Free Republic

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth. The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new...

Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program. The other leading wireless carriers have accepted the program, which allows people to sign up for text messages from Naral by sending a message to a five-digit number known as a short code. Text messaging is a growing political tool in the United States and a dominant one abroad, and such sign-up programs are used by many political candidates and advocacy groups to send...

Peter Wagner, a general partner at venture firm Accel, predicts there will be nuclear powered cars on the streets of San Francisco in a decade. You've just got to think of it more as indirect nuclear power. Cars won't have reactors, he explained during a panel discussion at the Venture Capital Investing Conference taking place in San Francisco. Instead, nuclear power will become a more acceptable form of energy to the American public as gas prices continue to climb and global warming worsens. Nuclear power will provide electricity to the grid, and individuals will charge electric cars by plugging them...

Father of Nick Berg, for some reason, agreed to speak on phone to Fox & Friends. He is sad that Al-Zarqawi, the admitted murderer of Nick Berg and others, is dead. Berg took the time to Blame Bush for the killings Al-Zarqawi has bragged about. Berg also suggested that assertions that Al-Zarqawi is involved with murders is actually a fabrication by the Bush administration. Furthermore, he criticised Bush for "destabilizing" Iraq.

The airing of doubts about global warming that I solicited last week has been remarkable: 169 blog comments (albeit with some repeats) and a number of private emails (including one from a college suitemate and engineering classmate I haven't seen in 18 years). I started the whole discussion because I felt communication on an important scientific issue had broken down, and I figure the best way to make sure we've reconnected the wires is to try and summarize what everyone has been saying. That way, you can correct me if I've misunderstood, misclassified, or just plain missed something. Later, I...

Context: Proposed federal legislation would require physicians to inform women seeking abortions at 20 or more weeks after fertilization that the fetus feels pain and to offer anesthesia administered directly to the fetus. This article examines whether a fetus feels pain and if so, whether safe and effective techniques exist for providing direct fetal anesthesia or analgesia in the context of therapeutic procedures or abortion. Evidence Acquisition: Systematic search of PubMed for English-language articles focusing on human studies related to fetal pain, anesthesia, and analgesia. Included articles studied fetuses of less than 30 weeks’ gestational age or specifically addressed fetal...

A new NASA-funded study finds that predicted increases in precipitation due to warmer air temperatures from greenhouse gas emissions may actually increase sea ice volume in the Antarctic’s Southern Ocean. This adds new evidence of potential asymmetry between the two poles, and may be an indication that climate change processes may have different impact on different areas of the globe. "Most people have heard of climate change and how rising air temperatures are melting glaciers and sea ice in the Arctic," said Dylan C. Powell, co-author of the paper and a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. "However,...

Mammalian sperm must reside in the female reproductive tract before they are able to undergo the acrosome reaction. This maturation process is called capacitation. The mammalian egg is surrounded by an extracellular envelope called the zona pellucida, to which sperm must bind and penetrate before they can make contact with the surface of the egg itself. The zona pellucida of the mouse egg contains three glycoproteins called ZP-1, ZP-2 and ZP-3 that polymerize to form a gel. The zona of newly-ovulated eggs is also surrounded by a constellation of follicle cells in a matrix of hyaluronic acid. Figure 1 shows...

... David Boonin, though not responding to George, also discounts the pro-lifer’s claim that the newly conceived embryo is a distinct, living, and whole human organism. How can this be, he argues, when we don’t know the precise moment during the conception process at which the new zygotic human being comes into existence? Here Boonin is both right and wrong. True, we don’t know exactly when during the conception process that the zygote comes to be. Some embryologists argue that it happens when the sperm penetrates the ovum while others point to syngamy, when the maternal and parental chromosomes crossover...

...The book begins with a discussion of the medical use of embryonic tissue and the debate over whether a blastocyst (which is a ball of a few hundred cells) is a person. This section is thoughtful, clearheaded and informed by developmental neuroscience. One fallacy Gazzaniga exposes depends on the common idea that graded differences block principled legal distinctions. In the version referred to as the fallacy of the beard, the logic goes like this: If we cannot say how long a man's whiskers must be to qualify as a beard, we cannot distinguish between a bearded man and a clean-shaven...

At a physics meeting last October, Nobel laureate David Gross outlined 25 questions in science that he thought physics might help answer. Nestled among queries about black holes and the nature of dark matter and dark energy were questions that wandered beyond the traditional bounds of physics to venture into areas typically associated with the life sciences. One of the Gross's questions involved human consciousness. He wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset consciousness in infants and speculated that consciousness might be similar to what physicists call a "phase transition," an abrupt and sudden large-scale transformation...

Question: Hi, I was wondering about a bioethical issue that's really important today- abortion. Most of the debate about abortion revolves around when life begins, so I was wondering when most scientist's believe that life begins, since you obviously would know more about this subject. You don't have to give your moral beliefs or anything, but I would just like to know when you think that life begins... Thanks! =) Amit Srivastava Answer 1: This is an important topic, but even (or especially) for a scientist you and I must realize that my "moral beliefs" will affect the kind of...

BERKELEY, Calif., July 8 (UPI) -- California researchers found genes are more important than exercise in determining response to cholesterol. Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute conducted a study to compare the effects of a high-fat diet and of exercise. Paul Williams gave diets that were either high or low in fat to 28 pairs of identical male twins -- one twin a vigorous exerciser, the other a comparative couch potato. For six weeks the twins ate either a high-fat diet -- 40 percent of its calories from fat,...

WASHINGTON - Predicted increases in precipitation due to warmer air temperatures from greenhouse gas emissions may actually increase sea ice volume in the Antarctic's Southern Ocean. This finding from a new study adds evidence of potential asymmetry between the two poles and may be an indication that climate change processes may have varying impacts on different areas of the globe. "Most people have heard of climate change and how rising air temperatures are melting glaciers and sea ice in the Arctic," said Dylan C. Powell, lead author of the paper and a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland Baltimore...

LONDON, June 30 (UPI) -- Only 1 percent of overweight women in a British survey said they are happy with their shape, blaming the celebrity culture for their attitude. Of the 4,000 overweight women questioned by the National Slimming Survey, 83 percent said they suffered from deep "self-loathing". Some 91 percent felt depressed and 79 percent said they felt "utter despair." Two-thirds of overweight women said they have felt like "life is not worth living," Sky News reported. The survey also said 74 percent admitted to hiding food in their bedroom, car, garage or garden. About half of respondents removed...

In an attempt to resolve any disagreement surrounding the meaning of the word "God", TPM has assembled a crack team of "metaphysical engineers" who have devised a new computer-modelling virtual environment in which to test the plausibility of different conceptions of God. Here's how it works. You are invited to select from the list below the attributes which you believe God must have (or the attributes that a being deserving of the name God must have). Metaphysical engineers will then model this conception of God to check out its plausibility.

THIS WEEK marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jean-Paul Sartre, ... Sartre appealed to the American people particularly when it came to his dramatic conception of freedom, light-years removed from the popular American version. Sartre often spoke of ''awful freedom," adding that we are ''condemned to be free." Strangely, Americans took to such language. ...

ATLANTA, June 25 (UPI) -- A 78-year-old great-grandmother has been charged with killing her ex-boyfriend because he had begun dating someone else at their Atlanta retirement home. A magistrate set bail at $25,000 and ordered Lena Driskell to wear an electronic ankle bracelet and to remain at her granddaughter's house, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. While prosecutors wanted her behind bars, her lawyer said that the elderly woman did not belong in jail. During the preliminary hearing, Detective D.B. Mathis told the court that Driskell told him, "I did it and I'd do it again." Driskell used a gun her father...

We need to understand that taxes, especially property taxes, are investments in our community. Nobody wants to live in a town where streets are unkempt and unplowed, the schools are poor, and public health and safety are compromised. Most towns pass tax overrides because they understand the positive link between property taxes and property values. It is likely that we will lose more money in property values and increased fees if we do not pass an override than we would lose in taxes if we do pass an override. It is also true that property values in Maynard have not...

A new article publishing in the latest issue of Review of Policy Research examines the evolution and devolution of speed limit laws and their effects on fatality rates. The author did not find a significant increase in fatalities per miles driven after speed limit laws ceased to be national and states could, and some did, increase their highway limit to more than fifty-five miles per hour. "Automobile safety features and enforcement emerge as important factors in increasing highway safety; speed limits are far less important," author Robert O. Yowell explains. Although speed limits bring to mind the notion of public...