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Wednesday, July 09, 2003
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 Howard Bloom writes: To understand the puzzle and the stakes, let's move back a bit in history. When scientists like England's Peter Russell, France's Joel de Rosnay, Germany's Gottfried Mayer-Kress, Belgium's Francis Heylighen, America's Gregory Stock, and Canada's Derrick De Kerckhove predict the coming of a global brain sometime in the 21st century, their minds are often fixed on electronic communication. They see satellite-relayed beams, fiber-optic cables, and next-generation technologies as neuronal axons in a cyber-cortex spanning continents. But trade and stone-tool technology-sharing had produced early versions of these far-stretched threads over two million years ago. The pace at which these interconnects grew after 3,000 B.C. was nothing to sneeze at. The Egyptians used the Nile to unite one long strip of towns into an Empire which endured fourteen times as long as the United States has been a nation. River boats provided remarkably quick and easy intercourse between one center and another. And foreign merchants offered interconnectivity all the way to Asia. In 800 BC the Phoenicians used agile craft capable of handling more turbulent waters to sail the Mediterranean and the Atlantic waves, shuttling goods and ideas from Britain and Spain to Argos and Assyria, 2,400 miles away. Shortly before the time of Christ, Greeks and Arabs tapped the monsoon winds to power their water craft on yearly trips to India and China, then hauled back wondrous cargos of pearls, Malabar pepper, perfumes, and jewelry. The Romans quickened the growing connective skein by building roads, copying Phoenician ships, and refining Egyptian and Persian forms of long distance data exchange into a 170-mile-per-day long-distance mailing service called the cursus publicus. St. Paul, a master of his era's form of internet promotion, used this postal system to send his Epistles throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, then took advantage of regular shipping - a powerful innovation - to carry his gospel as far as Rome and Spain. Paved highways and post-horses were so effective that young Constantine, according to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, left the palace of Nicomedia in the middle of the night, travelled post through Bithynia, Thrace, Dacia, Pannonia, and Italy, "and amidst the joyful acclamations of the people, reached the port of Boulogne in the very moment when his father was preparing to embark for Britain." This trip at breakneck speed had covered over 1,600 miles. (07/09/03)
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 Chris Floyd writes: The secret policemen snatched the citizen from his house. There were no charges, no warrants, no warnings. They spirited him away to a secret location; no one knew where he had gone, why he'd disappeared. The covert agents grilled him, in secret, for three months. They told him that if he didn't cooperate, he'd be declared an enemy of the state -- then they could salt him away in a military prison or the regime's concentration camp and hold him there, without charges, for as long as they wanted. Then, if they wanted, they could haul him before a military tribunal, try him in secret and, if they wanted, have him executed -- with no judicial oversight, no recourse to appeal save one: a plea for mercy from the regime's unelected leader. This usurper, who liked to be known as "The Commander," had given himself the arbitrary authority to strip any citizen of their liberty, and he alone -- no court, no council, no legislative body -- held the ultimate power of life and death over anyone he thus decreed an "enemy." After months in secret captivity, the prisoner -- a young truck driver with a history of mental problems -- broke down. In a secret court session, he confessed to planning a series of crimes against the state. The success of this covert operation was announced by the head of the regime's internal police forces. His declaration -- that a citizen had been snatched, interrogated, threatened and broken in secret, outside every stricture of the country's old constitution -- was greeted with cries of admiration in the national press. Yes, it was just another day in the New America ... (07/09/03)
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 Scientific American -- DNA is no longer just a scientific entity. It's erupted as this huge cultural phenomenon, as a metaphor for our natures. It's in our daily conversation, in art. When you were working on the double helix, did you foresee DNA ever becoming this well known? ... JAMES WATSON: No, no, we couldn't. Because no one had ever sequenced DNA or amplified DNA. It turned out to be totally wrong, but the famous Australian immunologist [Frank Macfarlane] Burnet published this article in a medical journal that came out in 1961 or 1962, in which he said DNA and molecular biology will not have an influence on medicine. Because that's only possible when you can read the DNA. That's why the Human Genome Project is so important. Neither Crick nor I is very science-fiction oriented. We've always been more concerned with what exists. The value of predictions falls off radically after five years. Back in 1953, all we wanted to do was find out how DNA provided the information and what the cellular machinery was for making proteins. That's really all; we didn't think about gene therapy. It took about 15 years before people began to think about that, around 1968-once restriction enzymes came along and, soon after, DNA sequencing. ... MORE. (07/09/03)
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 The New Scientist -- Scientists have built a minute, functioning vascular system - the branching network of blood vessels which supply nutrients and oxygen to tissues - in a significant step towards building whole organs. Conventional tissue engineering methods have successfully grown structural tissues such as skin and cartilage in the lab. But not being able to create the supporting vascular system has proved a major stumbling block preventing scientists from creating large functioning organs such as liver or kidneys. Now, researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School have used computers to design branching networks of venous and arterial capillaries, which start at three millimetres wide and reach a fineness of just 10 microns. "We used living vessels as a guide to model factors such as the angle and size ratio between branching vessels. But we optimised our design to improve it," said lead researcher Mohammad Kaazempur-Mofrad, from MIT's department of mechanical engineering and division of biological engineering. The networks were etched on to 15 centimetre-wide silicon wafers and the paths were then used as a mould to set a layer of biodegradable polymer. Two of these were then sealed together with a microporous membrane sandwiched between them, producing a mini artificial vascular system. Endothelial cells - which are flat cells lining the walls of blood vessels in a single layer - were injected into the network on one side of the membrane and either liver or kidney cells were injected on the other side. The endothelial cells coated the inside of the polymer nanotubes. These nanotubes biodegraded to leave a living shell of vessels similar to a natural vascular network. This method would provide an efficient means of supplying the liver or kidney cells with enough oxygen and nutrients to survive. (07/09/03)
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 BBC Nature -- It was said the English countryside used to sparkle - its field margins would swirl with the colour from arable "weeds". Times have certainly changed. The "unwelcome" plants that took their chances among the farmers' crops are now in full retreat. Mechanisation, herbicides and modern techniques of field management mean it is the crop that now chokes the weed and not the other way around. Traditional arable species have shown perhaps the greatest decline of all British plants in the last 25 years. Corn marigold, corncockle and cornflower are names which we might all recognise - they are still in the national consciousness; broad-leaved spurge, fingered speedwell and pheasant's eye are perhaps less well known. But these are all plants now listed in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan. Indeed, arable plants constitute one fifth of the wild flora targeted for conservation action in the UK. ... "Our fields are now a monochrome - a very plain, rather bright green," said Dr Jill Sutcliffe, the botanical manager at English Nature, the UK Government's nature advisory body. (07/09/03)
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 BBC World -- The rich world is running dangerously short of time to redeem its promises on helping the poor, the United Nations says. It is touch and go as to whether the goals will be met Despite three years of concerted effort, some countries have recently begun to get poorer. On present trends, some African countries will not vanquish poverty until 2165, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) believes. It says poor countries must introduce reforms, while rich ones improve trade and aid. ... The UNDP says its report documents "an unprecedented backslide... in some of the world's poorest nations. More than one billion people still live in extreme poverty, and for many living standards are getting steadily worse." The report identifies 59 priority countries where, it says, the MDGs will not be met without urgent action. In 31 top priority countries, progress towards the goals has stalled or even begun to reverse. Of the 59 priority nations, 24 suffer from a high incidence of HIV/Aids and 31 have unusually high foreign debts. (07/09/03)
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5:38:51 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
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8/3/2003; 11:27:17 PM.
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