Even if the Raelian baby Eve is a clone, chances are it will not be healthy, writes Roger Highfield.

Scientists are reluctant to label 2003 the Year of the Clone until independent tests confirm the Raelian cult's claim in Europe that it has produced the first cloned baby.

Even if genetic tests do back the claim, research with animals suggests there is a high probability the child is likely to have been harmed in some way by cloning.

Aside from the usual reservations about claims made by a cult that contends that space travellers created the human race by cloning themselves, animal research suggests it should be hard to clone successfully, according to Robin Lovell-Badge, of the National Institute of Medical Research in London.

Efforts to clone our closest relatives, the non-human primates, have been unsuccessful. "I would also like to see a thorough report on the health of this baby because of the issues raised by animal cloning, where it looks like the vast majority, even if born looking relatively normal, develop serious complications," he said.

Dr Lovell-Badge condemned the announcement by human cloning company Clonaid as a "circus trick" but said many scientists would be ambivalent about the work if it turned out not to be a hoax.

At the intellectual level, they would be intensely curious about how the cult had succeeded.

Yet at the visceral level, they would be revolted, given the risks to the child, said to be a clone of her 31-year-old mother, and fearful about the fallout for legitimate research on therapeutic cloning, where very early cloned human embryos are dismantled for cells to grow a wide range of tissues for treatments.

Dr Lovell-Badge said that the wider ethical issues are less clear-cut. "Personally, I don't have a great problem with clones wandering around, given we have identical twins, but I can understand why people find it a step too far."

This year, a fertility clinic in Italy, an embryology laboratory business in Kentucky and the Raelians announced they were on the verge of overseeing the births of cloned humans. The attempts have been made possible by the "nuclear transfer" technique developed in Edinburgh to clone Dolly the sheep five years ago.

The nucleus of a cell - such as a skin cell - is inserted into an unfertilised egg that has had its own nucleus, containing its original genetic recipe in the form of DNA, removed. The resulting "reprogrammed" egg is given an electric shock to persuade it to develop into an embryo, a clone of the donor of the nucleus, which is then implanted into a woman. Genetic tests can show whether the DNA of the cell donor and the clone are identical. "It would have to be done independently, but if genetic fingerprinting shows that they are the same, that would be pretty much conclusive," said Dr Lovell-Badge.

As an added check, he said, a second test can reveal links between the clone and the recipient egg, which should share the DNA from the power packs of cells - mitochondria.

Unlike the first attempts to create a test tube baby, the dangers of cloning are well known. Published work suggests that only about two clones in every 100 are actually born but the success rate was probably lower because failures tended to go unreported.

Only about one cloned embryo in 10 appears to develop normally when inspected under the microscope. These would be selected for implantation, although this simple test would not detect a Down's syndrome embryo, let alone one with subtle genetic disorders.

Most embryos are defective, even those resulting from normal intercourse. Most do not implant and many are lost before a pregnancy is established. Dr Brigitte Boisselier, the director of Clonaid, admitted to five miscarriages in its cloning effort but, given the low success rate of animal work, that is an incredible success rate.

Of the three or four foetuses that may survive their birth, scientists predict that many will be unusually big. Most will have enlarged placentas and fatty livers. They would probably bear at least one distinctive sign of their unusual history: a very large navel, a remnant of the oversized umbilical cord that inexplicably develops during cloning.

Of the few clones that make it to term, about half will suffer problems. Some fatal flaws are obvious. Cloned cows have been born with head deformities, such as a bulldog-like squashed face or head. Even when clones appear normal, sometimes they are not. They will likely die in the first few weeks from heart and blood vessel problems, underdeveloped lungs, malformed arteries to the lungs, diabetes or immune system deficiencies.

At the heart of these problems is genetic "imprinting", a poorly understood molecular mechanism through which about 50 genes inside sperm and egg cells are turned on or off in development.

William Muir, a professor of genetics at Purdue University in Indiana, said: "There are things that are not ethical to do, like experimenting with humans."

Arthur Caplan, the chairman of the department of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said: "The chance of getting a healthy baby is probably 50-50. No reputable scientist is anywhere near this project."

But Sony and its partners believe that if they can coordinate those processors at maximum efficiency, the PS 3 will be able to process a trillion math operations per second -- the equivalent of 100 Intel Pentium 4 chips and 1,000 times faster than processing power of the PS 2.

The generic name for this technology is RFID, which stands for radio frequency identification. RFID tags are miniscule microchips, which already have shrunk to half the size of a grain of sand. They listen for a radio query and respond by transmitting their unique ID code. Most RFID tags have no batteries: They use the power from the initial radio signal to transmit their response.

...

It becomes unnervingly easy to imagine a scenario where everything you buy that's more expensive than a Snickers will sport RFID tags, which typically include a 64-bit unique identifier yielding about 18 thousand trillion possible values. KSW-Microtec, a German company, has invented washable RFID tags designed to be sewn into clothing. And according to EE Times, the European central bank is considering embedding RFID tags into banknotes by 2005.

That raises the disquieting possibility of being tracked though our personal possessions. Imagine: The Gap links your sweater's RFID tag with the credit card you used to buy it and recognizes you by name when you return. Grocery stores flash ads on wall-sized screens based on your spending patterns, just like in "Minority Report." Police gain a trendy method of constant, cradle-to-grave surveillance.

In parthenogenesis, an unfertilised egg keeps two sets of chromosomes and begins developing as if it had been fertilised. Some insects and reptiles can reproduce this way but even though an electric or chemical stimulus can induce parthenogenesis in mammals, the resulting embryos die after a few days.

And that, according to its proponents, is the beauty of the technique as far as stem cells are concerned: it produces embryos that could never become human beings. So destroying these embryos to obtain stem cells would avoid the ethical concerns that have led to restrictions or bans on embryonic stem cell research in many countries.

Thirty years of research culminate in a 'Eureka!' moment for a French biologist working to regenerate severed nerve endings, reports Kim Willsher in Paris.

French scientists have discovered a way to regenerate damaged spinal cords in a breakthrough that might eventually allow paralysed people to walk again.

They have succeeded in regrowing the broken spinal cords of mice after identifying and eliminating two proteins that create scar tissue. This had prevented nerve endings from repairing themselves.

When the scientists, from the French National Health and Medical research institute, manipulated the genes of the mice so that they did not produce these proteins, they discovered that the spinal cord regrew within weeks, enabling the animals to run around again.

"It's a very important breakthrough because for the past 100 years researchers working on the regeneration of the central nervous system have been unable to crack this problem. Nobody envisaged being able to repair the system because for a very long time they thought it was something inherent to the fibres themselves that meant they couldn't grow back and restore movement.

"Today, after six years of research, we are sure that we can make them work again if we can stop these two proteins from being produced."

The key will be to find ways to inhibit the two proteins that stop the cord from repairing itself.

"We've proved that it is possible, but it's going to take at least five years to find out if the technique can be applied to humans. We can produce mutant mice but not mutant people, so we have to find other ways of tackling these proteins," said Prof Privat.

"I cannot be 100 per cent sure it will work on humans but I think the chances are very reasonable. It should work but until we do it we won't be sure."

The next stage involves developing a "genetic treatment" that could be applied to a damaged spine to halt the scarring process and stimulate the regrowth of the nerves. The researchers are also looking at whether the regeneration of the neurones can be jump-started in older injuries, enabling paralysed people such as Christopher Reeve, the actor, to benefit.

Prof Privat believes that the technique could also be used to treat brain injuries and degenerative conditions such as Parkinson's disease. "The neurons in the brain are very similar to those in the spinal cord," he said.

The team identified two key proteins, Vimentine and Glial Fibrillary Acidic Protein (GFAP). These proteins, they discovered, were produced in large quantities after a spinal injury and formed a scar, described as an impenetrable wire fence, around the damaged nerve endings, preventing messages being transmitted to the brain.

Amazingly, scientists are becoming increasingly confident that they will be able to create black holes on demand, in quantity, using the new atom-smashers due to come online in the next five years. Some estimates suggest that the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN -the acronym is in French) will be able to create an average of one black hole each second. LHC will bombard protons and antiprotons together with such a force that the collision will create temperatures and energy densities not seen since the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. This should be enough to pop off numerous tiny black holes, with masses of just a few hundred protons. Black holes of this size will evaporate almost instantly, their existence detectable only by dying bursts of Hawking radiation.

"But wait", I hear you say, "Has anyone considered that creating artificial black holes might not be the best idea?" The idea of creating black holes in the laboratory has to give one pause. I mean, how can anyone resist the urge to imagine future headlines like "Artificial Black Hole Escapes Laboratory, Eats Chicago" or some such thing? In reality, there is no risk posed by creating artificial black holes, at least not in the manner planned with the LHC. The black holes produced at CERN will be millions of times smaller than the nucleus of an atom; too small to swallow much of anything. And they'll only live for a tiny fraction of a second, too short a time to swallow anything around them even if they wanted to.

In northern Nigeria, where Mohammed is from, over 90% of the villages have no electricity. His invention, which he won a Rolex Award for (and $100,000), is a refrigerator than runs without electricity.

Here's how it works. You take a smaller pot and put it inside a larger pot. Fill the space in between them with wet sand, and cover the top with a wet cloth. When the water evaporates, it pulls the heat out with it, making the inside cold. It's a natural, cheap, easy-to-make refrigerator.

So, instead of perishable foods rotting after only three days, they can last up to three weeks. Obviously, this has the potential to change their lives. And it already has -- there are more girls attending school, for example, as their families no longer need them to sell food in the market.

On the near horizon are a slew of new pharmaceuticals we call memory management drugs. Some of these aim to improve memory safely. Others are designed to help dim or to erase the memories that haunt people suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.

...brain fingerprinting. This is a real technology being tested by the FBI. It could become part of the key evidence to overthrow the murder conviction of Jimmy Ray Slaughter, who is facing the death penalty in Oklahoma for assault and murder. It works by picking up the P300 electrical wave emitted by the brain when the subject is shown images relating to a crime. Its strength is that the P300 wave is involuntary - the suspect can't affect the outcome. It is said to be much more accurate than the polygraph.

Hypersonic sound. This is a focused beam of sound used to deliver marketing noises or other messages in a very personal way. The sound is inaudible unless you walk into its narrow path.

Yes. It does have fun possibilities. But it's also invasive. It's sudden and it acts inside your head, as if you're hearing something through headphones. And Forbes magazine reported last September that American Technology Corporation, the company that invented hypersonic sound, is installing this in soda machines right now on Tokyo's streets. As you walk past, you'll suddenly hear inside your head the sound of the ice cubes dropping into the glass and the soda making that "psst" can-opening noise. You are going to be startled, you won't know where the sound came from and then you'll realise, wow, I was just hijacked by an advertisement.

It's not an expensive technology - you can buy hypersonic sound generating devices for about $600 - and they will get cheaper. If anyone wanted to destabilise other people they could do it really easily by making them think they were hearing voices in their heads. The victims would be unable to distinguish whether those sounds or voices had an external or internal source. Again the law is a big black hole on cognitive liberty issues like this.

Sanofi-Synthelabo called SR141716 that blocks or reduces the effects of marijuana. It is in Food and Drug Administration clinical trials. The National Institute on Drug Abuse published findings in 2002 showing that this "anti-drug" reduces the effects of smoked marijuana by up to 75 per cent. The US government is serious about this effort to make not only the US but also the rest of the world drug-free, supposedly. It is now shifting this metaphor from "war" to "treatment". And in 2002, the Office of National Drug Control Policy even coined the term "compassionate coercion", saying that people who use illegal drugs are often in denial, so the government needs to act in this compassionately coercive way to get them the treatment that the government says they need.

Howe and his colleagues have calculated that with 17 grams of antimatter -- barely enough to hold in your hand -- a robotic space probe could get to Alpha Centauri in 40 years. To get there in a decade, the rocket would need at least four times as much antimatter.

"Interstellar flight requires quantities of antiprotons that we can't even imagine producing at this point," acknowledges Howe, whose firm is largely funded by the NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts. But time might change everything; he notes that in the early 1940s, there were only "micrograms of enriched uranium (for nuclear bombs) available to the world.

"At that time, if you said you'd need a ton of it, it would have seemed impossible. But nowadays, we have so many tons of it, we've quit making it."

And at Stanford University in California an experiment might be done later this year to create mice with human brains.

Scientists feel that, the more humanlike the animal, the better research model it makes for testing drugs or possibly growing "spare parts," such as livers, to transplant into humans.

has raised troubling questions: What new subhuman combination should be produced and for what purpose? At what point would it be considered human? And what rights, if any, should it have?

Last November they printed a 20-layer circuit board only 200 microns thick, the smallest ever.

They want to print complete digital devices—MP3 players, PDAs, cellphones—in one fell swoop, rather than assembling a gadget’s body and then adding its electronic components. Engineering professor John Canny is integrating polymers—plastics able to conduct electricity—into a 3-D inkjet that could someday print out electronic devices in one simple step, bypassing the timely fabrication of circuit boards and other components.

The lower volume of materials allows for tight patterns with very little dead space. The company estimates that the skinny boards will show up in gadgets by 2007, but competition from Hewlett-Packard and others experimenting with circuit printing may bring the boards to stores earlier.

Microscopic inkjet-based fuel-injection systems are already an indispensable component of the U.S. Navy’s experimental pulse detonation engine (PDE), which is designed to harness the energy of a violent fuel explosion and power a jet aircraft to Mach 3.

The automated system, which Khoshnevis calls Contour Crafting, consists of an overhanging carriage on which a nozzle slides back and forth, streaming layers of quick-setting concrete into walls [illustration, right]. “It’s much like printing on paper,” the engineer says of his $30,000 brainchild. “But unlike an inkjet print head that just moves sideways, our nozzle can move in all directions, like old vector plotters.” He is partnering with architects, construction companies and real-estate specialists to create a Contour Crafting center at U.S.C., and he predicts that the system will soon erect a 2,000-square-foot home in a single day, including the roof and conduits for plumbing and electricity. Later this year he plans to demonstrate a prototype capable of putting up 500-square-foot emergency shelters.

digital aerosols—thermal print heads inside inhalers that squirt tiny, perfectly uniform droplets—hit the market late this year. The aerosol, being developed by the Australian company InJet Digital Aerosols and being licensed to Canon, looks like a battery-powered inhaler. It delivers a mist of droplets between two and 20 microns in diameter, small enough to be absorbed through the lungs and in some cases directly into the bloodstream. InJet expects its inhaler to deliver drugs faster than pills or patches and with less pain than needles.

Growing replacement body parts in the lab is a grand idea, but researchers haven’t had much luck doing it. For one thing, manually stitching together billions of cells to form a nose or a liver involves labor so tedious that it’s been impossible to finish the job before the cells die. A perfect task for the you-know-what, thought Clemson University chemical engineer Thomas Boland in 2001 when he scrounged scrap inkjet printers from campus surplus and pressed them into service as cell-spitting robots.

By rewriting software drivers, modifying the output tray to drop a tiny notch with each pass of the print head to build up 3-D structures, and swapping ink for hamster ovary cells and growth factor, Boland introduced the inkjet to the world of tissue engineering.

To date, he’s used his printers to create half of a cat’s heart that beat in a petri dish...

[*Baldwin faints dead away*]

and tubes of cells that he hopes to one day coax into viable blood vessels. Constructing the vascular system is a crucial hurdle he’ll have to clear to meet his ultimate goal, which is to print custom organs on demand. In the next decade, Boland says we’ll see the printing of simpler tissues, including bits of cartilage for plastic surgery and cell sheets for skin grafts.

...recall the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment, in which a cat is both alive and dead until we observe it (and the wavefunction - where all probabilities exist at once - collapses). To answer the questions posed by this experiment, Kaku tells us, "physicists have been forced to entertain two outrageous solutions; either there is a cosmic consciousness that watches over us all, or else there are an infinite number of quantum universes." - Michio Kaku

Cyborg Liberation Front

As with science fiction, the scenarios we imagine reflect and reveal who we are as a society today. For example, how can we continue to exploit animals when we fear the same treatment from some imagined superior race in the future?

But the purpose of the Yale conference was direct, with no feinting at other agendas. The crowd there wanted to shape what they see as a coming reality. From the first walking stick to bionic eyes, neural chips, and Stephen Hawking's synthesized voice, they would argue we've long been in the process of becoming cyborgs. A "hybrot," a robot governed by neurons from a rat brain, is now drawing pictures. Dolly the sheep broke the barrier on cloning, and new transgenic organisms are routinely created. The transhumanists gathered because supercomputers are besting human chess masters, and they expect a new intelligence to pole-vault over humanity—in this century.

If he's right, we can't afford to renounce a role in a new intelligence's emergence or cede the chance to imprint it with cultural values. One day, that first cybernetic, genetically spliced, or wholly artificially created being will step into the town square of democracy. What then of the seminal words of our society: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights...

[See also Transhumanist politics]

Equality will be moot, and enforcing it could reasonably be seen as unjust to beings with categorically different or greater abilities.

...a good many of the transhumanists and extropians (a libertarian subset concerned with improving human nature through technology) are feverishly anticipating what they call the
Singularity, the moment when technologies meld and an exponentially advancing intelligence is unleashed.

The result, the team reports in tomorrow's issue of Nature, is that whatever was affecting the photons seems to have happened nearly instantaneously and that according to their calculations, the phenomenon influencing the particles had to be traveling at least 10,000 times faster than light. Given Einstein's standard speed limit on light traveling within conventional spacetime, the experiments show that entanglement might be controlled by something existing beyond it.

Tesla intended for the tower to demonstrate how the ionosphere could be used to provide free electricity to everyone without the need for power lines.

Immediately after his death, a component of the particle beam projector that may have been found among Tesla's possessions is said to have disappeared. Russian spies reportedly raided the room and the safe containing the schematics of the "death ray". The FBI never found any of the important parts of the schematics nor the trunk with the prototype.

"The eight patterns divide into two main categories. The first four are patterns of fidelity, by which we recognize the repetition of units within the same context, and the second four are patterns of magnitude, by which we recognize the same unit repeated in multiple contexts.

"What this all means is that the basic faculty of pattern recognition equips us to compare multiple units for their appropriateness within a certain context, effectively selecting the best tool for the job, and then to apply our chosen unit to as wide a range of contexts as possible, effectively discovering the largest number of jobs that tool is good for.

"Basically humour is all about information processing, accelerating faculties that enable us to analyse and then manipulate incoming data."

Clarke lists the patterns that are active in humour as positive repetition, division, completion, translation, applicative and qualitative recontextualization, opposition and scale.
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"The patterns reflect vitally important cognitive frameworks. Those of fidelity provide us with a basic arithmetical toolkit, while those of magnitude provide everything required to develop syntactical systems. Pattern recognition is in many ways pattern cognition, since the promotion of patterns through the reward systems associated with humour has massively accelerated humankind's ability to order and manipulate multiple units for multiple uses. Put like that, there are few better ways to express human ingenuity and adaptability."

Modern science...spending decades outlining all the things that babies couldn't do because their brains had yet to develop. They were unable to focus, delay gratification, or even express their desires. The Princeton philosopher Peter Singer famously suggested that "killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all."

While scientists and doctors have traditionally assumed that babies are much less conscious than adults - this is why, until the 1970s, many infants underwent surgery without anesthesia...

Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a young child will by no means enter into it