For the first time since Hwang Woo-Suk’s cloned stem cells were revealed as fakes, human cloning — for medical purposes, or even for reproduction — appears to be a realistic possibility.

“We show for the first time that the same genes turned on in normal human embryos are the same genes turned on in human clones,” said Robert Lanza, scientific director of Advanced Cell Technologies and co-author of a study published Monday in Cloning and Stem Cells.

Lanza’s team inserted human cell nuclei into hollowed-out egg cells from both humans and animals, then stimulated them into development, a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), or more informally, cloning. When compared to a normal human embryo produced through in vitro fertilization, the animal-human hybrids didn’t develop normally, but the human-human cloned embryos displayed many of the genetic characteristics of healthy development.

The research is the first step toward therapeutic cloning — making embryonic stem cells from a patient’s own DNA capable of replacing diseased tissue, failing organs and even lost limbs. And, theoretically, the same technique could be used to produce a cloned person.

In 2001, Lanza’s team claimed to have made cloned human embryos, stoking public hopes that cloning would soon produce thousands of embryonic stem cell lines — one for every common genetic group, capable of replacing diseased tissue, failing organs and lost limbs. It wasn’t clear, however, whether those embryos were actually healthy, and their DNA was never analyzed.

Four years later, researchers led by the now-infamous Woo Suk Hwang claimed to have actually harvested embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos. The findings again raised public hopes, only to be revealed as fraudulent. Hwang now works for a controversial dog cloning company, and embryonic stem cells taken from a human clone remains hypothetical.

However, even if the scientific challenges of so-called therapeutic cloning are overcome, ethical problems remain. Harvesting human eggs requires women to take ovulation-inducing hormones, a process that is arguably dangerous and inarguably arduous. As a result, egg supplies are limited and expensive. Some scientists hoped to solve this by substituting animal eggs for human.

Research on these hybrid embryos — as well as chimeric embryos, formed by mixing actual human and animal DNA — was approved last year in the United Kingdom. But that approval came after bitter public debate in which opponents raised the specter of sentient human-animal hybrids being used as biological parts factories.

The latest findings suggest that hybrids are incapable of growing to a medically useful stage, much less sentience. But both cloning and induced pluripotency — a recently-developed procedure in which adult cells are transformed into an embryo-like state — should work.

“Science has a way to go with both of these, but we will soon have a way to create a bank of stem cells to expand the range of stem cell therapies,” said Lanza.

His team compared the gene expression of a human embryo produced through in vitro fertilization with clones that incorporated human, cow, rabbit and mouse eggs. Several thousand genes were active in the fully human clones, but almost completely silent in their counterparts, which stopped developing after several days.

Among these were the genetic targets stimulated during induced pluripotency, in which adult cells are returned to an embryo-like state. Their silence suggests that animal eggs will not be useful in making clones capable of generating embryonic stem cells, much less growing to adulthood.

“You can never say never,” said Lanza, “but we’ve been at this a very long time, and despite literally thousands of these attempts, we’ve never seen one of these hybrids advance further than what we’re reporting here. And though negative results don’t often get reported, I know for a fact that other experts have had the same results.”

But the fully human cloned embryos could produce stem cells and, if permitted, perhaps grow into a person.

“The DNA resembles the DNA of a normal human embryo, which raises the question of human reproductive cloning,” said Lanza.

However, New York Medical College cell biologist Stuart Newman disagreed with Lanza’s assessment. Though the paper “shows that interspecies SCNT is a bust,” he said, there are still “substantial differences” between fully-human cloned and IVF embryos.

But even if Lanza’s embryos cannot develop, other scientists may come up with a more effective process. And though reproductive cloning has not yet been attempted, some experts say it’s inevitable.

The procedure is illegal in the United States, but a global ban proposed in the United Nations fell apart after the U.S. insisted that therapeutic cloning be banned as well.

“Virtually every country agreed, but President Bush held it hostage,” said Lanza.

President Barack Obama has promised to overturn President Bush’s moratorium on federal funding of most embryonic stem cell research. Lanza hopes he will abandon Bush’s position at the U.N. as well.

“Reproductive cloning is unsafe and unethical,” he said. “This raises the urgency that those laws need to be passed.”

Citation: “Reprogramming of Human Somatic Cells Using Human and Animal Oocytes.” By Young Chung, Colin E. Bishop, Nathan R. Treff, Stephen J. Walker, Vladislav M. Sandler, Sandy Becker, Irina Klimanskaya, Wan-Song Wun, Randall Dunn, Rebecca M. Hall,  Jing Su, Shi-Jiang Lu, Marc Maserati, Young-Ho Choi, Richard Scott, Anthony Atala, Ralph Dittman and Robert Lanza. Cloning and Stem Cells, Vol. 11 No. 2, Feb. 1, 2009.

Image: Cloning and Stem Cells / Each top-and-bottom image is a pair; from left to right, a human-mouse embryo; human-cow; human-rabbit; human; and a human embryo produced through in vitro fertilization.

credits

The company said that the problem was caused by “human error.”

Because the error essentially shut down Google for everyone in the entire world, the company fixed it immediately.

But what if Google made another error, and decided YOU were malware? What if the company, for whatever reason, came to the conclusion that you were a spammer, or a criminal, or somehow abused their rules? What if they simply invalidated your password to prevent you from using their many services?

It could happen because some hacker has stolen your password and is doing evil deeds with your account. Or it could be triggered by something you’re doing, such as sending copies of an e-mail to a large number of people, or whatever. Or it could be more “human error” on the part of Google.

You go to log into Gmail, and the password doesn’t work! How would that affect you?

In my case, that would shut me out of e-mail, my calendar, my blog, “Docs,” AdSense and a whole bunch of other things. I use these sites also to store vital information I need in order to search for things. It would be devastating.

What happens when other companies choose to shut you down. Facebook has been known to simply determine that users have violated unpublished rules for use, and cut people off. If this were to happen to you, you might be able to see the messages and posts people make, but you wouldn’t be able to reply.

I use reQall as the sole repository of all my projects and action items. I use FutureMe to queue up important reminders for months or years later. I use Evernote to store notes, column ideas, and a huge number of vitally important facts and details that I need for a variety of purposes. In fact, I use a wide number of free services for holding and managing data.

This is especially relevant for digital nomads, who rely heavily on these services because we’re mobile.

Free services are great when all is well. But when they stop working for whatever reason or turn against you, what recourse do you have? Unlike paid services, these free sites don’t really have an obligation to you because you’re not the customer. If they’re advertiser-supported, like Google, the advertisers are the customers, not you.

Google’s colossal meltdown today should remind us all of how vulnerable we are to errors — human or otherwise — at the companies we increasingly rely upon for our everyday work.

We’ve got to make sure we keep backups of everything and constantly prepare ourselves for sudden shut-outs, meltdowns, misunderstandings or even the collapse of these companies.

Because when companies that offer free services decide YOU’RE the malware, they can make your life quite unpleasant. And when it’s only you and not the entire Internet, it will take a lot longer than an hour to fix — if they ever fix it.

Mike Elgan

The transit officer who shot and killed an unarmed man may have mistakenly pulled his service pistol instead of a stun gun, his lawyer said Friday.

Defense attorney Michael Rains made the argument during a bail hearing for 27-year-old Johannes Mehserle. Alameda County Superior Court Judge Morris Jacobson later set bail at $3 million.

Jacobson said he set the high amount in part because he considered Mehserle a flight risk after the former officer fled to Nevada during the initial investigation.

Mehserle was being held Friday at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin. It was not immediately clear if he would be able to post bail.

Mehserle has pleaded not guilty to one count of murder in the death of 22-year-old Oscar Grant, who was killed early New Year’s Day. Cell phone videos of the incident, widely viewed on the Internet, showed the officer standing over Grant as he was lying facedown on an Oakland train platform and firing one shot into the man’s back.

Grant died of a gunshot wound to his torso.

Rains argued Friday that witness accounts indicate that Mehserle meant to draw his Taser but instead pulled his pistol. The lawyer blamed inexperience by the young officer, who joined the department in March 2007 and passed his Taser user certification test on Dec. 3.

“The bulk of the discovery, including witness and officer statements, seem to indicate that this young officer, who carried a taser for only a few shifts prior to this event, may have mistakenly deployed his service pistol rather than his taser, thus negating any criminal intent,” Rains wrote in court documents filed in support of the bail motion.

He told the judge that prosecutors should have charged his client with involuntary manslaughter, not murder.

The court documents contain statements and reports from several officers who were on the platform with Mehserle at the time of the shooting.

The officers – who had just pulled several men, including Grant, from a Bay Area Rapid Transit train after reports of fighting – described the scene as chaotic and confusing.

According to a statement from Officer Tony Pirone, Mehserle told Grant to stop resisting and put his hands behind his back. Then, according to Pirone’s statement, Mehserle said: “I’m going to taze him, I’m going to taze him. I can’t get his arms. He won’t give me his arms. His hands are going for his waistband.”

Pirone said he didn’t know if Grant was armed, but said Mehserle told him he had believed Grant may have had a weapon.

But Deputy District Attorney John Creighton questioned the defense’s account at Friday’s hearing, asking why Mehserle said after the shooting that he thought Grant was armed rather than saying he thought he was firing his Taser.

The judge also noted inconsistencies in the defendant’s account of the shooting.

“He has the willingness to add to the story, to change the story, to make up something that’s not true to avoid consequences,” said Jacobson, who imposed a temporary gag order in the case until the next hearing, on Feb. 10.

John Burris, an attorney for Grant’s family, said relatives were “very, very disappointed.”

“In a case of this magnitude, it was certainly our hope that no bail was set,” he said.

via:

Pity worst form of patronizing, will ensure Gazans continue to whine instead of acting

Observers worldwide have been expressing great pity for the people of Gaza, many of whom have been killed, injured, or forced to flee their homes during the ongoing IDF operation. This pity may be a natural emotional reaction, yet it is unethical and immoral.

To pity the people of Gaza is to patronize them, in essence implying that they do not control their fate, the state of their government, or their own actions. It is to assume one of two things: Either that Gazans are too stupid to oust the cancerous Hamas presence in their midst, or that they are unable to do so.

Just as a crying baby who only elicits pity will continue to cry, the citizens of Gaza will continue to cry out to the world instead of taking matters into their own hands. As long as they are told that they are helpless victims or mere pawns at the hands of terrorists, Gazans will only see their suffering prolonged.

The residents of Gaza, and the Palestinians as a whole, say they would like their own state. Yet such state must be earned. And earning a state – a piece of land to call your own – takes much more than incessant whining to the international community coupled with a desire to drive out the Jews. It requires inner strength and the ability to create rather than destroy. This is what Israelis proved time and again for over 60 years, and this is what Palestinians have yet to prove.

Yet before the people of Gaza are able to build, Hamas must be obliterated. Moreover, Hamas’ ultimate defeat must not be at the hands of the IDF, but rather, it is an endeavor that must be undertaken by Gaza residents themselves. After all, Hamas is the true reason for their misery.

Those who believe that Gazans are capable of this should do away with their pity. As to those who do not believe Gazans can do it – why waste time pitying them in the first place?

and here is the source of this ….. post

When his teacher, Guo, found out that young Zheng had not completed his homework, she flipped out.

“She was very angry at the time,” he said. “She ripped and twisted my cheeks with both her hands and then she lifted me off the ground.”

The teacher held the boy up until one of his cheeks actually ripped off and the boy was bleeding profusely.

Without hesitation the teacher reached down and picked up Zheng’s cheek skin, put it on his face, and instructed the boy go home immediately.

When the parents saw Zheng, they immediately took him to the hospital where it took 52 stitches to have his cheek sewn back on.

Zheng’s father has reported the case to the police and is expected to press for damages.

(link)

TRACKED BY CELL, WITH HELP FROM GOOGLE

Using technology more commonly seen in television crime dramas, an Athol police officer and a deputy chief in the town’s Fire Department were able to track a woman and her allegedly kidnapped 9-year-old granddaughter to a motel in south-central Virginia.

They notified Virginia State Police, who yesterday arrested Rose M. Maltais of 14 Grove St. without incident around 4:15 p.m.

Natalie Maltais will soon be back home with her legal guardians after Virginia State Police found her with her 52-year-old grandmother, Ms. Maltais, at the Budget Inn in Natural Bridge, Va.

Police Chief Timothy C. Anderson said the child and grandmother had been missing since Saturday, when Ms. Maltais picked up Natalie for what was supposed to be a weekend visit. Alarmed by comments made to them by the grandmother that they would never see Natalie again, the child’s guardians contacted police. An arrest warrant was then issued for Ms. Maltais charging kidnapping.

The arrest of Ms. Maltais yesterday and the recovery of the child were the direct result of clever investigative work by Athol Police Officer Todd Neale and Deputy Fire Chief Thomas V. Lozier.

Officer Neale had the child’s cell phone number from Monday night, when police Sgt. Kent A. Hager spoke to the child and her grandmother, who were at an undetermined location in Rhode Island. Police had been aware Ms. Maltais might be taking the child to Rhode Island, where she has relatives, or to Louisiana, where the child’s biological mother, Marlena Santos, lives.

Sgt. Hager said, in speaking to Ms. Maltais and the child, he was able to determine the girl was not in immediate danger, and he was told by Ms. Maltais she would turn herself in yesterday morning.

When that did not happen, Officer Neale hit on the idea of tracking the woman and the child using the child’s cell phone.

Since the end of 2005, cell phone carriers have been required to provide some way to trace calls to 100 meters or less. To accomplish this, global positioning technology has been integrated in cell phone handsets.

Knowing this, Officer Neale said, he contacted the child’s cell phone provider seeking a way to trace the call.

The company provided him with GPS coordinates every time the phone was activated.

Knowing Deputy Chief Lozier has extensive experience using GPS technology, Officer Neale contacted him at the fire station. It then became a back and forth effort between the cell phone company, the police officer and Deputy Chief Lozier, who received latitude and longitude coordinates and triangulated them to learn where the two missing people were.

Deputy Chief Lozier said initially they thought Ms. Maltais and the child were heading to Knoxville, Tenn., and he and Officer Neale were hoping to be able to tell which direction they took out of Knoxville because it could give them an indication where their ultimate destination would be. Instead, he said, he was able to track the calls to an intersection on Virginia Route 11 near Interstate 81 in Natural Bridge, Va.

He said coordinates kept coming in within 300 feet of each other.

“Then I Googled it,” he said.

Deputy Chief Lozier said that on the Internet search engine site Google there is a street view where people can look at photographs of neighborhoods in many locations.

Using the street view, he was able to look back and forth from the intersection.

Looking across a field, he said he saw a long building with a red roof that looked like a motel. He then did a search on Google for motels in Natural Bridge and found the Budget Inn-Natural Bridge, which, on a map, appeared to be close to the intersection he was looking at.

Not satisfied with that, he then looked at Google’s satellite view of the motel and saw it was close to the intersection.

“I told Todd if I was going to throw the dice, I’d throw them there,” he said.

Officer Neale then called state police in Virginia and told them the missing people were likely in the motel.

The police found them and placed Ms. Maltais in custody.

Natalie was taken into custody by the Virginia Department of Social Services, which will care for her until she is returned to her legal guardians.

Ms. Maltais is being held in Virginia while awaiting rendition to Massachusetts to face charges. Sgt. Hager said the charges are still to be determined.

Deputy Fire Chief Lozier said last night he was just thrilled to help police out in the case.

“When I got that call from Todd that they found them, that was a good call,” he said.

via

Despite the mysterious nature of the report produced by, as The Right Perspecitve’s Frank from Queens calls The Ministry of Lies, a DHS project involving blimps has been in the planning stages from several years now. In addition to being fodder for the bloggosphere, both MSNBC and Science Daily wrote articles on the plan back in 2005. The higly-respectable Endgadget also wrote about the project in 2007.

More conspiracy-minded folk point to Project Blue Beam, a four-part staged event to usher in a “New Age religion” which will be the “foundation of a one-world government”.

UPDATE: A reader says the device is a hyperblimp, which is billed on the company website as “whisper quiet”, “maneuverable as a hummingbird”, and can be used for, among other things, “unmanned airravel, research”, “monitoring”, and “surveillance”.

(AP)

Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits last year, an Associated Press analysis reveals.

The rewards came even at banks where poor results last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to lagging bank performance, but still forked over multimillion-dollar executive pay packages.

Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the AP review of federal securities documents found.

The total amount given to nearly 600 executives would cover bailout costs for many of the 116 banks that have so far accepted tax dollars to boost their bottom lines.

Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services committee and a long-standing critic of executive largesse, said the bonuses tallied by the AP review amount to a bribe “to get them to do the jobs for which they are well-paid in the first place.

“Most of us sign on to do jobs and we do them best we can,” said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. “We’re told that some of the most highly-paid people in executive positions are different. They need extra money to be motivated!”

The AP compiled total compensation based on annual reports that the banks file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The 116 banks have so far received $188 billion in taxpayer help.

Among the findings: