From the BBC: “A cloned human would probably consider themselves to be an individual, a study suggests.”
Well duh.
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Tag: news
I know why the phrase ‘like shining from shook foil’ is in my head — because I was putting some foil over a dish of coronation chicken. More peculiar is the other thing that’s been going around my head this morning:
“Bush and Saddam sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G”.
I think it’s unlikely that either of the Presidents Bush have ever snogged Saddam Hussein, and even if they have, a tree would be an unorthodox venue. But I suppose you never know.
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ARMED POLICE RAID FARCE
As the Evening Standard news-stands put it. Which conjured up an image that I don’t think they intended.
Scientists in Denmark, the US and Canada have all been working on producing a genetically-engineered plant whose flowers will come up red instead of white in the presence of underground explosives. The idea, of course, is that you can use them to to test for the presence of landmines by dropping the seeds from the air and seeing what colour the flowers are when they come up.
Apart from the benefits if the technology works (and the rampant symbolism), this is the kind of project that the genetic engineers needed to come up with at the start of the technology to help sell it to the public. It would take a very hard person, however suspicious they were of science, to oppose a cheap new mine-detection technology.
Instead, of course, despite all the publicity about how GM products were going to end third-world hunger, reinvigorate medicine and who knows what else, the first major products were herbicide-resistent crops, allowing farmers to use even more toxic chemicals in the quest for ever-more intensive crop production. Personally I think that most of the opposition to GM food is incoherent, illogical and based entirely on prejudice, but I still can’t feel very positive about Round-up Ready soybeans.
via Metafilter; photo from and presumably © missouriplants.com
BBC London, reporting on some building developments which are being held up by protests from English Nature, announced that the three key bird species were ‘Dartmouth Warbler’ (actually Dartford Warbler), Woodlark and Nightjar. But the really amusing bit was that the Nightjar was illustrated with film of some Wigeons. It’s always slightly unnerving when journalists report on a subject which you know something about; it makes you realise how much crap they must be talking the rest of the time.
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noozpapers
One of the minor joys of the brave new electronic age is the ease of buying the UK papers abroad. Not because I desperately want to keep up with the British news – I mean, really, whatever the fuck David Cameron has just said about the NHS can wait a couple of weeks, by which time everyone will have forgotten about it anyway – but because it’s nice to be able to sit in a cafe somewhere with a caffe solo and read the paper. I suspect that’s the key truth for anyone wanting to run a newspaper; no one is buying it to learn what’s happening in the world. We have TV, radio and internet for that. What we want is something that will keep us occupied, entertained, and very gently stimulated for about three-quarters of an hour. In the long run, incredible ground-breaking scoops that shake governments are less important to your circulation figures than a good crossword and some mildly amusing columnists.
None of which offers much incentive for journalists to do the useful job of keeping politicians on their toes.