Science

MPs vote for human-animal hybrid embryos - Telegraph

Posted by MikeS from Telegraph.c

In a debate that covered the range from pure science to bioethics to science fiction images, British legislators voted earlier this week to allow stem cell researchers to work with animal-human embryos. This means that researchers will be able to inject human DNA into empty cow or rabbit eggs. Depending on where people stand on the bioethics continuum this has been seen as either a huge leap ahead of research in other countries or a leap into uncharted and shadowy medical territory.

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Book Review: The Woman Who Can't Forget

Posted by Jeff from Newsweek

With eight months left in 2008, it might be premature to choose the weirdest book of the year, but "The Woman Who Can't Forget," the memoir of a 42-year-old California woman named Jill Price, will be hard to beat. It poses a thought-provoking question-what would it be like to recall almost every day of your life since childhood?

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New idea in mortuary science: Dissolving bodies with lye

Posted by Jeff from Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Can't they just make me into a green battery? ... Getting the public to accept a process that strikes some as ghastly may be the biggest challenge. Psychopaths and dictators have used acid or lye to torture or erase their victims, and legislation to make alkaline hydrolysis available to the public in New York state was branded "Hannibal Lecter's bill" in a play on the sponsor's name - Sen. Kemp Hannon - and the movie character's sadism.

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Conservatives Happier Than Liberals

Posted by theangryindian from Live Science

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

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Bizarre DNA of Platypus tells a story about us

Posted by Jeff from Seattle Times

There are genes for egg laying, evidence of the animal\\\\\\\'s reptilian roots. Genes for making milk, which the platypus does in mammalian style despite not having nipples. Genes for making snake venom, which the animal stores in its legs. And there are five times more sex-determining chromosomes than scientists know what to do with.

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Abu Dhabi Aims to Build First Carbon-Neutral City : NPR

Posted by Mikep2 from NPR

Morning Edition, May 6, 2008 · In Abu Dhabi, there's an area of nothing but wind-swept desert. But 10 years from now, if all goes according to plan, a city of 6 square kilometers housing 50,000 people will rise in the United Arab Emirates - and it will be carbon neutral.

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Parachuting Dog Helped Win WWII | LiveScience

Posted by ecproject from Live Science

The Allied airmen and women of World War II were certainly brave and skilled in battle, but even they couldn't win the war on their own.

Plagued in the early, low-tech years of the war by dangerous afflictions such as altitude and decompression sickness, pilots got some help behind the front lines from a team of American physiologists who studied the effects on the body of flying.

Their research, which involved at least one parachuting dog, and the technology it initiated was a key to the Allied victory in the air, says Jay B. Dean of the University of South Florida College of Medicine.

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