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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." |
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No
Stoning, Canada Migrants Told 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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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