be the change you want to see in the world

Researchers have created beating hearts for lab rats using baby rat cells and the cadaverous scaffold of a rat heart. Is this Frankenstein or what?

The researchers removed all the cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the valves and outer structure as scaffolding for new heart cells injected from newborn rats. Within two weeks, the cells formed a new beating heart that conducted electrical impulses and pumped a small amount of blood.

With modifications, scientists should be able to grow a human heart by taking stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow and placing them in a cadaver heart that has been prepared as a scaffold, Dr. Taylor said in a telephone interview from her laboratory in Minneapolis. The early success “opens the door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas — you name it and we hope we can make it,” she said.

Wow.

The last stand of the climate change skeptics is now “ok, so we’re causing it. So what? We’ll adapt. We always have in the past.”

Contrary to what most skeptics will tell you, this now-finished debate was never about whether climate change happens in absence of human causes. Of course, climate science, geology and a host of other sciences have long shown us that our climate is variable. Ice ages of the past covered our planet in ice caps. Heat waves caused drought and melting. This all happened before. This time, the problem is not that it is happening again, but rather the speed of change is historically unprecedented, with the exception of times of cataclysm like meteor strikes or huge volcano eruptions.

It is the speed of change that will be the gotcha for humans. Sure, we have adapted in the past. In the past, change has come over many generations, and change has been almost imperceptible. This time we are seeing change on a decade-by-decade pace, and it will soon change to year-by-year. It will be very difficult, and very expensive, to make the needed adjustments to our human infrastructure to be able to continue in a civilized manner, should we take the “we’ll adapt” approach to this problem. Here’s a mild example of possible outcomes, which happened recently in one of our most civilized countries, Britain:

Last night vast areas of the country around Gloucestershire and Worcestershire were still inundated, large numbers of people in temporary accommodation, transport links were widely disrupted, and yet more householders were standing by to be flooded in their turn, in one of the biggest civil emergencies Britain has seen.

About 150,000 residents in Gloucestershire were left without drinking water when the Mythe Water Treatment Works in Tewkesbury became inoperable after flooding. Another 200,000 people are at risk of losing their supplies. The water shortages may last until Wednesday and 600 water tanks were being drafted to the area.

Panic buying of bottled water was reported, with supermarkets selling out of stocks, and there were contamination problems in south London, where 80,000 households and businesses in the Sutton area were advised to boil their water after rain got into a tank. Yet another potential danger was from car thieves; West Mercia police warned drivers who had abandoned their cars in the floodwater to collect them quickly to prevent theft.

Think about this over the long term, as changes become more profound, and impacts are spread to more fragile societies with even less ability to adapt. Then ask yourself what the proper approach to this issue is. I think it is clear we need to act within our capacity to mitigate the effects of excessive co2 emitted by our society, just as we acted to curb CFCs and stop damage to the Ozone layer. It is clear. We must act.

Certainly, there are other important issues facing us. General environmental degradation is one. Nuclear proliferation is another. AIDS yet another…sadly we don’t get to cherry-pick the issues we tackle. They must all be beaten.

Rumors in Physics Blogosphere Test Faith in ‘God Particle’

For weeks, the physics world has been buzzing with rumors juicier — at least in context — than any Washington scandal: Researchers at Fermilab’s Tevatron particle collider may have made one of the biggest scientific discoveries in decades, just months before a new European facility supplanted their position at the top of the field.

Tonight I googled green hornet insect in an attempt to identify a macro photo subject I took today. I flipped Google over to images, clicked on the fourth one in the results and was taken to my own photo set on flickr. That was freaky.

Check it out.

A development in Europe may have some interesting ramifications for search engines. It used to be that the search engine was an amazing thing; a gift to humanity that brought all the world’s online info to your fingertips (some more efficiently than others). Now that search is becoming more commonplace, publishers are starting to wonder if being in the search engines, with their direct links, is really the best thing. Some publishers are recognizing that search engines are stealing revenue. If enough publishers of quality content push back and block the search engines, the content available via free search might just become an information ghetto.

Google has long been regarded as the best of the search engine crowd. Now Google is getting pushed back a bit by the people who provide some of the better content for the Internet. Belgian newspapers have said that it isn’t in their best interest to have their content freely available in search engines, Google in particular. So they went to court. And they won.

Google, the owner of the world’s most-used search engine, must pay $32,500 US a day until it removes all Belgian news content, the Brussels Court of First Instance ruled Tuesday. There’s “no exception” for Google in copyright law, the court said. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said it has already removed the content and will appeal the ruling.

The case may restrict how Internet sites in Europe link to newspaper content. Copiepresse, a group representing French- and German-language newspapers including La Libre Belgique and Le Soir, had sued Google for copyright infringement. The journals lose advertising revenue when Google uses snippets of articles and links directly to stories, bypassing ads on their Web sites, said Bruno Vandermeulen, a Brussels-based lawyer at Bird & Bird.

The implication here is that search engine trick is wearing thin. It just isn’t that big of a deal now for people to be in the Google search index. For some publishers with no other means of exposure, you can see the value of the model. But if you put energy into your content, and you are selling it elsewhere, it may NOT be in your best interest for your content to be reachable by one click from a Google search. more and more publishing businesses may come to this same conclusion.

The future may see one or both of two things: 1) a new search engine model where the content provider/publisher is in on the deal and recovering revenue from search engines like Google who profit immensely from being the biggest instance of what is no longer that big of a trick to pull off. 2) the ghettoization of free search, wherein the search engines like Google are eventually pushed off a lot of the really good content, which becomes accessible only by direct access or by clicking through on paid ads on select websites. This is not the same as membership sites, but rather a category of web publishing that is in between. The content is still free, but how you get there is constrained by copyright law.

Google better think hard about how to maintain its market leadership here. Some enterprising search outfit might come along with a model that includes content providers at the party, and leaves Google in the ghetto with desperate publishers with no other model.