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RENO, Nev. - On a farm about six miles outside this gambling town, Jason Chamberlain looks over a flock of about 50 smelly sheep, many of them possessing partially human livers, hearts, brains and other organs. The University of Nevada-Reno researcher talks matter-of-factly about his plans to euthanize one of the pregnant sheep in a nearby lab. He can't wait to examine the effects of the human cells he had injected into the fetus' brain about two months ago. "It's mice on a large scale," Chamberlain says with a shrug. As strange as his work may sound, it falls firmly...

An accented, angry voice comes over the intercom system: "Attention, attention teachers. You must move your students to the auditorium immediately." There are screams and confusion in the hallways.... Another teacher, sensing the spreading danger, closes and locks her classroom door, quickly she yells to open the windows and tells the children to climb out and run away. A driver passing by sees a group of children rolling off the school's window ledges and darting across the athletic field.

I don't know about the rest of America, but as a former intelligence analyst, what we don't know right now about nuclear proliferation in the world scares the hell out of me. Let's review just some of the news reports over the last several weeks... Many have probably heard of A.Q. Khan... Osama Bin Laden who has already declared it a Muslim duty to acquire nuclear weapons, recently received a Fatwa, or religious declaration, approving his use of one.... CIA Director Porter Goss... "It may be only a matter of time before al-Qaida or other groups attempt to use chemical,...

LOS ANGELES - The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine doesn't have a home, any money, or even a single employee, but the head of the new state agency expects to be awarding its first grants for stem cell research by May. "We have a responsibility to move as quickly as possible," Robert Klein said Thursday. "I admit that I am an optimist." The institute was created by California voters in November when they approved a $3 billion bond to fund stem cell research over the next decade. The 29-member committee appointed to manage the institute met Thursday and began to...

Cell phones may be ruling our lives, but at least they don't have to ruin our dinners and study breaks anymore. With newer, fancier cell phones continually hitting the market and the FCC (search) considering allowing the use of mobiles on airplanes, there is once again an oasis of quiet to be found: restaurants and libraries across the country are installing cell-phone booths (search) to give Americans peace from annoying chatter — and the privacy to make a call. "People think it is a good idea, because it gets people [on cell phones] out of the restaurant so they don't...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Italians love their mobile phones and often carry out love affairs over them -- but they must beware, flirting with text messages can carry a fine. A judge in the northern Italian town of Padua on Monday found a man who sent an unsolicited compliment by SMS guilty of harassment and fined him 300 euros ($391), Italian news agency Ansa reported. "Since you appeared before my eyes I can't do anything but think of you," the man had written to a clerk while on lunch break, Ansa said. She took the offending SMS to the police. Italians own more mobile...

Hydrogen holds fantastic promise as a plentiful, clean-burning fuel and an eventual replacement for gasoline. Environmentalists like it because it might trim the amount of greenhouse gas spewed by the nation's automobiles. (The combustion of hydrogen produces only water.) Engineers like it because it's new technology that will need fueling with lots of ideas and design work. One futuristic idea places wind turbines in the windiest part of the country electrolyzing water and pumping it into a national grid. And cynics like the idea of a hydrogen economy because it lets them snicker while pointing out the hurtles that must...

This piece ran originally in the New York Sun last Friday for their weekend edition. "In the wake of Ron Reagan’s appearance at the Democratic Convention, John Kerry has tried to make stem-cell research a featured policy difference between Kerry and George Bush. His campaign website talks about “ideologically-driven restrictions” from the Bush administration and promises to lift the “ban on stem cell research.” In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial outlining his economic plan, Kerry writes that he will restore America’s competitive edge by working to “end the ban on stem-cell research.” In fact, it may be the most...

According to a new report, complex cells like those in the human body probably resulted from the fusion of genomes from an ancient bacterium and a simpler microbe, Archaea, best known for its ability to withstand extreme temperatures and hostile environments. The finding provides strong evidence that complex cells arose from combinations of simpler organisms in a symbiotic effort to survive. Jim Lake and Maria Rivera, at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), report their finding in the Sept. 9 issue of the journal Nature. Scientists refer to both bacteria and Archaea as "prokaryotes" -- a cell type that has...

A New Use for Old Printers: Treating Burn Victims Researchers in the US are using old inkjet printers to produce sheets of human skin to be used on burn victims. They think that this 'skin-printing' method will minimize rejections by patients and reduce post-operative complications. In this article, the Wall Street Journal (paid registration needed) writes that while the technology is still in its early stages, it could be used clinically within two years. This could be a life-saving technology for the 20% of burn patients who have the most extensive burns. Considering that each year, some 45,000 people...

Ron Reagan Wrong on Stem Cells Thursday, July 15, 2004 By Steven Milloy Ron Reagan, the younger son of the late Republican president, announced this week that he would give a prime-time address in support of stem cell research at the Democratic National Convention in Boston later this month. "Ron Reagan's courageous pleas for stem cell research add a powerful voice to the millions of Americans hoping for cures for their children, for their parents and for their grandparents," said a spokesman for John Kerry to the Associated Press. Reagan told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the speech was intended "to...

06/01/04 -- Two years after transforming human fat cells into what appeared to be nerve cells, a group led by Duke University Medical Center researchers has gone one step further by demonstrating that these new cells also appear to act like nerve cells. The team said that the results of its latest experiments provide the most compelling scientific evidence to date that researchers will in the future be able to take cells from a practically limitless source -- fat -- and retrain them to differentiate along new developmental paths. These cells, they said, could then be used to possibly treat...

Soon, our knowledge of life processes will let us program cells as we do computers.Back in the 1940s, John Von Neumann—a giant in the development of modern computers—investigated the theoretical possibilities of self-reproduction. He essentially asserted that a self-reproducible machine would require a “tape” or other description of itself. During reproduction, this tape would serve as the set of instructions for building a copy of the machine and would itself be copied to create the seed necessary for the next generation. DNA, of course, turned out to have precisely these properties. What a beautiful story! One of the very first...

Cell phone users in many states will have to wait years before emergency 911 operators will automatically get the same location information they get from callers with conventional phones, congressional investigators said Wednesday. The General Accounting Office said less than half of the 50 states report they will have full Enhanced 911 systems, which can pinpoint the location of cell phone users, by 2005 - the deadline for wireless companies to install technology allowing centers with the proper equipment to track callers. Some states were unable to even estimate when the new systems would be installed. "Implementation of wireless E911...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 (UPI) -- A study in mice indicates that contrary to previous thinking, a type of adult stem cell derived from bone does not give rise to new heart and brain cells when transplanted into the body. The finding that this type of stem cell might not be as medically beneficial as researchers had hoped likely will have a significant impact on the political debate over embryonic and adult stem cells. Embryonic stem cells have a proven capacity to regenerate damaged tissue and offer the potential of treating diseases, such as Parkinson's and diabetes. Some groups, however, oppose...

The first human cloned embryo could be implanted into a surrogate mother's womb before the end of the year, US fertility expert Panayiotis Zavos claimed on Monday. The attempt follows months of "practising" in the lab on hundreds of hybrid embryos made by fusing human cells with empty cow eggs, Zavos told a press conference in London. If the human pregnancy proceeds and goes to term, the baby will be a girl, he adds. "We've created the first human embryo for reproductive purposes," says Zavos, director of the Andrology Institute of America and associate director of the Kentucky Center for...

Cells from human embryos could be used to help some people with spinal injuries to walk again, successful work involving rats has indicated. Scientists from the University of California at Irvine college of medicine said that paralysed rats walked again after being injected with stem cells from "early-stage" human embryos. They hope that the breakthrough will prove to American policy makers that the use of human embryonic stem cells and therapeutic cloning - presently banned in the US - are justified. The team, led by Hans Keirstead, took stem cells from early-stage human embryos, and altered them in the laboratory...

Ballyhooed hydrogen fuel cells may have environmental drawback WASHINGTON (AP) Widespread use of the hydrogen fuel cells that President Bush has made a centerpiece of his energy plan might not be as environmentally friendly as many believe. Scientists say the new technology could lead to greater destruction of the ozone layer that protects Earth from cancer-causing ultraviolet rays. Researchers issued a report Thursday saying that if hydrogen replaced fossil fuels to run everything from cars to power plants, large amounts of hydrogen would drift into the stratosphere as a result of leakage and indirectly cause increased depletion of the ozone....

Tel Aviv University and American researchers have managed to cure diabetes in mice by creating insulin-producing cells from stem cells taken from the liver of a four-month-old miscarried human embryo and implanting them into Type I (insulin-dependent) diabetic mice. Prof. Shimon Efrat of the department of Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine at TAU's Sackler School of Medicine and colleagues in Israel and the US hope that eventually such cells could be transplanted into human diabetics if a way is found to protect them from rejection through an autoimmune attack. The genetically engineered human cells will theoretically be ready for clinical...