jrh
Researchers at Manchester University are able to print human skin cells!
Tailor-made skin from ‘ink’ printer: “Using the same principle as an ink-jet printer, experts are able to take skin cells from a patient’s body, multiply them, then print out a tailor-made strip of skin, ready to sew on to the body. The wound’s dimensions are entered into the printer to ensure a perfect fit.
“
(via we make money not art.)
Awesome:
The devices were formed by ‘growing’ rat cells on microscopic silicon chips, the researchers report in the journal Nature Materials.”
…
via Rich
It’s not like it was hard to see this coming, but Seymour Hersh reported in this week’s New Yorker that the U.S. has been conducting recon missions inside Iran with the purpose of identifying military targets:
Hersh quotes one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon as saying, “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible.”
One former high-level intelligence official told The New Yorker, “This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign.”
The administration is denying the conclusions of the article, and insists that they are pursuing diplomatic measures to address the threat perceived from Iran. Let’s hope these aren’t from the same diplomacy toolbox we had nearby in the prelude to the Iraq war.
Meanwhile, Hersh’s source has told a pretty detailed story:
The former intelligence official told Hersh that an American commando task force in South Asia is working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had dealt with their Iranian counterparts.
The New Yorker reports that this task force, aided by information from Pakistan, has been penetrating into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear-weapons installations.
In exchange for this cooperation, the official told Hersh, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has received assurances that his government will not have to turn over Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, to face questioning about his role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Hersh reported that Bush has already “signed a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia.”
Defining these as military rather than intelligence operations, Hersh reported, will enable the Bush administration to evade legal restrictions imposed on the CIA’s covert activities overseas.
Now this seems more like the sort of diplomacy this administration has demonstrated: quietly make a deal with the non-democratic leader of the country known to have helped two-thirds of the “axis of evil” develop WMD (this is, ironically, every “axis of evil” member we have not yet militarily occupied), where the terms of the deal protect the individual known to have been a critical link in the WMD proliferation. Fantastic.
I’m reminded of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, by Chalmers Johnson. It’s a good book, and the thread it follows – connecting the dirtier side of our foreign intelligence dealings with their eventual consequences – makes this sort of unprincipled dealing and duplicitousness all the more terrifying.
(Via truthout.)
Old-school netizen Howard Rheingold has written a short manifesto entitled “Mobile and Open”.
The setup suggests, quite reasonably IMHO, that some key elements of the Internet’s development were lucky strokes, and implies that entrenched powers might now be on to the ability of disruptive technologies to, well, disrupt (it should go without saying that this disruption is at the likely expense of the entrenched). Given that, what will make the coming network of massively interconnected and personal mobile communication devices do good for people in general, as opposed to just the aforementioned powers?
I’ll avoid quoting at length, as you should really just go read the manifesto, which outlines four requirements for a “future where mobile media achieve their full economic and cultural potential”:
That people are free and able to act as users not consumers: Users can actively shape media, as they did with the PC and the Internet, not just passively consume what is provided by a few, as in the era of broadcast media and communications monopolies. If hardware can’t be hacked and software is locked away from individuals by technology or law, users won’t be free to invent.
An open innovation commons: When networks of devices, technological platforms for communication media, the electromagnetic spectrum, are available for shared experimentation, new technologies and industries can emerge…
Self-organizing, ad-hoc networks: Populations of users and devices have the power, freedom, and tools to link together technically and socially according to their own inclinations and mutual agreements…
Everybody should have the freedom to associate information with places and things, and to access the information others have associated with places and things…
The original has started a lively discussion, if you’re interested in more.
(via worldchanging.)
Twelve distinguished retired Generals and Admirals have published an open letter [pdf] to the Senate Judiciary Committee, arguing against Gonzales’ nomination as Attorney General (well, coming as close to a stance as CYA-laden diplomacy does, at least).
Not too surprisingly, they express concerns over Gonzales’ position on the Geneva Convention, as well as the familiar “torture memo” issue. With regard to the Convention in general, they echo Colin Powell’s concern that:
…abandoning the Geneva Conventions would put our soldiers at greater risk, would “reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions,” and would “undermine the protections of the rule of law for our troops, both in this specific conflict [Afghanistan] and in general.” State Department adviser William H. Taft IV agreed that this decision “deprives our troops [in Afghanistan] of any claim to the protection of the Conventions in the event they are captured and weakens the protections afforded by the Conventions to our troops in future conflicts.” Mr. Gonzales’ recommendation also ran counter to the wisdom of former U.S. prisoners of war. As Senator John McCain has observed: “I am certain we all would have been a lot worse off if there had not been the Geneva Conventions around which an international consensus formed about some very basic standards of decency that should apply even amid the cruel excesses of war.”
It’s nice to see that tactics used to date have not completely quieted informed dissent.
(via truthout.)
… is how BBC Radio 4 described the Edge 2005 “World Question”.
A cross-disciplinary group of 120 “science-minded thinkers” was asked to answer this question: “What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?“
Despite the 60,000 word response limit, there’s a lot here.. I’ve just flipped around a bit more or less at random, and it’s been very interesting reading.
From the editor’s introduction:
This year there’s a focus on consciousness, on knowing, on ideas of truth and proof. If pushed to generalize, I would say it is a commentary on how we are dealing with the idea of certainty.
We are in the age of ‘searchculture’, in which Google and other search engines are leading us into a future rich with an abundance of correct answers along with an accompanying naïve sense of certainty. In the future, we will be able to answer the question, but will we be bright enough to ask it?
(via Bruce Sterling.)
“eye of science” is a photographer + biologist team that uses all kinds of neat equipment to create rather beautiful images of things we normally don’t see, or of things we typically don’t see like that. The gallery is worthy of perusal, IMO. (via warrenellis / WorldChanging).
The New York Times has an impressive flash-based collection of information about the tsunami.
(via WorldChanging.)
Wired News: Jacket Grows From Living Tissue:
“Grown using a combination of mouse and human cells, the jacket is currently quite tiny (about 2 inches high and 1.4 inches wide) and would just fit a mouse. Using a biodegradable polymer as a base, the team coated it with 3T3 mouse cells to form connective tissue and topped it up with human bone cells in the hope of creating a stronger layer of skin. The jacket is being grown inside a specially designed bioreactor that acts as a surrogate body. The group hopes that once the polymer degrades, a whole jacket that maintains its shape and integrity will be left behind.”
Neat.
Found via Gizmodo’s year-end roundup. (Though I have no idea how I missed this in October…)
recent comments