In an age when science-based questions are confronting society almost constantly, public science knowledge appears to have remained stalled at a very low level, or is in retreat. This is largely a result of a failed communication theory that persists in science journalism and particularly among scientists. Serious thought should be given urgently to training working journalists and journalism students to deal successfully with science topics by abandoning failed models and taking up the democratic opportunities offered by new communications technologies.

Protein extracted from 68 million-year-old T. rex bones has shed new light on the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. [...] The proteins found in the T. rex bones belong to the elastic connective fibres - known as collagen - that support other tissues in the body. [...] Collagen makes up most of the organic material in bone, which consists of both minerals and protein. It is the same substance injected into the lips, and other areas of the body, in cosmetic surgery procedures. [...] When minerals are removed from human bone, a collagen matrix is left behind. The US scientists performed the same operation on the T.rex fossil, and found what appeared to be residual traces of collagen.

The Democrats and the peace movement are walking into a trap. The Republicans are preparing with Rovian cunning to focus the mind of the public on the question: Who lost Iraq?

And they are already giving the answer: The Democrats and the peace movement.

When something supernatural or something epic happens to us in real life, we have no means of dealing with it except what we have learned through stories. Myths are the soul of the civilization. When a war starts, for example, whatever the governing myth is in the society dictates how men will react to this epic circumstances: if Viet Nam is the governing myth of the society, we will react to all wars according to what that myth says, and we will call the war a quagmire. If David and Goliath is the governing myth in society, then we will root for the little guy. So the movie had to deal with the question of what happens to a man who over-intellectualizes his myth. What do you do when you do not have a myth ready to deal with things of mythic magnitude in life? The character, to make this point, had to be someone who knew stories backward and forward, but who was not himself a creative person: a critic, in other words. Someone who sucks the magic out of myth-making for a living. Of course he has to come to a bad end: the point of the story is that we need stories to live, we need the inspiration as a lantern in the dark. A man who throws that lamp away, according to the logic of the story theme, has to stumble.

In order to understand what the similarities between Islamist and Nazi imaginations are based on, we have to look at the history of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood which was founded in 1928 and which established Islamism as a mass movement.

The continuing significance of the Muslim Brotherhood for Islamism is comparable to the significance of the Bolshevik party for Communism in the 20th century: The Muslim Brotherhood is the organizational as well as the ideological core which successfully inspired all subsequent Islamist groups and tendencies. No other organization has influenced the ideology of the al Qaida cadres more strongly than the Brotherhood and its leading members Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Abdullah Azzam have.

The Ark Two Community is the largest pluralistic survival community in North America without any political, religious, or cultural bias. Its purpose is to ameliorate the catastrophe of a nuclear war and to help restore civilization. [...]

[...] The Ark Two Community in Canada has a 10,000 sq/ft nuclear shelter as part of its refuge facility. This may be the largest Privately Constructed nuclear fallout shelter in the world. 42 buses were used as forms to pour a minimum of 12 inches of high strength concrete that was heavily reinforced with rebar. A minimum of 5 feet to a maximum of 14 feet of earth was pushed back overtop.

The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into Human-Computer Interaction. In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on interaction may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called information software, I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users goals can be better satisfied through other means.

If anyone still labors under the delusion that J.R.R. Tolkien was a writer of twee fantasies for children, this novel should set them straight. A bleak, darkly beautiful tale played out against the background of the First Age of Tolkien's Middle Earth, The Children of Húrin possesses the mythic resonance and grim sense of inexorable fate found in Greek tragedy.

Despite their differences, vertebrates, worms and insects are all believed to be descended from a common ancestor - a worm-like organism, named Urbilateria, which lived some 600 million years ago. Urbilateria displayed bilateral symmetry - its body was symmetrical along its longitudinal axis - and this body plan was inherited by the diverse array of organisms descended from it. But, according to new research, just published in the journal Cell, it wasn't just bilateral symmetry that Urbilateria's descendants inherited: at the earliest stages of their evolution, vertebrates - including humans - may have inherited the organization of their nervous systems from Urbilateria as well.

In a nocturnal cerimony in front of the Episcopal Palace, Liquid Cat unveiled a preliminary design of the new label for its purified Holy Water brand San Giovanni.

The press has been informed that Liquid Cat and monochrom settled their agreement over the licensing for the purifiation technique. The italian company is currently organizing its labs for the production of the new Holy H2O.

"No may be the most important word in our vocabulary, but it is the most difficult to say well. At the heart of the difficulty in saying No is the tension between exercising your power and tending to your relationship."

In towns and cities where we sleep alongside millions the notion doesn't arise. But out here where there is nobody, we're terrified of seeing a single man, precisely because there's nobody else. For why would anybody be out here if he wasn't reeling around the mercury sands with an idiot grin that changes to a grimace as soon as he sees the tent?

The gleaming bus is heading north through green hills. Santiago is far behind us and the black asphalt road flows through the countryside like a sleek river of oil. Out here beyond the grey sprawl of the capital, you start to feel Chile for the first time; the Chile that hasn’t aged since the Conquistadores arrived. The size of the blue sky always feels like the New World and through a squint of the brain you can imagine that the rivers and villages that are passing by outside the AndesMar bus have not yet been named. The road is good. Everything is smooth and something is not right.

The trouble with Chile is that it is always in-between. Neither South American nor European - a little of one and not enough of the other.

It's time to let this genie out of the bottle: I'm helping to organize an international conference and festival all about sex and tech, with experts from the fields of science, economics, art and technology — Arse Elektronika. It will take place here in San Francisco on October 5-7, 2007 at the Porn Palace of Kink.com. The premise isn't the question of whether or not sex affects tech and culture, but *how* it does.

We’re looking for speakers and presenters, and researchers. If you have an interest in speaking or sponsoring, please email: arseelektronika AT monochrom.at

I'm helping Monochrom to organize this — a serious conference with a fun attitude about sex and tech. There are a number of speakers I'd love to invite and have fly in from various parts of the globe — this could be amazing, and could change many cultural conversations about sex and tech, and my hope is to try and smash the stereotypes that impede the organic evolution of sex and tech. This is not a corporate con; this is by and for the people who are active in sex, sex culture, and technology, and all those interested — not companies hawking products or startups trying to launch another gimmick. We’re looking at talks, presentations, demonstrations, and panels. We're ready to evolve sex and tech: the conversation starts here.

Diamond is the hardest material known, because its carbon atoms form very short covalent bonds, according to co-author Richard B. Kaner, UCLA professor of inorganic chemistry and materials science and engineering. Most of the diamond used in the world is actually synthetic and very expensive. Diamond powder is used for oil drills and machines that build roads and cut holes in mountains. Diamond cannot be used, however, to cut steel without ruining the diamond blade.

Cubic boron nitride is a diamond substitute used to cut steel; it is made synthetically under very high-temperature, high-pressure conditions, and is even more expensive than diamond, Kaner said.

There are two ways to make super-hard materials that are "ultra-incompressible,” meaning they are resistant to shape deformation, which is a necessary condition for hardness: One is to imitate diamond by using carbon and combining it with boron or nitrogen to maintain short bonds; the other is to look for metals that are already incompressible and try to make them hard, said Kaner. He and his colleagues are developing the second approach.

The Poles call it the law of lustration, a term meaning ritual purification; the word has strong connotations of repentance and penitence in Poland, where history and Catholicism are so closely intertwined.

Under the law, which was passed last October and entered into force on 15 March this year, 700,000 Poles are required to confess any collaboration with the communists between 1945 and 1989. All senior civil servants, university professors, lawyers, headmasters and journalists born before 1972 must now confess their past sins by 15 May.

They must all fill in a form and answer the question: "Did you secretly and knowingly collaborate with the former communist security services?" The forms must be handed to their immediate superiors, who will forward them to the Institute of National Memory in Warsaw, which will check its records and issue a certificate of political purity. Journalists employed in any public service will be dismissed automatically if they collaborated. Anyone who refuses to answer the question or who is proved to have lied may be banned from their profession for 10 years.

This mad law, which is causing uproar in the European Union, makes the McCarthyites of the United States in the 1950s look like amateurs at the practise of anti-communism. It is the main feature of a witchhunt launched by the authorities after the conservative president, Lech Kaczynski, and his twin brother, prime minister Jaroskaw Kaczynski, came to power in Poland in October 2005.

a recent article in nature reports about the controversy around a xenotransplatation study, carried out in russia.

the russian study (funded by a australian biotech company) aimes to transplant pig beta cells (insulin producing cells) into humans.

implants come from hygienically housed pigs descended from animals introduced by whalers to sub-antarctic islands, these pigs on the islands have been found to be free of many viruses, bacteria and parasites.

the cells are encapsulated in a seaweed based gel, allowing the passage of nutrients and blocking immune cells...thereby reducing immunosuppression therapy.

link, nature

if you don't have a subscription for nature journal:
link

At thirty thousand feet above sea level, Snakes on a Plane is a basic Hollywood movie: exciting stunts, goofy one-liners, campy performances, gratuitous sex, unneeded violence, and serious pre-release hype in search of a foregone market conclusion. The movie itself does little to advance cinematic aesthetics, and it squeaks by with a semblance of entertainment value. It is a Hollywood B-movie, period. However, at ground level, the movie is something else altogether: a vehicle with wide open windows staring straight into the post-9/11 American mind—a mind plagued by existential fear and phantasmic preoccupations.

The movie easily compares to the events of September 11th: the snakes equal terrorists; the plane in the movie equals the planes of 9/11; fear of snakes equals our fear of terrorism; the movie’s evil mastermind equals the likes of Osama bin Laden; the movie’s F.B.I. action hero equals our governmental and military heroes; the anxiety of the movie’s passengers equals our own anxieties; etc. These basic comparisons are obvious, but there is more to the story. We begin that story with America’s obsession with fear.

On April 24th, the European Parliament will vote on IPRED2, the Second Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive. With one stroke, they risk turning thousands of innocent EU citizens and businesses into copycriminals. Only you can stop them. Sign our petition now!

If IPRED2 passes in its current form, "aiding, abetting, or inciting" copyright infringement on a "commercial scale" in the EU will become a crime. Penalties for these brand new copycrimes will include permanent bans on doing business, seizure of assets, criminal records, and fines of up to EUR 100,000. IPRED2's backers say these copycrimes are meant only for professional criminals selling fake merchandise. But Europe already has laws against these fraudsters. With many terms in IPRED2 left unclear or completeley undefined - including "commercial scale" and "incitement" - IPRED2 will expand police authority and make suspects out of legitimate consumers and businesses, slowing innovation and limiting your digital rights.

A picnic on a far-flung planet orbiting a red dwarf might involve spreading your blanket on black grass and munching on purple veggies, according to a new model.

Given that we have yet to find bacteria, let alone little green men or purple palms, on any other planet, it might seem slightly ridiculous to spend time working out what colour plants elsewhere in the Universe must be. But scientists say that the thought experiment could be useful in helping us to look for lush landscapes in other solar systems.

Nancy Kiang, a biometeorologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, modelled the solar and atmospheric conditions of other planets to see which ones might be suitable for photosynthetic life, and what those photosynthesizers might look like.

No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was Joshua Bell, one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

In Mediterranean countries, a combination of automobile mania and contempt for our peasant, agricultural past means that the ancient mule and donkey culture is in crisis. In Greece the number of donkeys (including the unique breed of Arcadian donkey known to Homer and Xenophon) fell by 96.4%, from 508,000 to 18,173, between 1955 and 2006 and is still falling. The special breeds of Asinara, Sardinia and Sicily are endangered species. Donkeys in Corfu are on the verge of extinction. The lovely Martina Franca donkey of southern Italy has just been rescued from oblivion, but at a price: it is likely to be farmed for meat.

Ester Dreier and Lamb Lamont are proud to announce that Jean Baudrillard has been caught while floating around the Odyssey art gallery. Look at the amazing philosopher, take pictures and click on him to let him talk about death, life, and how is it to be a simulacrum!
Baudrillard will be available in Odyssey art gallery as long as we can retain his soul.

Artist Xia Xiaowan uses layers of glass to make 3-D paintings. He draws his inspiration and method from X-ray photographs, giving two-dimensional painting a three-dimensional effect. He combines material, technology and painting, thus maintaining the hand-made qualities of painting while adding elements of installation and sculptural art and displaying the cold, absurd and strange qualities of realism.

The Western high-tech elite, being too busy with defining and re-defining what the digital divide is and endlessly trying to compensate it, is definitely missing one the best lessons it could learn. It is a fact that developing countries are low-tech by definition, so they are always struggling to improve their minimal infrastructure by creating and exchanging ideas, rather than by assembling and delivering pricey chunks of electronics. In >>bare-life<< territories, there is a need to develop technological innovations while being aware of technical limitations. The focus here is on their creative exploitation or on slight but effective improvements that enable radical changes. Whereas, in the so-called industrial countries, we feel more and more >>connected<<, perpetually and unavoidably - even in the countryside or on the road - to the invisible communication networks, people not living in G8 countries are in a completely different situation: they have to hack communication systems to get what they need. Mobile phones, for example, have already provided the infrastructure for political movements in these kinds of countries, and have already been successfully used in this context.
One of the most famous historical cases is the >>People Power II<< movement in Manila in 2001, where thousands of people linked by SMS were able to coordinate non-violent demonstrations against President Joseph Estrada and his institutional corruption, finally leading to his impeachment. What made the difference was an efficient distribution structure that allowed the messages suddenly to reach an impressive number of people, reconfiguring the one-to-one message system for a large community. This structure was then enhanced and amplified for emergency conditions, and in the end the new scheme led to success and was permanently adopted.

Law enforcement officers in Tennessee make the greatest underground discovery since Tutankhamen's tomb was unearthed in the Valley of the Kings.

Under this ordinary house is a marijuana grow-op unlike any you have ever seen. Within the caves of middle Tennessee, growers constructed a complex of offices, living quarters, restroom facilities, and a climate-controlled forest of over one thousand cannabis plants.

In NYC there are huge power hungry TV screens above subway entrances that play ads for reality TV shows, and well, other reality TV shows, 24 hours a day 7 days a week- they're not used for public service or weather, word of the day, teaching people the metric system or to say things like the trains are delayed -- but some are now being turned into art, the site shows you how to make your own too.

Once upon a time a philosopher wrote an article called 'Don Quixote and The Narrative Self'. He commenced by saying: In this essay, I will discuss the question of whether our selves are constituted by narratives, ie stories. Are we like Don Quixote, whose self was created by his reading of medieval romances: are we Homo quixotienses, the narrative self? Or are we rather like the protagonist of Sartre's novel Nausea, Antonin Roquentin, whose life did not form any narrative unity? Are we in other words rather Homo roquentinenses?

The warming of the world's oceans is going to shorten the day, say German researchers. But there's no need to adjust your watch: the shortening will be by only 0.12 milliseconds over the next 200 years, they estimate.

Teddy Babes are plush adult toys. They can be used as sex dolls, but not necessarily. They can also be collected as "soft sculpture" art objects. They're not inflatable or made of latex or silicone, but made of velvety-soft plush material stuffed with non-allergenic poly-fil. Essentially, they're 'stuffed pretty girls,' as opposed to stuffed animals (such as teddy bears). They're also of superior quality than most, if not all, inflatable love dolls on the market, given that they include moveable joints, a high-quality fashion wig, and other special features.