Month: April 2006

New Scientist: Print me a heart and a set of arteries

SITTING in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was “printed”, using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering.

Gabor Forgacs, a biophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, described his “bioprinting” technique last week at the Experimental Biology 2006 meeting in San Francisco. It relies on droplets of “bioink”, clumps of cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter, which Forgacs has found behave just like a liquid.

This is amazing that it works and yet it seems like such a simple idea. It is probably many years off but with the advancements in 3D printing techniques couple with this technology then we could almost literally have new organs on demand.

Tags: science

The Terrorism Act 2006 powers has come into force today.

The Terrorism Act 2006 allows groups or organisations to be banned for those offences and covers anyone who gives or receives training.

The act designates nuclear sites as areas where trespass can become a terrorist offence.

Human rights campaigners argue the law is drawn far too widely and it faced stiff opposition in the House of Lords.

Via SpyBlog, which notes “that one of the most controversial parts of the Act has not commenced today, i.e. Section 23 Extension of period of detention of terrorist suspects to Section 25
which extends the period of “pre-charge detention” from 14 days to 28 days has not been commenced i.e. has not yet been brought into law ?”

Tags: politics, terrorism

Bird flu could kill 100,000 British children: report

There are so many ifs and buts with the bird flu thing that it really isn’t something people should be worrying about. It’s totally irrelevant that there has been this one case in an isolated part of Scotland, it doesn’t mean that Britain is any more peril than it was 2 weeks ago.

Plus the headline talking about deaths of children but a pandemic is likely to affect all ages in fact if a pandemic was to occur that’s anything like the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic then fit and healthy adults will be just as likely to be killed by it.

If this H5N1 strain of Avian flu ever does cross over and become infectious from human to human then would be the time that people might be justified to feel a little panic, but at the moment it is just sensationalist bollocks.

Tags: disease, science

milk bath
Originally uploaded by H.Y.C.

The full set of photos is viewable at Flickr.

Beautiful but sorry looking cat.

Tags: photography

London’s High Court has ruled that The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown did not infringe the copyright of an earlier book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh.

The claim was clearly without merit as copyright law only protects the expression of an idea not the idea itself. Also if the idea itself is one which the authors claim is historical fact that would surely undermine their case further, but whether or not that is truly the case is pretty irrelevant.

Worryingly Jon Silverman a BBC legal affairs analyst does not think that the judgement represented a significant victory for creative freedom.

But to suggest, as Gail Rebuck, the chief executive of Random House, did outside court, that the judgement represented a significant victory for creative freedom, is probably going too far.

The judge himself acknowledged that nothing in the plaintiffs’ case would have stultified creative endeavour or extended the boundaries of copyright protection.

I wasn’t at the court so I don’t precisely know what the plaintiffs’ case actually hung on. Was it just idea theft as was portrayed in the media or was there claims that passages of their book appeared in virtually the same form in The Da Vinci Code?

I think that if the judgement had come down on the side of the plaintiffs and extended copyright law to cover ideas as well as the expression of those ideas then creativity would have been stifled. Corporations would start a landgrab of ideas and we’d find ourselves in a situation where every single new literary work would have to license the basic ideas from the corporate owners of those ideas.

But this is a nightmare situation that I believe is unlikely to come to pass as even corporations that otherwise lobby for extension to copyright protection could see that this would be an extension too far, it would be damaging to their own interests.

Tags: books, copyright

Channel 4 News: Court ruling.

A High Court judge condemns the detention of a Serbian couple, saying the Home office showed an “unacceptable disregard for the rule of law.”

Via BlairWatch: The Home Office Under Charles Clarke Strikes Again.

Tags: politics

In a follow up to yesterday’s piece about John Reid’s comments concerning whether the Geneva conventions are still adequate to cover all eventualities in today’s world he offers this rebuttal.

I am relieved by this clarification of his motivation. Or at least I would be more relieved if his words in today’s rebuttal more fully covered what he actually said in his speech and if I believed that the threats posed by terrorism or rogue states as outlined in his speech were as significant as he would have us believe.

He expresses the need for intervention to prevent mass killings or genocide – illustrated by Rwanda and Sudan among others. But then appears to go to say that such things are already covered under the conventions. The only problem then surely is the political will then to actually intervene in such situations.

John Reid’s original speech, which was given to the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies is available here at the MOD’s website.

I am still concerned by the issue of ‘imminence’ and under what conditions does he believe the British military should be allowed to pre-emptively strike against another nation.

Tags: security, terrorism

Whilst John Reid seems to be further widening the gulf that exists between Britain and the Middle East there are those who are seeking to reach out to the younger generation in a shared interest of Welsh sheep.

Or to be more specific the Welsh children’s TV series The Baaas, which concerns a multiracial Welsh sheep family, and which has just been bought by the TV Station Al-Jazeera. It is to be broadcast on the station’s Children’s Channel, which can be seen in countries including Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Not to mention Iraq.

“The important thing is that the programme is about how we get on with each other and although there is some bickering in the Baaas’ household, they always work things out in the end,” said the show’s producer Nia Ceidiog when the series was announced.

A valuable lesson indeed.

Tags: Al-Jazeera, TV

Richard Norton-Taylor and Clare Dyer report for The Guardian on Defence Secretary John Reid’s comments about how The Geneva Conventions are hindering the ability of British troops in the War on Terror.

John Reid demanded sweeping changes to international law yesterday to free British soldiers from the restraints of the Geneva conventions and make it easier for the west to mount military actions against other states.

In his speech, the defence secretary addressed three key issues: the treatment of prisoners, when to mount a pre-emptive strikes, and when to intervene to stop a humanitarian crisis. In all these areas, he indicated that the UK and west was being hamstrung by existing inadequate law.

I have to say that I’m very troubled by this, true laws need to change with the times if they are now out of step with the needs of society. But I really cannot see the case for any changes needing to be made to the Geneva Conventions. In fact John Reid has made no case at all and has not outlined in any way what changes he envisions are necessary.

What John Reid has done is to yet again raise the boogeyman of the 21st century that of ‘barbaric terrorism’ as he phrased it. Plus also straying into the game of I can imagine a worse imaginary threat than you.

“But what if another threat develops?”, Mr Reid asked. “Not al-Qaida. Not Muslim extremism. Something none of us are thinking about at the moment.” Terrorist groups were trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, he said.

We can all play the ‘what if’ game but surely it is only realistic to legislate for known threats or else there’s no end to it. Should we legislate for any movie threat that the defence secretary has seen such as zombificating viral infections, invasion by hostile extra-terrestrial beings or marauding gigantic creatures. Of course terrorist organisations are seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction, but how realistic is it that they could actually acquire them. We live in a world where even nation states with all their resources are facing huge technical hurdles let alone political ones in their struggle to acquire them.

I have a struggle to understand what John Reid is actually advocating here in terms of changes to the Geneva conventions. Is he advocating the torture and mistreatment of prisoners? Does he seek the right for the UK to launch pre-emptive attacks on sovereign nations based on the mere belief that they pose a threat to Britain?

Tags: terrorism

At a time when we’re told by the industry that the average gamers are pushing 30 rather than 13 how is it that a pair of bare naked breasts and the thought of hardcore sex got more people riled up about Grand Theft Auto than the fact that is one of the most reprehensively violent games out there?

read more | digg story

Tags: Digg, games, sex