A U.S. spacecraft named Spirit is to land on Mars this week. It is to be followed in three weeks by an identical spacecraft named Opportunity, that is to land in a different location. Once on Mars they are to deploy rovers to search for water to determine if the cold, barren planet could once have harbored simple life forms. But the mission is fraught with risks.
The American directive, which has come into immediate effect, applies to all flights using American air space. An estimated 800 to 1,000 passenger flights a day could potentially be required to use sky marshals.
According to the regulation, 'where necessary' foreign carriers 'will now be required to place armed, trained law enforcement officers on designated flights as an added protective measure'.
Armed marshals disguised as passengers are already deployed on thousands of US flights each week.
Several countries, including Germany and Canada, already use armed guards, while others are considering, or in the process of implementing, the measure.
These days, everything old is new again. Income is once again concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, and money rules politics to an extent not seen since the Gilded Age. The Iraq war bears an eerie resemblance to the Spanish-American war. (There was never any evidence linking Spain to the Maine's demise.) And Citizen Kane is back, in the form of an incestuous media-political complex.
In the streets of Baghdad and other cities, plenty of excitable people tell you that life under the Americans is now worse than it was under Saddam, but that is stupidity of a high order.
Last week one of my BBC colleagues interviewed a man who had been dropped into a vat of acid by Saddam's torturers. They then immediately fished him out because they felt his crime had not warranted such a hideous death. When he eventually recovered from his burns he went to thank them for saving his life; only to discover that they had been executed in their turn.
The mile-long, 24-hour queues for petrol, the power blackouts that last for 14 hours a day, the chronic shortages of clean water and medicine, the sudden and frightening rise in crime that has followed the American and British invasion are all very bad but they don't remotely compare with the viciousness of Saddam's regime, and they won't last for ever.
Iraqis are quick-minded and impatient, and many of them resent the behaviour of the American soldiers in their cities. Yet the level of resistance to the Coalition forces seems to be falling, and it is nothing like serious enough to drive the American forces out. While they stay, the country will hold together.
... it is not obvious that getting fat is a natural response to plenty. Animals rarely get fat, even when food is abundant, unless they are old and domesticated. Young animals almost never get fat. Young people do all too frequently.
Humans have around ten times as many fat cells in relation to their body mass as most other animals. Polar bears are similarly off the curve, but then they have good reason to be fat: they need insulation and go for long periods without food. Pigs are well-padded, but they were bred for it.
Perhaps humans were bred for it too. That is what the thrifty-gene theory suggests. It was thought up by James Neel, a geneticist, in 1962, as he was seeking an explanation for the extreme porkiness of the Pima Indians. He postulated that they were fat because of the bad times their tribe had been through. They were minding their own business in Mexico and Arizona in the 19th century when incoming farmers disrupted their water supply. Some Pima starved and many were malnourished. Those who survived, suggested Neel, did so because they had some innate advantage%u2014a thrifty gene that meant they were particularly good at storing energy. Their descendants inherited a trait that became a burden, not a benefit.
Andrew Prentice, professor of international nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, reckons that the thrifty gene is widespread among the human race. He puts it down to agriculture. Hunter-gatherers, he argues, did not much need a thrifty gene. They may not have had the plenty that agriculture could provide, but they were few and their food supply flexible. However, after man settled down to farming around 12,000 years ago, the population grew, and soon lots of people depended on a small range of crops in a limited area. When the crops failed, disaster struck. And it did so often, and relatively recently, in Europe.
In 1321, some 20% of English people are reckoned to have died of famine. There was cannibalism in 1563 and 151 famines were recorded in England before 1620, the year the Mayflower sailed to America. American genes may be especially thrifty. Some immigrants were survivors of disasters such as the Irish potato famine. They also had to survive the crossing and the business of making a new life, which wiped out plenty of weaker stock. From 104 passengers on the Mayflower, only 23 left descendants. That was mostly because of crop failures and starvation, relief from which Americans still celebrate at Thanksgiving.
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities.
Nelson, D-Tallahassee, said about 75 senators got that news during a classified briefing before last October's congressional vote authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nelson voted in favor of using military force.
Nelson said he couldn't reveal who in the administration gave the briefing.
The White House directed questions about the matter to the Department of Defense. Defense officials had no comment on Nelson's claim.
Nelson said the senators were told Iraq had both biological and chemical weapons, notably anthrax, and it could deliver them to cities along the Eastern seaboard via unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones.
'They have not found anything that resembles an UAV that has that capability,' Nelson said.
Nelson delivered the news during a half-hour conference call with reporters Monday afternoon. The senator, who is on a seven-nation trade mission to South America, was calling from an airport in Santiago, Chile.
'That's news,' said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington, D.C.-area military and intelligence think tank. 'I had not heard that that was the assessment of the intelligence community. I had not heard that the Congress had been briefed on this.'
Since the late 1990s, there have been several reports that Iraq was converting a fleet of Czechoslovakian jet fighters into UAVs, as well as testing smaller drones...
President Pervez Musharraf narrowly survived an assassination attempt here Sunday night when a large bomb detonated on a bridge 30 seconds after his motorcade had crossed.
Visibly shaken, General Musharraf appeared on state television and described what was by far the most serious attempt on his life since he sided with the United States in the campaign against terrorism in September 2001.
It's time once again for Keyboard Korner, the computer-advice column that uses simple, ''jargon-free'' terminology that even an idiot like you can grasp; the column that shows you how to ''take command'' of your personal computer, if necessary by reducing it to tiny smoking shards with a hatchet.
Unbeknownst to most citizens, state officials are selling their
voter-registration information to political candidates, nonprofit groups
and data collectors who then combine it with census data, purchasing
histories, credit reports and magazine subscription lists in order to
fine-tune their messages or marketing pitches to specific constituencies,
such as pickup truck drivers who subscribe to "Soldier of Fortune" or SUV
drivers who buy lacy underwear at Victoria's Secret. And while some states
limit sales to political groups, 22 states lack any criteria restricting
who may purchase the information. "Voters fill out these forms in good
faith, thinking the information they're providing is needed for the purpose
of administering elections," says California Voter Foundation founder Kim
Alexander. "Then they get phone calls or a knock on the door from campaign
strangers who have a list of their personal data." Alexander says the
information requested by many states, such as Social Security numbers and
mother's maiden names, could easily be used for identity theft. The
situation has become especially troubling since Congress passed the Help
America Vote Act last year, which required that states develop a
centralized, statewide voter-registration database, making it possible for
third parties to collect huge amounts of data very easily. Alexander says
the reason there's been no outcry against the practice is that "the people
who ultimately decide how voter data should be allowed to be used are the
politicians… Politicians need to rein in the laws, yet they're the biggest
consumers of data." (Wired.com 11 Dec 2003)
One year after President Bush sought to energize the nation's bioterrorism preparations with an unprecedented smallpox vaccination campaign, the program has all but ground to a halt. A report released yesterday, meanwhile, finds that only two states -- Florida and Illinois -- are prepared to distribute and administer vaccines or medicines that would be needed in the event of a major outbreak or attack.
Humans and chimps shared a joint ancestor as recently as five million years ago. Biologists have long supposed that if they could identify the genes that changed in the evolutionary lineage leading from the joint ancestor to people, they would understand the genetic basis of how people differ from chimps and, hence, the essence of what makes humans human.
Because the sequence of DNA units in the two genomes is 98.8 percent identical, it seemed that just a handful of genes might define the essence of humanity.
The project received a lift two years ago when a large London family with barely intelligible speech was found to have mutations in a gene called FOXP2. Chimpanzees also have a FOXP2 gene, but it is significantly different. The human version shows signs of accelerated evolutionary change in the last 100,000 years, suggesting that the gene acquired a new function that helped confer the gift of speech.
But the process of transforming the joint human-chimp ancestor, who was probably a very chimpanzeelike creature, into a human seems much more complicated in light of the new analysis. In a preliminary screen, Dr. Clark and his colleagues have found that a large number of genes shows signs of accelerated evolution in the human lineage. Those are genes that, by a statistical test applied to changes in their DNA, appear to be under strong recent pressure of natural selection and so are likely to be those that make humans differ from chimpanzees....
The authors of the Science article note that many of the human genes they found to have undergone accelerated evolution turn up in the list of Mendelian diseases, those caused by defects in a single gene. The reason for that curious association could be that the genes serve new functions, ones that emerged so recently that evolution has not had time to install backups, Dr. Clark said...
The body, it turns out, is as important as the brain. Dr. Antonio Damasio, a neurologist at the University of Iowa Medical Center and the author of the book 'Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain,' has pioneered the argument that emotions and feelings are linked to brain structures that map the body. From human social emotions, he said, both morality and reason have grown.
The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (CAUCE, www.cauce.org) is disappointed by the passage of a weak anti-spam bill in the House of Representatives and Senate. This legislation fails the most fundamental test of any anti-spam law, in that it neglects to actually tell any marketers not to spam. Instead, it gives each marketer in the United States one free shot at each consumer's e-mail inbox, and will force companies to continue to deploy costly and disruptive anti-spam technologies to block advertising messages from reaching their employees on company time and using company resources. It also fails to learn from the experiences of the states and other countries that have tried 'opt-out' legal frameworks, where marketers must be asked to stop, to no avail. In fact, the bill would preempt an opt-in law set to go into effect in California on January 1, 2004, which was passed after an state opt-out law similar to the current federal legislation was found to be a failure.
In an interview, Professor Protess said he initially was surprised by the number of cases he and his students encountered in which the prisoners were innocent. "I'd always thought that miscarriages of justice were an aberration and that our justice system, overwhelmingly, worked well," he said. "But I was seeing error rates of 10 to 15 percent. I was very struck by how pervasive the problem was."
I asked if he thought any innocent people had actually been executed.
"Oh, absolutely," he said. "There's just no question."
One third of Britons carry the toxoplasma parasite in their brain.
Its natural home is the cat and it's spread in cats' faeces. It can be picked up by any mammal, from rats to cattle. The main way we get it is by eating undercooked meat (which is why 80% of the French are estimated to have it, with their love of rare meat).
Once we have it we have it for life, there's no way we can get rid of it.
Research shows it somehow manipulates rats' behaviour - it makes rats attracted to cats - their natural predator, so they're more likely to be eaten by a cat and the parasite can complete its life cycle.
For years scientists thought it had no effect on our behaviour, but now the parasite's changing their minds. Recent research suggests that people with toxyplasma have slower reaction times than those without and are also more than twice as likely to be involved in a traffic accident than those who aren't carrying the parasite.