Geneticists Breach Ethical Taboo By Changing Genes Across Generations

by Rob Stein October 24, 2012 3:00 PM Geneticist reported Wednesday that they had crossed a threshold long considered off-limits: They have made changes in human DNA that can be passed down from one generation to the next. The researchers at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland say they took the step to try to prevent women from giving birth to babies with genetic diseases. But the research is raising a host of ethical, social and moral questions. "That kind of genetic engineering has been ruled off-limits," says Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society. "And it's a very bright line that has been observed by scientists around the world." There have been lots of reasons for that line. One big one is purely practical, says Dartmouth bioethicist Ronald Green. "If we make mistakes, we'll effectively be introducing a new genetic disease into the human population — for generation after generation," Green says. But beyond the risks, Green says taking that step has long raised more far-reaching fears. It's the kind of technology that could be used to try to create genetically superior humans. "It could easily move into the realm of gene enhancement," Green says. "Higher IQ. Improved physical appearance. Athletic ability. That's a worry to some people — to many people." But in this week's issue of the scientific journal Nature, Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University and colleagues report that they have crossed that line. They have figured out a way to change the DNA in a human egg. Why? Mitalipov says his team is trying to prevent some rare but horrible disorders: genetic conditions caused by defects in a certain kind of DNA known as mitochondrial DNA, which only mothers pass down to their kids. "They are caused by mutations in this mitochondrial DNA, which is pretty small — only encodes 37 genes," Mitalipov says. So Mitalipov's team figured out a way to pluck these little packets of defective mitochondrial DNA out of eggs and replace them with healthy genes from eggs donated by other women. They fertilized the transplanted eggs in the laboratory and showed they could create healthy embryos. "What we showed is that the faulty genes, which are usually passed through the woman's egg, can be safely replaced. And that way, the egg still retains its capacity to be fertilized by sperm and develop," he says. The researchers haven't taken the next step yet: They haven't tried to make babies out of these modified embryos. But they have made baby monkeys this way, increasing their confidence it would work. And some other doctors hope so, too. Mary Herbert of Newcastle University is part of a team that has prompted a national debate in England by doing similar research. She also hopes to help women who have gone through the trauma of giving birth to a baby with one of these genetic conditions. "In severe cases, the child will die in the first days of life, or they might live, you know, a few years and then die," Herbert says. "It's like a game of Russian roulette." But the work raises a long list of questions. One is about the morality of creating embryos in the laboratory for research and destroying them, which some consider immoral. Another is about the safety of the women donating the eggs. And, of course, it's far from clear that the resulting babies will be healthy. But even if they are, there are still more questions. One is about the very genetic identity of any babies made this way. They'd inherit DNA from three separate people instead of the usual two: from the father's sperm; from the egg of the woman whose egg was fixed; and from the egg of the woman who donated some of her DNA to fix the problem. "So yes, we're going to have to, perhaps, get used to the fact that people can have three genetic parents in the future," Dartmouth bioethicist Green says. But beyond that, the move raises those early fears about manipulating DNA to create a brave new world of genetic haves and have-nots, according to Darnovsky. "Socially, what this would mean is we would be moving toward a world in which some people — and it would be people who could afford these procedures — would have either real or perceived genetic advantage," she says. Despite the concerns, Mitalipov and Herbert say the real benefits of preventing genetic diseases outweigh such hypothetical risks. Herbert is awaiting a decision by the British government on whether she can proceed to the next step in her research. Mitalipov has already asked the Food and Drug Administration if he can try to make a healthy baby by genetically altering human eggs.

Testing agency loses 18 NY students' AP US history essays

ASSOCIATED PRESS Last Updated: 2:52 PM, August 17, 2012 Posted: 11:57 AM, August 17, 2012 A national testing agency has apologized to 18 New York high school students after their US history essays on an advanced placement exam were lost. Newsday reports that Educational Testing Service administrators described the loss as an "isolated incident." ETS says it scores more than 50 million answer sheets from AP and other tests annually. Students at Center Moriches High School have been offered three options. They can retake the essay portion of the test, cancel results and get an $87 refund, or accept "projected" scores based on their multiple-choice answers. Some of the high school seniors say they won't have time to properly review for a new exam. ETS officials say the test answer packets arrived at their offices, but handlers could not find the essays.

Harvard Students Accused of Cheating on Final Exam Reflects 'Culture of Cheating,' Grad Says

By COLLEEN CURRY Aug. 31, 2012 Administrators at Harvard College have accused 125 students of cheating on a final exam last spring, an allegation that Harvard graduate and author Eric Kester said reflects a "culture of cheating" at the school. Officials at the prestigious university in Cambridge, Mass., said Thursday that they had found at least 125 students who they believe collaborated on a take-home final exam during the spring semester this year. "We take academic integrity very seriously because it goes to the heart of our educational mission," Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said in a statement. "Academic dishonesty cannot and will not be tolerated at Harvard." As of now, the school noted, the cheating is simply an allegation that will continue to be investigated. An academic board pored over 250 final exams from the Introduction to Congress class taught by Professor Matthew B. Platt, according to the Harvard Crimson. Platt noticed similarities among 10 to 20 of the exams that were turned in, and alerted the Administrative Board, which then conducted an investigation, according to the report. The board then found similarities among 125 exams. The student newspaper described how prior to the deadline to turn in the exam, panicked students packed into the office of a teaching assistant, asking for help explaining the essay questions on the test. Platt reportedly canceled his own office hours before the due date, the Crimson noted. The school did not release the names of the accused students, although a student told ABC News that some of the individuals who took the class might have graduated in May. Kester, a 2008 Harvard graduate who wrote a memoir, "That Book About Harvard," about his own struggles with academic honesty and the high expectations of Harvard, said the cheating scandal didn't surprise him. "When I was a student there, I definitely noticed there was a culture of cheating there," Kester told ABC News today. "There's a lot of pressure internally and externally to succeed at Harvard and when kids who are not used to failing feel these things, it can really bend their ethics in ways I didn't expect to see." Kester said he struggled through a calculus class during his time at Harvard, and at one point was approached by a group of students who were planning to cheat. He wrestled with his own morals about whether to join them before deciding against it, he said. "It comes down to the responsibility of the students, they're adults, they know cheating is wrong, that's the bottom line," he said. "At the same time I'm slightly sympathetic to the students, because in our society and especially at Harvard, there are high expectations to become the next Mark Zuckerberg." Kester noted that many of the students who cheat at Harvard are smart enough to pass the classes on their own. "Most people who cheat at Harvard don't really need to, it's just sort of a way of making themselves feel safer of not failing," he said. Harvard's reputation as a place that graduates politicians, CEOs and entrepreneurs only adds to the pressure that students feel while studying at the school, Kester said. Many of the students have likely felt pressure their entire lives to gain admittance to the school, and cannot risk failing out of Harvard once they're accepted. "The fact that this story alone has become national story is evidence that Harvard is this lightning rod. Kids now are very aware, they've seen 'The Social Network,'" Kester said, referring to the movie about Zuckerberg's life. "Most of these kids have spent at least high school and maybe since they were 5 or 6 years old getting into this school, doing SAT tutoring since 10 years old and going to organic chemistry summer camp. When you take that into account, you get a clearer sense of why you might be afraid," he said. Kester and Harvard administrators agree that most students there do not cheat, but that academic integrity could be stressed more on campus."We must also not forget that the vast majority of our students complete all their assignments honestly, diligently, and in accordance with our regulations and practices," Smith, the dean, said. "Allegations of inappropriate collaboration or plagiarism in a single class should not be allowed to diminish the good work or reputation of our outstanding student body." The school said it will focus on spreading awareness of academic integrity this school year.

Caravaggio claims spark Italian art world dispute

ROME – Caravaggio was notorious for his brawling, so it might be fitting that a claim by two Italian art historians that they discovered as many as 100 drawings by the painter in his boyhood has sparked an art world uproar. The researchers say they found dozens of early drawings by Caravaggio in the collection of master Milanese artist Simone Peterzano, the painter's teacher from 1584 to 1588. Many experts have responded with skepticism to the startling claim: Over the centuries, art historians have never definitively attributed any drawings to Caravaggio, who shook up 16th-century art by using models from the lower walks of life for religious scenes and dramatically counterpointing light and dark. On Friday, the curator of the drawings collection at Milan's Sforzesco Castle, where the collection of 1,500 painting generally attributed to Peterzano is kept, challenged the seriousness of the researchers' methods and contended that the pair had never set foot in the room to scrutinize the works. "We would be happy to have a Caravaggio," Francesco Rossi said, cautioning that it's difficult to be sure of the works' provenance. Making it especially difficult to pin works on Caravaggio was the artist's habit of not signing his own work. Attempts at fakes and uncertain claims of authenticity have been frequent. He dismissed the historians' methods as naive. "What surprised us about this thing is the fact that these experts never came here in the drawings department to see the works," Rossi told The Associated Press. "They evaluated (the drawings) using black and white photographs." The researchers defended their claim, which they made public on Thursday in an interview with the Italian news agency ANSA. Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli, told the AP in a phone interview that some of their research team studied the drawings firsthand. When pressed to identify the other researchers, she said she wasn't authorized to reveal their names and passed the phone to the other art historian, Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz. "I saw the originals," Bernadelli Curuz said. The art historian said he was able to visit the collection `'after hours," thanks to his contacts with a high-level city official who was authorized to enter the drawings department. He declined to identify the city official. But he insisted that he and Conconi Fedrigolli worked `'in a very scientific way" using photos of the drawings and comparing details to those in well-known Caravaggio works. He said it was not logical that among the Peterzano collection drawings there wouldn't be any by Caravaggio, a star pupil then known as Michelangelo Merisi. The artist is better known by the name of the Italian town where he was born. He contended they were able to distinguish drawings by Peterzano from those of his pupils, including Caravaggio. Among the prominent skeptics was Antonio Paolucci, the director of the Vatican Museums and one of Italy's most esteemed art historians and restoration experts, who pointed out that many experts have seen the drawing and "not one of those experts had come up with the name of Caravaggio." Paolucci described the claim as "pure inductive optimism" in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano on Friday, though he acknowledged it was always possible that "researchers with lesser credentials but with an especially gifted eye, sensitivity and also luck" had pinpointed something new. Paolucci has experienced first-hand the perils of attributing works to great artists, particularly Caravaggio. Two summers ago, the Vatican Museums director wrote an article under the headline "A New Caravaggio? Not really," a week after the Vatican newspaper first suggested that a painting depicting St. Lawrence could be that of Caravaggio -- but then backtracked. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/07/06/caravaggio-claims-spark-italian-art-world-dispute/#ixzz1zzROzXb0

Napoleon's English homework sells for $415,000

A RARE letter written by Napoleon in English has sold at auction for 325,000 euros ($415,000), five times the predicted price. The standard-sized sheet of paper is a homework exercise Napoleon sent to an English teacher for correction in 1816 and was sealed with the imperial eagle wax stamp. It's one of three such English-language letters by Napoleon in the world, according to the auction organisers, and was bought by Paris's Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in a dramatic bidding war yesterday near the Chateau of Fontainebleau, one of Napoleon's south of Paris. The selling price suggests the document's historic value, as rare proof that Napoleon, who famously dismissed England as a "nation of shopkeepers", learned to speak the language of his opponents late in life. He wrote the letter while a captive of the British in the remote island of Saint Helena following his defeat at Waterloo, according to the Osenat auction house. The house's president, Jean-Pierre Osenat, says Napoleon's English lessons were "very noble, respectful". "He really had a great admiration for England, the rules and history. The English have the wrong idea: Napoleon didn't hate them, he was just a military man, and the French interests were different to the English," he said. But did admiration alone lead the empire-building Frenchman to learn English? It seems that vanity, too, may have played a role - and though he was stranded on the South Atlantic Ocean island, he still cared about what people thought. "Of course, he was always very worried about his image. He wanted to read what was said about him in the English press," added Osenat, with a wry smile. Whatever the reason and despite Napoleon's best efforts - months of hard study, often late into the night - the letter shows he still had some way to go in mastering the language of Shakespeare. It begins: "It's two o'clock after midnight, I have enow sleep, I go then finish the night with you." Napoleon addressed the letter to the Count Las Cases, his teacher, "at his bonk" - thought to be the word "bunk" misspelled. The document offers insight into the historical puzzle of who Napoleon became when imprisoned and in exile. After defeat at Waterloo, under constant watch and allowed only a small entourage, the great leader became depressed and neared death. "It's very moving, since it's one of the last pieces of writings in English before his death," said 19th-century manuscript expert Alain Nicolas. "At the end he's written: 'Four o'clock in the morning,' so he wrote that in two hours. He took some time to write it. ... It shows he couldn't sleep and took his time. He had painful cancer in the stomach. He was an insomniac," Nicolas said. "He had a lot of moments to sit and reflect in Saint Helena. Learning English was a way to fill his time. It was near the end of his life: he used it as a time to think about his life, his campaigns, regrets and remorse," Nicolas added. Napoleon died in island exile on May 5, 1821, aged 52. Read more: http://www.news.com.au/world/napoleons-english-homework-sells-for-415000/story-e6frfkyi-1226390795609#ixzz1xUESlQBZ

Lost Mozart Piece Discovered

A PIANO work experts believe Mozart composed as a child has been performed for the first time since it was found last year after apparently being left in an attic for centuries.

The lively 84-bar passage - marked "allegro molto," or "very quick" - was played on the composer's piano in a room of his Salzburg home by virtuoso Florian Birsak on Friday.

The Mozarteum Salzburg Foundation, which staged the event, said the manuscript was found last summer as part of a 160-page book of handwritten piano music as the musty attic of a house in Tyrol was being cleared from centuries of detritus.

Part of a collection of notes from a village music teacher, the book was dated 1780 - 24 years after Mozart was born - and the manuscript played on Friday bore the name "Del Signore Giovane Wolfgango Mozart," Italian for "Mr Wolfgang Mozart Jr".

Musicologist Hildegard Hermann-Schneider, who traced the composition to Mozart, said the fact that other pieces in the book were known works by Mozart's father, Leopold, strengthened the case that the work was genuine. As well, Leopold Mozart often used "Wolfgango" when labelling works written by his young son, she said.

From the style of the composition, Hermann-Schneider attributed it to Mozart at around the age of 11.

The piece exhibits "a series of components that are found repeatedly in other Mozart piano works," said the Mozarteum in a statement.

"Judging by the current level of knowledge, it thus has to be a genuine sonata phrase from Mozart."

Da Vinci's Lost Work

Art sleuths said on Monday they believe they have found traces of a Leonardo Da Vinci masterpiece on a hidden wall in a palace in Florence that has not been seen in over four centuries.

The traces were collected using tiny probes introduced into a wall covering the original surface in a lavish hall in the Palazzo Vecchio and contained a black pigment also used in the "Mona Lisa", historians and officials said.

The research is the result of a decades-long quest using cutting-edge technology by University of California San Diego professor Maurizio Seracini, who was featured in Dan Brown's bestselling novel "The Da Vinci Code".

"The composition of manganese and iron found in the black pigment has been identified exclusively on Leonardo's paintings," Seracini, whose methods have sometimes stirred art world controversy, told reporters in the Italian city.

Seracini also said that Leonardo had painted the "Mona Lisa" at around the same time as the long-lost "Battle of Anghiari" in the 16th century but said more research was needed to unlock one of art history's greatest mysteries.

The probes also discovered red lacquer and brown pigment on the hidden wall, which researchers said indicated the wall had had a fresco painted on it.

The experts pointed to documentary evidence from the period showing that only Leonardo could have been the author of any work on the older wall.

The probes found an air gap of around three centimetres (1.2 inches) in some places between the old wall and the new wall built in front of it.

Da Vinci (1452-1519) began his painting of the 1440 battle between Milanese and Florentine forces in a vast hall in Florence's traditional seat of government in 1505 but never finished it because the colours began to run.

The fresco was nevertheless praised by Da Vinci's contemporaries for what art historian and fellow painter Giorgio Vasari called its "graceful beauty" and Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens drew a famous copy of it.

Renaissance master Benvenuto Cellini said it was "the school of the world."

The Rubens sketch shows a bloody scene of horsemen battling with swords drawn and trampling over infantry men -- their faces contorted with rage and their muscled horses entwined with eyes bulging out with fear.

Da Vinci was a Renaissance polymath and the author of what has become the most famous painting in the world, the "Mona Lisa". But very few of his works survive and there are frequent attempts to find traces of his documented work.

Some historians believe Vasari built a wall in front of the fresco so as to preserve Da Vinci's efforts out of respect for the renowned master and then painted his own work, "The Battle of Marciano", on the new wall in 1563.

Seracini said Vasari himself left a tantalising clue on his painting about the hidden Leonardo with an inscription on a banner held up by one of the soldiers in the battle that reads "Cerca Trova" ("Seek and You Shall Find").

The research has been partly funded by National Geographic and the US group's vice president Terry Garcia said: "I am convinced that it is there."

Florence mayor Matteo Renzi said: "This is very exciting, very emotional and very important for the future of our city.

"This is not a crusade by some crazy guy in love with some mystery but a crucial issue for cultural policy in our country," he said.

Renzi said he had also asked the Italian government for permission to carry out further probes through the Vasari painting in over a dozen areas where the original paint no longer exists and has been touched up over the centuries.

Asked whether public funding would be needed for further research, he said: "We're talking about Leonardo here. The money will come from around the world."

The research in Florence has been controversial however and has been even investigated by art police because the researchers had to bore six small holes into Vasari's work out of the 14 they had requested to reach the hidden wall.

International art scholars and the Italian heritage group "Italia Nostra" last year signed a petition complaining that the search was nothing more than a "Dan-Brown style" publicity stunt which risked damaging Vasari's fresco.

Art historian Tomaso Montanari, who teaches at the University of Naples, said in his blog that the search for the "Battle of Anghiari" was "tragi-comic" adding: "It will not be found but what counts is the mediatic effect."

Seracini said the criticism had "slowed down" and "damaged" the project.

Real Jurassic Park? Scientists to bring back woolly mammoth

by Michael Henrich

Doesn't anybody remember Jurassic Park?

Perhaps a certain group of Japanese and Russian scientists does not.

Thanks to the finding of well-preserved bone marrow in a woolly mammoth thigh bone recovered from Siberia, these scientists believe they can clone the long-extinct species and bring it back into existence, according to published reports.

The researchers plan to produce embryos with mammoth DNA by replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth's marrow cells, the reports state.

Scientists from Russia's Sakha Republic's mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University are launching the joint research project next year and hope to clone a woolly mammoth within five years.

Mammoths became extinct roughly 10,000 years ago.

Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

By Trip Gabriel
At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.
Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image....

Philosophy and Faith

By GARY GUTTING
One of my jobs as a teacher of bright, mostly Catholic undergraduates is to get them thinking about why they hold their religious beliefs. It’s easy enough to spark discussion about the problem of evil (“Can you really read the newspaper everyday and continue to believe in an all-perfect God?”) or about the diversity of religious beliefs (“If you’d been born in Saudi Arabia, don’t you think you’d be a Muslim?”). Inevitably, however, the discussion starts to fizzle when someone raises a hand and says (sometimes ardently, sometimes smugly) “But aren’t you forgetting about faith?”

That seems to be enough for most students. The trump card has been played, and they — or at least the many who find religion more a comfort than a burden — happily remember that believing means never having to explain why.

I myself, the product of a dozen years of intellectually self-confident Jesuit education, have little sympathy with the “it’s just faith” response. “How can you say that?” I reply. “You wouldn’t buy a used car just because you had faith in what the salesperson told you. Why would you take on faith far more important claims about your eternal salvation?” And, in fact, most of my students do see their faith not as an intellectually blind leap but as grounded in evidence and argument.

“Well, if there’s no God,” they say, “how can you explain why anything at all exists or why the world is governed by such precise laws of nature?”....

iPhone jailbreaking (and all cell phone unlocking) made legal

Owners of iPhones and other smartphones are one step closer toward taking complete control of their gadgets, thanks to a new government ruling Monday on the practice of "jailbreaking."

This weekend has seen a flurry of activity about digital rights, but the biggest news dropped Monday morning, when the Library of Congress announced that it had made the controversial practice of “jailbreaking” your iPhone — or any other cell phone — legal.

Jailbreaking — the practice of unlocking a phone (and particularly an iPhone) so it can be used on another network and/or run other applications than those approved by Apple — has technically been illegal for years. Most jailbroken phones are used on the U.S. T-Mobile network or on overseas carriers, or are used to run applications that Apple refuses to sell, such as Safari ad-blocking apps, alternate keyboard layouts, or programs that change the interface to the iPhone's SMS system and the way its icons are laid out.

While technically illegal, no one has been sued or prosecuted for the practice. (Apple does seriously frown on the practice, and jailbreaking your phone will still void your warranty.) It’s estimated that more than a million iPhone owners have jailbroken their handsets.

Apple fought hard against the legalization, arguing that jailbreaking was a form of copyright violation. The FCC disagreed, saying that jailbreaking merely enhanced the inter-operability of the phone, and was thus legitimate under fair-use rules.

The upshot is that now anyone can jailbreak or otherwise unlock any cell phone without fear of legal penalties, whether you want to install unsupported applications or switch to another cellular carrier. Cell phone companies are of course still free to make it difficult for you to do this — and your warranty will probably still be voided if you do — but at least you won’t be fined or imprisoned if you jailbreak a handset.

In addition to the jailbreaking exemption, the FCC announced a few other rules that have less sweeping applicability but are still significant:

• Professors, students and documentary filmmakers are now allowed, for “noncommercial” purposes, to break the copy protection measures on DVDs to be used in classroom or other not-for-profit environments. This doesn’t quite go so far as to grant you and me the right to copy a DVD so we can watch it in two rooms of the house, but it’s now only one step away....

Scientists find most massive star ever discovered

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press Writer
LONDON – A huge ball of brightly burning gas drifting through a neighboring galaxy may be the heaviest star ever discovered — hundreds of times more massive than the sun, scientists said Wednesday after working out its weight for the first time.

Those behind the find say the star, called R136a1, may once have weighed as much as 320 solar masses. Astrophysicist Paul Crowther said the obese star — twice as heavy as any previously discovered — has already slimmed down considerably over its lifetime.

In fact, it's burning itself off with such intensity that it shines at nearly 10 million times the luminosity of the sun.

"Unlike humans, these stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age," said Crowther, an astrophysicist at the University of Sheffield in northern England. "R136a1 is already middle-aged and has undergone an intense weight loss program."

Crowther said the giant was identified at the center of a star cluster in the Tarantula Nebula, a sprawling cloud of gas and dust in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy about 165,000 light-years away from our own Milky Way.

7th-Graders Discover Mysterious Cave on Mars

Clara Moskowitz
Senior Writer
SPACE.com – Mon Jun 21, 5:00 pm ET
A group of seventh-graders in California has discovered a mysterious cave on Mars as part of a research project to study images taken by a NASA spacecraft orbiting the red planet.


The 16 students from teacher Dennis Mitchell's 7th-grade science class at Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, Calif., found what looks to be a Martian skylight — a hole in the roof of a cave on Mars.


The intrepid students were participating in the Mars Student Imaging Program at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University. The program allows students to frame a research question and then commission a Mars-orbiting camera to take an image to answer their question.....

Scientific showman out to dazzle the world with genetics

The Irish Times - Saturday, May 22, 2010
DICK AHLSTROM

When J Craig Venter announced the creation of a synthetic cell this week he was accused of playing God. But stirring up controversy is in the scientist’s DNA

IF EVER the scientific world had a showman, that entertainer would be J Craig Venter. The California-based researcher knows how to do big science – and how to work the media and attract attention.

On Thursday he grabbed global headlines with the announcement that he had created a “synthetic cell”, a living organism built from scratch. He described the resultant organism, a bacterium, as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer”. This was a reference to the fact that its entire genetic blueprint, its DNA, had been assembled rather than grown......

Galileo's finger goes on display in Italy

A wizened finger belonging to Galileo Galilei, the only remaining part of the 17th century astronomer's body, is to go on display in Italy.

By Nick Squires in Perugia
Published: 11:41AM GMT 27 Feb 2009
The finger was removed when the astronomer's body when it was exhumed from his unconsecrated grave and transferred to a mausoleum in a Florentine church in 1737. It is usually on display at Florence's Museum of the History of Science.