Weird Links

An electronic petition of the UK Prime Minister’s office that garnered 1,414 signatures calling flatly for a ban on the use of digital rights management techniques in all digital content, was rejected on Monday.

New studies of Greenland and Antarctica have forced a UN expert panel to conclude there is a 50% chance that widespread ice sheet loss "may no longer be avoided" because of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

They first grew each cell type separately to make larger numbers of them and then injected them into a sticky protein called collagen.

The tooth germ grew into a tiny tooth about 1.3mm long. The researchers then extracted the incisor from an eight-week-old adult mouse and inserted the bioengineered tooth.

After two weeks, the transplant was found to be growing perfectly, with root, enamel, dental pulp, bone, blood vessel -- the same composition and structure as a normal tooth.

U.S. scientists say they have disproved the long-held theory that the spinal cord is incapable of repairing itself. The Johns Hopkins University researchers say human nerve stem cells they transplanted into damaged spinal cords of rats have survived, grown and in some cases connected with the rats' own spinal cord cells.

The advantage is that your own stem cells could be harvested and used to treat you, rather than using embryos as a source of stem cells.

A new study in the Journal of Political Economy by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf has found that illegal music downloads have had no noticeable effects on the sale of music, contrary to the claims of the recording industry.

Entitled "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis," the study matched an extensive sample of music downloads to American music sales data in order to search for causality between illicit downloading and album sales. Analyzing data from the final four months of 2002, the researchers estimated that P2P affected no more than 0.7% of sales in that timeframe.

A seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis has made the first 3-D model of seismic wave damping ? diminishing ? deep in the Earth's mantle and has revealed the existence of an underground water reservoir at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean. It is the first evidence for water existing in the Earth's deep mantle.

Descendants from populations that practiced cattle domestication, maintain the ability to digest milk and other dairy products into adulthood. These individuals have the lactase persistence trait.

Scientists have discovered that the surface of the moon can accumulate a huge charge of static electricity - up to 4,500 V has been detected so far. The scientists, writing in Geophysics Research Letters number 34, say that their findings could have significant implications for those planning to colonise the rocky globe.

While astronauts would most likely be protected from any discharge by his or her suit, a spark from the surface could disrupt or even burn out electronic equipment.

The first human death from avian flu in west Africa was confirmed at the weekend in what experts said was a much more serious development than the spread of the virus to a turkey farm in Suffolk.

A 22-year-old woman from Lagos, Nigeria, who died on 16 January was infected with the H5N1 virus, the World Health Organisation confirmed