• What we said: This month, six breast cancer patients filed suit against Myriad Genetics, a company that owns both the patent on two genes that are associated with an increased risk for breast cancer and ovarian cancer and the patent on testing to measure those risks. Some of these women are suing because they can’t afford the $3,000 fee Myriad charges to determine their risk for breast or ovarian cancer. Some of them are suing because, thanks to Myriad’s patent, they can’t get second opinions about whether they should have their breasts or ovaries removed - no one else is allowed to perform another test for them.
• - Editorial, May 24, 2009
•  What happened: A federal judge struck down Myriad Genetics’ gene patents, deciding they involved a “law of nature” and had been “improperly granted.” The case could reshape intellectual property laws and have a big impact on biotech companies. About 20 percent of genes in the human body have been patented.
• What’s next: An appeal, of course. Expect this one to reach the Supreme Court. The high court should strike it down. Genes are the common property of humanity, not the private fiefdoms of individual companies.

• A tiny island claimed for years by India and Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal has disappeared beneath the rising seas, scientists in India say.
• The uninhabited territory south of the Hariabhanga river was known as New Moore Island to the Indians and South Talpatti Island to the Bangladeshis.
• Recent satellites images show the whole island under water, says the School of Oceanographic Studies in Calcutta.
• Its scientists say other nearby islands could also vanish as sea levels rise.

• A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same. 
• In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States.
• “Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests,” said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. “When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain extra weight.”

Sceptic challenges guru to kill him live on TV - Times Online

• When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s response was different. “Go on then — kill me,” he said.
• Mr Edamaruku had been invited to the same talk show as head of the Indian Rationalists’ Association — the country’s self-appointed sceptic-in-chief. At first the holy man, Pandit Surender Sharma, was reluctant, but eventually he agreed to perform a series of rituals designed to kill Mr Edamaruku live on television. Millions tuned in as the channel cancelled scheduled programming to continue broadcasting the showdown, which can still be viewed on YouTube.
• First, the master chanted mantras, then he sprinkled water on his intended victim. He brandished a knife, ruffled the sceptic’s hair and pressed his temples. But after several hours of similar antics, Mr Edamaruku was still very much alive — smiling for the cameras and taunting the furious holy man.

uncertaintimes:libraryland: archivedigger: aminotes:

Stone Age jottings. The writing on the cave wall by Kate Ravilious | New Scientist

French caves are known for their prehistoric rock art. But also marked on the walls around the paintings are 25 symbols that have appeared again and again in French sites across 25,000 years of prehistory. Early signs suggest that many of these symbols crop up in other parts of the world too, leading some to wonder if symbolic communication arose with early humans.

To von Petzinger and Nowell, it demonstrated that our ancestors were indeed considering how to represent ideas symbolically rather than realistically, eventually leading to the abstract symbols that were the basis of the original study. (…)

Does this suggest that these symbols travelled with prehistoric tribes as they migrated from Africa? Von Petzinger and Nowell think so. Davidson, on the other hand, who has identified 18 of these symbols in Australia, is unconvinced that they have a common origin, maintaining that the creative explosion occurred independently in different parts of the globe around 40,000 years ago. Instead, he thinks the symbols reveal something about a change in the way people thought and viewed their world, which may have emerged around this time. “I believe that there was a cognitive change, which suddenly put art into people’s heads,” he says. (…)

That suggests we might need to rethink our ideas about prehistoric people, von Petzinger says. “This incredible diversity and continuity of use suggests that the symbolic revolution may have occurred before the arrival of the first modern humans in Europe.” If she is right, it would push back the date of the creative explosion by tens of thousands of years.”

Related: Prehuman Mariners?

• Today’s cryonics scientists believe that this future may be a mere 100 years away. Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., the world’s largest cryonics company, charges US $150,000 to freeze and maintain a body and $80,000 for a head, typically paid for with a life insurance policy.
• Ralph Merkle, a nanotechnology expert and a director at Alcor, believes the best approach lies in developing nanorobots that can repair the body at the cellular level before thawing. They would fix or replace diseased and deteriorated tissue as well as the tissue fractures and denatured proteins that result from the freezing process itself. The revival process would, ideally, restore the physiology of dead persons to a pristine level, not only undoing the damage of whatever disease or accident killed them but also enabling them to return smarter and healthier than they ever were in life.
• ”We’re talking about a fundamentally more powerful medical technology than we have today that will continue the evolution of the concepts of life and death,” says Merkle, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford.
• Before the body is cooled to –196 degrees Celsius (the temperature at which liquid nitrogen becomes a gas), the person’s blood is replaced by a cryoprotective solution that doesn’t freeze at those temperatures. Technically, the body and cryoprotective solution are not frozen but vitrified — that is, they solidify into a glassy substance that’s free of ice crystals and the damage they can cause.
• The first step in the future regeneration process would remove this vitrified liquid, letting physicians use the circulatory system as a series of tunnels through which they could run nanomedical robots, nanomaterials and a removable high-speed fiber-optic network connecting to an external supercomputer.
• ”It takes about 10 to the 25th bits to store the molecular structure of the brain,” says Merkle. ”The processing power to repair the brain alone might be 10 to the 37th; switching operations — the equivalent of 100 million copies of today’s fastest supercomputer running flat out for three years. With Moore’s Law doubling computer power every year, we’ll have that kind of computational power in a single supercomputer in about 26 years,” he adds.
• ”Give it another 10 years and the price will drop from $100 million to $100,000. Somewhere around 2050, that much computational power will be readily available to individuals.” And it doesn’t matter if Moore’s Law slows down, Merkle says: ”A person at the temperature of liquid nitrogen can literally wait centuries.”

• Just a few months into 2010, and Mother Nature has delivered a slew of costly and deadly natural disasters. From the catastrophic Haiti and Chilean earthquakes to the U.S. blizzard that descended on Washington, D.C., last month, which was mostly just inconvenient by comparison, 2010 is already above average in terms of natural-disaster casualties.
• In comparison to previous years, the number of casualties from natural disasters in 2010, which is already well above 200,000, is outside the norm. Yet as in other disastrous years, the high toll this year is due largely to a single event.
• Over the decade from 2000 to the end of 2009, the yearly average was 78,000, according to the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR). For the 1990s, the average was 43,000, and the 1980s was 75,000. Disaster experts say the rise in tragedy is at least partly due to increases in urban populations.

• The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) must close at the end of 2011 for up to a year to address design issues, according to an LHC director.
• Dr Steve Myers told BBC News the faults will delay the machine reaching its full potential for two years.
• The atom smasher will reach world record collision energies later this month at 7 trillion electron volts.
• But joints between the machine’s magnets must be strengthened before higher-energy collisions can commence.
• The Geneva-based machine only recently restarted after being out of action for 14 months following an accident in September 2008.

Hacked Mattel Brain Toy Delivers Painful Electric Shocks for Thinking

• A toy that reads your brain waves to manipulate a foam ball sounds fun — until said toy begins manipulating other things, too. Like your body’s pain receptors. Doesn’t sound too thrilling to us, but a few geeks apparently thought it’d be a great idea.
• According to GeekoSystem, some folks at Harcos Laboratories took Mattel’s Mindflex and hacked it to deliver a painful electric shock to the user. Strap the device on your head, and challenge yourself not to think — not even a little bit. If your brain is a little active, you’ll get a little shock. The more activity inside your head, the more intense of a shock you’ll feel. If you’re into this kind of thing, there’s a step-by-step how-to on the Harcos blog. Attempt at your own risk.

It was an experiment that didn’t set out to demonstrate how mind control techniques used by cult groups can work effectively in practice. But that’s one of the results from  a behavioral study done to test whether elderly people isolated together could so completely convince themselves they were young again that their bodies actually would begin to morph ‘backward’ in resonance .

What Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer wanted to know was whether the body clock of a group of men in their 70s and 80s could be re-set to 1959 by their collective mindset.

After just a week, those in this experimental group (compared with a control group of similar aged men) measured significant physical and mental changes in a range of areas:
—They had less arthritis;
—More joint flexibility;
—Improved posture and gait;
—Better hearing and eyesight;
—Sharper minds and better performance on mental tasks;
—Elevated spirits and optimism about life.

Pentagon-Backed Venture Aims for ‘Google Underground’

• The Department of Defense already has omnipresent eyes in the sky, underwater and, of course, on the ground. It’s only when you start going underground that the surveillance powers of the Pentagon begin to wane — at least until now.
• Just last month, the Pentagon’s risk-taking research arm, DARPA, announced plans for a program called ‘Transparent Earth’. They’re spending $4 million this year on preliminary plans for a digital, 3D map that would display “the physical, chemical and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 kilometer depth.”
• But Geospatial Corporation is already doing it. The company, started in 2005 by longtime water-pipeline manufacturer Mark Smith, uses a proprietary gadget called  ‘Smart Probe’ to map deep earth via underground pipes. The company’s probe can be inserted into pipes as small as 1 1/2 inches, and then travel their length while taking super-speedy coordinates — 800 per second — and saving them onto a USB key. The probe is removed, the data extracted, and a 3D map of the underground region is created. The probe can travel through pipes that are empty, or contain fluid or gas.

(nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide!)

• The 11th annual “Mad Scientist” Future Technology seminar from 20 – 23 January 2010 addressed the challenge of blended S&T surprise. Specifically, it brought together a dynamic group of scientists, science fiction writers, futurists, academicians and students from the private sector and government to look into the future and explore ideas about the “blending” of science and technology in ways that might challenge the United States. This executive summary provides an overview of the judgments, insights and implications from that seminar.

Robot wars, out of control nanotech, EMP bombs/guns, dark webs, Mad Scientist futures, all the good stuff.

Antarctic Glacier Has Five-story Blood-red Waterfall of Primordial Ooze

There is a five-story, blood-red waterfall pouring slowly from the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valley. Its back story, at Atlas Obscura, is simply remarkable:

Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist without heat, light, or oxygen, and are essentially the definition of “primordial ooze.” The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color. A fissure in the glacier allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.