Next week when the book’s finished.
Virus “harnessed to kill cancers”
The virus lacks a gene viruses normally use to disguise themselves so they can sneak into the cell unnoticed.
Normal cells can recognise they are under attack by the modified virus and commit suicide to prevent it from replicating and infecting other cells.
Cancer cells are programmed differently and resist suicide at all costs.
This “selfishness” on the cancer’s behalf allows the engineered virus to replicate within the cancer cells and spread through the tumour tissue.
New scans of some of the original film shot on the Apollo 11 mission have been made available at the Project Apollo Image gallery. 
Images identified with the prefix AS11-40 are now seen for the first time in their clearest and most accurate presentation to date, and are a result of recent work by Johnson Space Center to digitally scan original Apollo film. The process involves removing each original film roll from a double-freezer, allowing it to thaw, then digitally scanning each frame using an Oxberry adapted HR-500 long roll film scanner.
Today Stephen Hawking dropped by the Seventeenth International Conference on Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, and had this to say:
The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing, and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics isasymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary, and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.
And here’s an easy version of that to hold the rest of us until his whole paper’s published somewhere.
…Here was one other moment that made me laugh, from the page showing abstracts for talks during the plenary session:
The last few years have seen the techniques of loop quantum gravity applied to a growing number of problems. They have been used to compute the entropy of various sorts of black holes, including those with non-minimally coupled matter, for which the entropy is not proportional to the area. Perhaps more importantly, loop quantum gravity has given us a clear {it picture} of the quantum geometry of the horizon, which accounts for the microscopic degrees of freedom responsible for black hole entropy. There are tantalizing connections to Hod’s work on quasinormal modes, but these remain mysterious. Combined with traditional ideas on quantum cosmology, loop quantum gravity has led to newinsights on how quantization can eliminate the singular behavior of geometry at the big bang – perhaps with testable consequences. Predictions of Lorentz symmetry violation may also be experimentally testable, but these remain controversial. Finally, the dynamics of the theory is being studied with the help of spin foam models. My talk will survey all this work with a bare minimum of technical details.
Yes, please, keep those to a minimum! (clutches head)
And further down the abstracts page — “cosmic censorship”?? What the heck is that? (sigh) One more thing to research…
How far in or out of synch are the guys Teresa Nielsen Hayden talks about here as regards our European colors, I wonder? And do we have our own version of this shadowy force?
…Damned if I’m going to wear what colors they tell me, though. It’s happened before that I’ve refused to buy anything new for a few years until the colors sorted themselves out into ones that (for example) didn’t turn me into a large walking stalk of asparagus. If it needs to happen again, well, so be it.
Find out. And have a kebab while you’re waiting.
They have more to say, obviously, but once again I’m reduced to “Ooooo.”
“It tells the tale of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and their quest for the Holy Grail. A chorus line of dancing divas and knights, flatulent Frenchmen, killer rabbits and one legless knight are featured.”
(“It’s only a model.”)
(“Sssh!”)
Wonder what Omi would make of this…
“The warrior monks of China’s Shaolin temple have applied to trademark their name in more than 80 countries, Chinese state media says.
“The monks, famed for their martial arts skills, want to stop their image being used to sell products across the world.”
The first and roughest version of the Kingdom in Twilight trailer was out and linked to here, but (it turns out) iMDB jumped the gun in releasing it: so I’m removing the links. Sorry, all.
“The Dirty Fecker, a 24-foot motor launch, was towed safely to Dun Laoghaire Harbour in the early hours of this morning after breaking down off Greystones, Co Wicklow while on a fishing trip.”
And yes, “fecker” is Irish for the word you’re probably thinking of.
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