Weird Links

The Center for Constitutional Rights will file the suit on behalf of a group of Iraqi detainees as well as the so-called 20th hijacker, who is currently being held at Guantanamo Bay.

"The former secretary actually authorized a series of interrogation techniques," said Michael Ratner, President of CCR. "They included the use of dogs, stripping, hooding, stressed positions, chaining to the floor, sexual humiliation and those types of activities."

Those techniques, he says, amount to torture and violate the Geneva Conventions. Ratner will be traveling to Berlin next week and plans to file the suit on Tuesday.

This study provides indirect evidence that modern Homo sapiens and so-called Neanderthals interbred at some point when they lived side by side in Europe.

"Finding evidence of mixing is not all that surprising. But our study demonstrates the possibility that interbreeding contributed advantageous variants into the human gene pool that subsequently spread".

Reference: Evans et al. Evidence that the adaptive allele of the brain size gene microcephalin introgressed into Homo sapiens from an archaic Homo lineage [PDF]. PNAS 2006 Nov 7 (in print).

Hollow, submicroscopic strands of carbon (carbon nanotubes) have been used to connect an integrated circuit to nerve cells. The new technology offers the possibility of building an interface between biology and electronics.

Very cool, I was talking about this just the other day (although this isn't the article I originally saw :/).

These guys want to create a transgenic human stem cell by inserting a human nucleus (DNA), into a cow egg that's previously had it's nucleus removed. You can then grow the egg to a very early stage of development (it'll just be a ball of cells; a ball of cells is not a fucking baby) and recover the embryonic stem cells.

Hay, lets not entertain the idea that what they'll end up with is a human-cow hybrid. It doesn't work like that. The nucleus will contain's human DNA only. The only "cow" DNA remaining in the egg, I would assume, would be mitochondrial DNA. The only DNA in the cell that makes it a cow, human or whatever is that contained within the nucleus.

It's true that mitochondria can communicate with the nucleus (as far as I remember), but mitochondrial DNA only codes for mitochondrial proteins. In other words, I can't see how the transgenic stem cell would produce any natively cow-like proteins that would make it look anything other than human. Although that wont stop you from making up stupid words like "frankenfoetus", will it? You dumbass fuckwit.

A functional retrovirus, called Phoenix, has been recovered from human DNA. Mutations that rendered Phoenix otherwise non-viable were corrected by using consensus sequences, obtained from the alignment of dozens of related viruses, in order to piece the thing back together again.

Human DNA is littered with all sorts of ancient viral DNA and self-replicating DNA sequences (transposons) that are just along for the ride.

A man-made, pure-white compound called Oxycyte carries oxygen 50 times more effectively than blood. It's being used in phase II clinical trials to prevent brain damage following head-trauma. The theory is that Oxycyte carries oxygen through swollen and damaged blood vessels more efficiently than red blood cells; reducing the damaging effects of oxygen starvation.

Grown from embryonic stem cells, the technique will eventually allow drug testing to be carried out on cultured organs and even better, will eventually lead to entire organ replacement.

Now I'm wondering if this only works with embryonic stem cells, since the obvious advantage would be if you could grow organs from adult stem cells, because then you'd have no problems with rejection following a transplant. Perhaps it would be possible to replace the nucleus of an embryonic stem cell with one from your own cells? I'm sure I read a story about someone doing this recently, but I'm buggered if I can find it.

Hossam Shaltout, a former political adviser to Saddam Hussein's son, said today that before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, Saddam expressed his intent to yield to all American demands, but that the Bush administration refused his offers.

Lord Levy, a close associate of the prime minister, told Scotland Yard detectives last month that he was acting on the direct orders of Blair when he secretly obtained £14m in loans from businessmen to fund the party.

An Al-Qaeda terror suspect captured by the United States, who gave evidence of links between Iraq and the terror network, confessed after being tortured, a journalist told the BBC.