Wednesday, October 19, 2005

International stem cell bank open. A bank that will create and supply embryonic stem cells for international research opens in South Korea. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition] 9:23:05 AM      Google It!.

Attention economics. You'd think that Clive Thompson's article Meet the Life Hackers, in this week's New York Times Magazine, would have produced a storm of commentary. After all, it's a major mainstream outing of Linda Stone's evocative phrase "continuous partial attention," Danny O'Brien's seminal talk on the seven habits of highly effective geeks, and Merlin Mann's 43 Folders1. Yet the blogosphere has reacted less vigorously than it would have a year ago. Here's a telling comment: The irony is that I have been trying to get through this article for a couple of days, but I keep getting interrupted... It's often suggested that this isn't a problem for generation X, Y, or Z2, the new breeds of post-humans who've adapted to continuous partial attention. I don't completely buy that argument, and neither does Clive Thompson. From an interview with NPR's Alex Chadwick: Don't the kids of today thrive on this? I've heard a lot of persuasive evidence that it's not true. Some researchers were sitting in classrooms of college students, and they said "This [attention scarcity] is what we work on" and the students said "Oh my god, that's exactly my life, please save us from that." ... [Jon's Radio] 9:20:27 AM      Google It!.

In a crisis, creating DNA vaccine could help save lives, slow spread of 'bird flu'. Researchers scrambling to combat a virulent form of bird flu that could mutate into a form easily spread among humans should consider developing vaccines based on DNA, according to British biochemical engineers. DNA vaccines, they say, can be produced more rapidly than conventional vaccines and could possibly save thousands of lives if a global influenza outbreak occurs. [Science Blog -] 9:18:46 AM      Google It!.