- Ranking scientists | Physics
An analysis of the citation network leads to an alternative way to quantitatively assess the impact of a scientist's work. - Your Next Body Is Growing In a Lab Right Now | Gizmodo
At TEDMED, I witnessed video clips showing science I never knew was so advanced. Dr. Anthony Atala has been growing human tissue and organs, in a lab, for nearly two decades. He's even printed kidneys from a cell-stuffed inkjet printer. - Google Flu Shot Finder Goes Live | Medgadget
Google has released a new tool to help Americans find local pharmacies and clinics offering seasonal and H1N1 flu shots. So far the database is far from complete and Google hopes providers will share information about availability once they get word of the service. - EEG leads to murder conviction | Mind Hacks
Wired UK has a fantastic investigative article concerning a recent case in India, where, for the first time, an 'EEG lie detector' was used to convict a 23-year-old woman of murder. - Aimee Mullins: Racing on Carbon Fiber Legs: How Abled Should We Be?
November 15, 2009
Link dump for 2009.11.15
From the four corners of the web:
The comments in the article "your next body is growing in a lab right now" reminds me of something significant which I haven't seen addressed anywhere. Namely, about the idea that clinical immortality will lead to an uncontrollable population explosion. People who think that seem to have forgotten about menopause.
ReplyDeleteEither menopause won't be cured, in which case a woman will still only have a roughly 25 year breeding period, and thus won't be spawning babies into perpetuity; or else it will be cured, in which case women will have no pressure to have children young, and career minded ones will not have their first child until they're 80 or something. And clinical immortality doesn't necessarily mean "will live forever" - only that old age and degenerative diseases are no longer a factor.
Either way, this could still lead to a potential minor boost in population growth rates, if you ignore the fact that healthier, longer-lived people generally have fewer children and most industrialized nations already have a negative population growth rate (at least among the native-born; some still have positive growth rates, but this is usually due directly to immigration and indirectly due to the fact that young immigrants tend to have a lot of children after they arrive)