Free Republic

For a transition to occur from the pre-biological world of 4 billion years ago to the world we know today, amino acids--the building blocks of proteins in all living systems--had to link into chainlike molecules. Now Robert Hazen and Timothy Filley of the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Glenn Goodfriend of George Washington University have discovered what may be a key step in this process -- a step that has baffled researchers for more than a half a century. Their work, supported by NASA's Astrobiology Institute and the Carnegie Institution, is reported in today's issue of ...

In tune We all begin life with perfect pitch, suggest studies of babies, but only some retain the skill From the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco We all begin life with perfect pitch, suggests study of infants. Most English speakers lose the ability to identify a note by frequency alone because perfect pitch is not necessary for understanding English words. "Our hypothesis is that the ability goes away for most of us because it's not really useful - unless you happen to be speaking a tonal language like Thai or Mandarin," ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The first in-depth look at the human genetic code has revealed much less than anticipated -- about half to a third the number of expected genes, scientists will announce on Monday. They said their findings so far made it clear that far from being a blueprint, the human genetic code was only a guidepost. The true directions for what makes a human being lie not in letters of code but in what the body does with that code. They have found a few interesting tidbits. Most of the variation -- the mutations that underlie evolution and bring ...

UPTON, NY -- Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers from 11 institutions in the U.S., Russia, Japan, and Germany, today announced an experimental result that directly confronts the so-called Standard Model of particle physics. "This work could open up a whole new world of exploration for physicists interested in new theories, such as supersymmetry, which extend the Standard Model," says Boston University physicist Lee Roberts, co-spokesperson for the experiment. Standard Model. This indicates that other physical theories that go beyond the assumptions of the Standard Model may now be open to experimental ...

A severely disabled French boy has won a landmark case against medical authorities for allowing him to be born rather than aborted. Nicolas Perruche was born deaf, part-blind and with mental disabilities in 1983 after a doctor and a medical laboratory failed to realise that his mother had caught rubella, also called German measles, during her pregnancy. Mistakes committed by the doctors and the laboratory prevented (Mrs Perruche) from exercising her choice to end the pregnancy Cour de Cassation decision His parents, Josette and Christian Perruche, said the failure to diagnose the disease damaged their child in the womb ...

Under the headline "The smile of autocrats", Germany's Die Zeit reflects that the election uncertainty in Florida will give rise to schadenfreude among rulers throughout the world who have had to listen to lectures from the US about the virtues of democracy. It sees a growing danger in "dictators, semi-democrats and political cynics" promoting a "post-modernist theory of relativity" according to which democracy in various guises has its shortcomings everywhere. "Illegal ballot papers, human error and manipulated vote-counting" can happen anywhere, "whether in a parliamentary democracy in Germany, a presidential democracy in America, a Russian-style pseudo-democracy or a people's democracy ...

WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDAIf Al Gore eventually wins Florida and the presidency, historians will likely trace his victory to the early morning hours after he retracted his concession to George W. Bush. In those crucial first hours of November 8, while the Bush campaign was still waiting for the results of Florida's first tally, Team Gore was already beginning to fight a recount the same way it fought the campaign itself: ferociously. Gore's advisers had actually begun preparing for a recount battle even before Election Day. Weeks before November 7, Joe Sandler, the Democratic National Committee's general counsel and the ...

Human rights group hits Hanoi policy By Tom CarterTHE WASHINGTON TIMES      A Washington human rights group, days before President Clinton is to visit Vietnam, yesterday released a series of Vietnamese government documents that depict an official policy of persecution against Christians, especially evangelical Protestants. Some 50 pages of documents disclosed by the rights-group Freedom House bear government seals and signatures, and were passed to human rights workers in Vietnam earlier this year.     "These documents . . . show that church closures, arrests and Bible burnings are not isolated acts of overzealous cadres but are the policy directives of the Vietnamese Communist ...

Only a small percentage of a country’s population orients itself towards values different from those of national or international law. Some may apply Christian ethics to their everyday lives or do without cars or electricity out of concerns for the sake of conservation, but the majority of the population orients itself simply towards the laws of the state6, particularly penal law and judicial decisions. In Europe, the state’s influence has particularly increased with the Church’s loss of influence on the younger generation. Few parents try to give their children moral values above and beyond the consensus of their society, either ...

This is a continuation thread for the discussion of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Previous threads in this series: Predestination (Thread XV)Predestination (Thread XIV) Predestination (Thread XIII) Predestination (Thread XII) Predestination (Thread XI) Predestination (Thread X) Predestination (Thread IX) Predestination (Thread VIII) Predestination (Thread VII) Predestination (Thread VI) Predestination (Thread V) Predestination (Thread IV) Predestination (Thread III) Predestination (continued) Predestination The first three threads all begin with the article under discussion.

Stem cells from the brain can be turned into muscle, researchers in Italy have found. Such cells could provide an inexhaustible supply of material for treating muscle-wasting disorders such as muscular dystrophy. The researchers have also found clues to what triggers the cells to change. Angelo Vescovi and his colleagues at the National Neurological Institute in Milan, Italy, have shown that adult stem cells from mouse brains become muscle cells when implanted in muscles of live mice. And when human adult stem cells extracted from the brains of miscarried fetuses are implanted in mouse muscle, they too turn into muscle ...

Genetically Engineered Corn Not Approved for Human consumption Found in Taco bell Brand Taco Shells From National Environmental TrustMonday, September 18, 2000WASHINGTON, DC — CONTAMINENT FOUND IN TACO BELL TACO SHELLS,FOOD SAFETY COALITION DEMANDS RECALL BY TACO BELL, PHILIP MORRIS Genetically engineered corn not approved for human consumption may be in other products, too Washington, DC – Genetically Engineered Food Alert, a coalition of health, consumer and environmental groups, today demanded that taco shells marketed using the Taco Bell name be immediately removed from grocery store shelves across the country. In independent testing, a sample of the taco shells was ...

New Study Indicates Brain Damage To Gulf War VeteransIn a study released Thursday, researchers say they have found a strong link between brain cell loss on the left side of the brain in sick Gulf War veterans and abnormal over-production of dopamine, a neurotransmitter chemical important in such conditions as degenerative brain diseases. The UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas study, published in the American Medical Association's Archives of Neurology, links brain cell loss in the left basal ganglia of sick Gulf War veterans with out-of-control production of a brain neurotransmitter chemical called dopamine. With fewer total brain cells, the ...

This week's meeting of the Royal Society in London examined the repeated claim that the HIV virus was spread by an experimental polio vaccine. Its conclusion: there is no evidence for the claim. In response to that finding, the World Health Organiztion issued a formal statement on Tuesday. That statement is included here in its entirety. Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, there has been much speculation in both the scientific literature and in the popular press on the origin of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. One theory that HIV was spread to the general population by an ...

Campaigners against human cloning have welcomed a European Parliament resolution attacking British government plans to allow the cloning of embryos for research. The resolution, adopted by MEPs meeting in Strasbourg, accused Tony Blair's administration of using "linguistic sleight of hand to erode the moral significance of human cloning". It said the creation of an embryo purely for research "poses a profound ethical dilemma, irreversibly crosses a boundary and is contrary to public policy as adopted by the European Union". The UK is the only EU member state proposing to allow medical research using embryos created by so-called "therapeutic cloning". The ...

NIH and human embryo research revisited:What is wrong with this picture? Dianne N. Irving, M.A., Ph.D. Professor of PhilosophyDominican House of StudiesWashington, D.C. 20017 I. Introduction The rapid advance of medical technology has left a plethora of profound ethical, social and political issues unresolved. No longer restricted to the archaic deliberations within the halls of academia, Americans in general are finding themselves increasingly affected by these technical medical issues and the corresponding academic "theories" and public policy recommendations constructed by academia - especially within bioethics. Without the technical and academic expertise they perceive necessary to respond cogently to these issues, most ...

Human cloning law relaxed for research The law on human cloning is to be relaxed to allow for medical research, but scientists are to be banned from "making" a cloned baby, the government has announced. Scientists will be permitted to take cells from young embryos and use them to grow skin and other tissue to research cures for previously untreatable diseases, but new legislation will also outlaw the use of human cloning for reproductive purposes. Ministers were responding to a report by Chief Medical Officer Professor Liam Donaldson on the issue of human embryo cloning. The relaxation of the ...

Sea urchins study may help treat male infertility A study of the sex lives of sea urchins may lead to new treatments for male infertility, scientists say. The US research has revealed the answer to a 100-year-old mystery about how sperm fertilises a female egg. Since the turn of the century, scientists have wondered exactly how contact between a sperm and egg triggers embryo development. Experiments on male and female sea urchins from the Pacific Ocean have now shown that the fertilisation "switch" is nitric oxide gas inside the sperm. The scientists found that sea urchin sperm contains an enzyme ...

  Of mice and memory DAVID ADAM Love is chemical and so, it seems, is remembering it. Male mice missing certain brain proteins cannot recall which females they have had sex with. The forgetful fellas can blame this unfortunate amnesia on their DNA: a missing gene means their ‘social’ memory fails them. Mice meetings are dominated by smell. Females release pheromones that males use to tell their mates (literally) from their mates (in the ‘just friends’ sense). Researchers suspected that a neurochemical, ‘oxytocin’, helps mice turn these smells into memories, but this has been difficult to prove. Now, James ...

Genetic Discovery Brings Worries as Well as Hope The drafts that researchers finished today of the human genome introduce a wealth of vital information for medical researchers. But some fear there may also be such a thing as too much information. “Just as we fought major battles over social, racial and women’s rights in past decades, these will be the years we battle against genetic discrimination,” said Jeremy Rifkin of the Foundation for Economic Trends and author of The Biotech Century. No Genetic Privacy The human genome in its finished form will offer a detailed guidebook to the human ...