. So before we can understand ourselves, we must stick to our task and continue to dissect the past. We are new, but not as startlingly so as we would like to think. (06/19/03) Indian Farmers Like GM Crops BBC Agriculture -- The farmers here like genetic modification (GM). In fact, they like it so much they are illegally cross-breeding Monsanto's insect-resistant cotton with local plants to create their own GM varieties. A BBC investigation has confirmed widespread use of pirate seeds. Our Delhi correspondent, Geeta Pandey, and I went to the town of Mansa, which is the centre of the trade, to see if we could track down some of the illegal material. The market town is in the agricultural heart of Gujarat; it is in the wild west of India with its own set of rules and its own set of values. Last year, Gujarat was one of first Indian states to grow Monsanto's novel cotton crop. The plant contains genetic material taken from a bacterium. The modification makes the cotton plant's tissues lethal to insect pests, including the economically damaging bollworm. But farmers here claim to have been using their own illegal versions of this so-called BT Bollgard for several years. And it is thought that a half of all the GM seed now sold in the state is pirated. As we walked along the bustling high street, we came across a stall belting out the latest indie hits - no doubt the usual pirate copies. This is very much the chaotic Indian way: pirate tapes, pirate designer clothes and now pirate GM seeds. (06/19/03) Mobile Phone Cameras Useful for Doctors BBC Health -- Doctors at a Welsh hospital are leading the way in using modern technology to help speed up a patient's treatment. When a specialist is not to hand to make an instant diagnosis, junior doctors are using mobile phones to send picture messages of an X-ray. Doctors claim the use of mobile phone technology has already reduced waiting times for orthopaedic patients. As part of the scheme, a team at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant, south Wales, send an image of an X-ray over a mobile phone to a specialist. The consultant can then advise the junior doctors how to proceed immediately. Previously, copies of X-rays had to be sent by Telex or delivered by taxi to the specialists - an expensive and time-consuming process. "We tend to rely on seeking opinions and discussing cases with colleagues," said Jonathan P Davies, orthopaedic consultant at the Royal Glamorgan hospital. (06/19/03) Use Them and Lose Them -- Controlling GM Seeds BBC Agriculture -- Seeds may be a bigger danger than pollen in allowing GM crops to escape into the countryside. Seeds can be carried long distances on farm machinery to cross with wild relatives, a French study has found. Seeds can be spread in soil on farm machinery Genes from commercial sugar beet turned up in wild plants growing more than 1.5 kilometres away, according to scientists at Lille University. It suggests GM crops are likely to jump the confines of any buffer zone imposed. "If GM sugar beets are established in regions where populations of the wild form also occur, then gene flow between wild and cultivated relatives is almost inevitable," says lead author Dr Jean-Francois Arnaud. The French study looked at sugar beet, a crop that can easily cross breed with closely related wild plants such as sea beet. The scientists used molecular biology techniques to see whether genes from the commercial crop could spread across the countryside. They took DNA from plants in three areas: the field itself, wild sea beet growing some 1.5 km away and a linking "contact zone". The scientists found there was gene flow from the commercial crop to the wild. They believe the genes were spread accidentally by human means in seeds rather than by pollen. "Accidental transport of seeds within soils carried on motor vehicles, or by other normal agricultural activities is the best explanation," says Dr Arnaud. "Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis of human-mediated long-distance dispersal." (06/19/03) Michigan Town Riots CNN News -- Police in a Michigan town said they were preparing for more violent rioting Wednesday after two nights of burned buildings, gunfire and beatings. A hospital spokeswoman said 10 people were injured in Tuesday night's violence -- a reaction to a high-speed police chase in which a Benton Harbor, Michigan, man crashed and died. The disturbance lasted into the early hours of Wednesday. Most of injuries were lacerations, and at least person was treated for a gunshot wound. Early Wednesday, police told reporters the protests were getting worse and authorities planned to declare a town curfew. Michigan's governor declared a state of emergency, which allows for the activation of Michigan National Guard troops, if needed. Kuk estimated about 300 protesters were on the streets of Benton Harbor, a town of about 12,000 people on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. "They say this is far more violent than what was happening last night," she said. In the police chase, which ended early Monday, Terrance Shurn, 28, died when he crashed into an abandoned house after losing control of his motorcycle. The chase at times reached 100 miles per hour. After the crash, police said they discovered Shurn had a suspended license and a small amount of marijuana on him. His death sparked outrage from Benton Harbor residents, some of whom have a long list of grievances with the police, and blamed the Benton Township officer chasing Shurn for his death. (06/19/03) Nanotube Ram Chip could hold 10 Gigabits! New Scientist -- A computer memory chip based on carbon nanotubes has passed a manufacturing milestone, according to the US company developing the technology. The prototype chip would store information using hundreds of billions of nanotubes with a theoretical capacity of 10 gigabits of data, says Nantero, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Once fully developed, the company says nanoscale random access memory (NRAM) could hold more data that existing types of RAM and would also be non-volatile, meaning data would not be lost when the power is been turned off. Computers using such memory could boot up almost instantly. Nantero also claims that NRAM would be much faster than current non-volatile memory, such as Flash. Nantero is not the only company hoping to use carbon nanotubes to make improved types of computer memory. But the company believes its advantage lies in the fact that its chips can be made using existing silicon manufacturing methods and would therefore be relatively cheap to make. (06/19/03) Looking Good versus Smelling Good New Scientist -- The development of colour vision may have lead to Old World primates, and hence their human descendants, to lose their ability to detect pheromones, suggests a new genetic study. Pheromones are highly specific scent molecules that many animals rely upon to find and assess a potential mate. But humans appear to make little, if any, use of pheromone signals, says Jianzhi George Zhang, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Researchers have suggested before that the primates' pheromonal abilities may have fallen by the wayside because they developed colour vision, a better way of selecting mates. (06/19/03)   7:44:53 AM

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