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• • Friday, February
2, 2006
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"I
doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows
are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists
are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general.
It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in
non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so."
~ RICHARD
DAWKINS |
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No
Stoning, Canada Migrants Told
BBC News
Don't stone women to death, burn them or circumcise
them, immigrants wishing to live in the town of Herouxville in
Quebec, Canada, have been told.
The rules come in a new town council declaration on culture that
Muslims have branded shocking and insulting.
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God
and Gorillas
Salon
Every human culture has believed in spirits,
gods or some other divine being. That's why human beings have often
been called Homo religioso. Some people take this long history
of belief in the otherworldly as evidence for God; doesn't it explain
why religion continues to be so pervasive? But many scientists
are coming up with their own, decidedly secular, theories about
the origins of faith. In fact, over the last few years, a small
cottage industry made up of scientists and philosophers has devoted
itself to demystifying the divine.
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UCLA
Micromanufacturing Laboratory
UCLA
The Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) program
at UCLA emphasizes the design, fabrication, and physics of systems
and devices integrated on a sub-millimeter scale. Current research projects
in their lab include digital microfluidics, nanoengineered surfaces,
microdroplet-dispensing systems, RF liquid switches, micro fuel cells,
3-D microbatteries, and
on-chip encapsulation of microdevices.
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New
International Guidelines for Stem Cell Science
NewScientist
The first international guidelines on human embryonic
stem cell research, released on Thursday, echo public opinion in
calling for a ban on human reproductive cloning. But they are already
proving controversial in other angles.
Although the guidelines are not legally binding, they carry the
weight of leading scientific opinion and are likely to be influential
in many countries.
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Flies
Live Longer If They Can't Smell Their Food
Nature
Eating less can lengthen an animal's life. But
now it seems that – for flies at least – they don't
have to actually cut down on the calories to benefit. Fruitflies
can boost their lifespan just by not smelling their food.
The result suggests that flies might use their sense of smell –
as well as the actual consumption of food – to help determine
how rich their environment is, and how they should go about distributing
their energy resources.
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Adult
Stem Cells to Repair Damaged Hearts
Rush University Medical Center
The Autologous Cellular Therapy CD34-Chronic
Myocardial Ischemia (ACT34-CMI) Trial is the first human, Phase
II adult stem cell therapy study in the U.S. designed to investigate
the efficacy, tolerability, and safety of blood-derived selected
CD34+ stem cells to improve symptoms and clinical outcomes in subjects
with chronic myocardial ischemia (CMI), a severe form of coronary
artery disease. "What we’re hoping is that
these stem cells will be able to stimulate the growth of new blood
vessels to bring more blood and
oxygen to the heart muscle, so that these patients will have a
better quality of life and less chest pain," said Dr. Gary
Schaer, director of the Rush Cardiac Catheterization Lab and study
investigator.
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Robots
Are Tougher Than You
Popular Mechanics
Robots go where people can’t: collapsed
underground mine shafts, on one-way trips into deep space and down
into the bone-crushing bottom of the sea. With inhuman strength
and smarts, robots routinely explore inhospitable territory in
which high radiation, extreme temperatures or complete lack of
atmospheric pressure would cause human beings to suffocate, freeze
solid, explode into tiny chunks or all of the above at the same
time. Even so, robots are far from invincible. Explore the grave
and mortal challenges faced by robots that boldly go where humankind
cannot or will not.
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Scientists
Find Cancer Stem Cells in Pancreatic Tumors
The Washington Post
Researchers have for the first time identified
stem cells linked to pancreatic cancer.
The study, by scientists at the University of Michigan Comprehensive
Cancer Center, could help in the development of new treatments
for this deadly form of cancer, which has the worst survival rate
of any major malignancy. Only about three percent of patients survive
five years after their diagnosis.
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What
a Friend We Have in Dawkins
Skeptic
Richard Dawkins is a wondrously efficient and
beguiling writer – colloquial, unpretentious, and direct,
notwithstanding his deep erudition and the exacting reasoning he
continually deploys.
The obvious comparison is to Bertrand Russell, a thinker with similar
views and a similar gift for turning a devastating phrase. But
Dawkins’s virtues also include easy familiarity with popular
culture, American as well as British. He cleverly uses it to gain
the ear of an audience that, perhaps, would be a bit put off by
a purely academic style.
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Street-fighting
Robot Challenge Announced
NewScientistTech
A contest to build a robot that can operate
autonomously in urban warfare conditions, moving in and out of
buildings to search and destroy targets like a human soldier, was
launched in Singapore on Tuesday.
The country's Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) is offering
one million Singapore dollars ($652,000) to whoever develops a
robot that completes a stipulated set of tasks – yet to be
revealed – in the fastest time possible.
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Homo
Futurus: How Radically Should We Remake Ourselves – Or Our Children?
The Huffington Post
Should parents have the right to choose their
baby's gender? How about its sexual preference? Intelligence? Physical
appearance? And are these left/right questions?
Futurists see a conflict forming over our dominion over the human
body, and over the choices we make about our biological future
– and that of our children. Some call it a clash between "bioliberals" and "bioconservatives," and
frame it as a debate over individual rights. When it comes to transforming
one's own body they may be right, but it gets thornier when children
are involved.
Is our only choice between a transhumanist future where children
are genetically designed to win on "American Idol," or
a world where authoritarians rule our most personal choices? The
answer, sadly, may be yes.
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What
Does it Mean to Have a Mind? Maybe More Than You Think
EurekAlert!
Through an online survey of more than 2,000
people, psychologists at Harvard University have found that we
perceive the minds of others along two distinct dimensions: agency,
an individual's ability for self-control, morality and planning;
and experience, the capacity to feel sensations such as hunger,
fear and pain.
The findings, presented this week in the journal Science, not only
overturn the traditional notion that people see mind along a single
continuum, but also provide a framework for understanding many
moral and legal decisions and highlight the subjective nature of
perceiving mental attributes in others. "Important
societal beliefs, such as those about capital punishment, abortion,
and the legitimacy of torture, rest on perceptions of
these dimensions, as do beliefs about a number of philosophical
questions," says co-author Kurt Gray, a doctoral student in
Harvard's Department of Psychology. "Can robots ever have
moral worth? What is it like to be God? Is the human experience
unique?"
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