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Russia nabs meteorite smuggling ring



Moscow (AFP) Feb 11, 2010
Amid a huge bounty of contraband goods seized recently at a Russian airport, one far-out find floored customs officials: chunks of meteorite.
"On the customs declaration, the smugglers identified it as granite for construction and decoration of office space," Larisa Ledovskikh, a spokeswoman for customs at Moscow's Domodedovo airport, told AFP on Thursday.

"But our officials could see it was clearly not granite!"

The two smugglers -- who also tried to ship out silver antiques, fossils, semi-precious stones, microscopes and old books in the suspect cargo -- were initially charged with making a false declaration on their customs form.

Only after a three-month investigation did officials discover that the mystery lumps were fragments from outer space and the men part of a larger crime ring including experts and scientists, Ledovskikh said.

"They were part of an organized criminal gang. They had worked out a plan in advance to smuggle out of Russian territory and to the Czech Republic... two meteorite chunks, each weighing 100 grams," she said.

The two men were arrested on Sunday and charged with contraband, a sentence that carries a maximum of 12 years in prison in Russia.

And whould you pay extra to hunt down your own dinner?

Would you like to be given a bow and arrow, sent off to the woods and left to fend for yourself as you tried to score a bullseye on a plate of burger and chips that was suspended on a plate with sentinant AI?

And lest face it folks, scientists no longer come up with their own idears... they plagerize ours!

I HAVE killed this thread off!!!

Well we Croydonians didn't get any of "the white stuff." Sulk

Oh I'm sorry to hear that.
I'll keep stum about my petty troubles.

Dan O'Bannon: Sci-Fi writer


Dan O'Bannon was never quite famous, but his name was revered by fans of science-fiction cinema. He wrote Alien (1979) and Total Recall (1990), worked on special effects for Star Wars (1977), and collaborated closely with John Carpenter on his debut film Dark Star (1974), in which O'Bannon also played one of the main characters.


He was a purist, keen to defend the artistic and narrative integrity of his films. He repeatedly fell out with collaborators, responding to a critic's negative comments on Alien with a long letter of agreement. "The script that was committed to the film was self-contradictory, confusing, one-dimensional, clichéd and bargain-basement as science-fiction," he wrote in a letter to Starburst magazine. He blamed the producers.


Most viewers seemed to think Alien worked well enough — the film was an international hit, spawned a franchise, proved enormously influential and currently figures in the Top 50 films of all time, as voted for by the public on the Internet Movie Database website. Its success helped generate interest in O'Bannon's other projects and he might have made more were he a little more ready to compromise his visions.


Born in St Louis in 1946, he studied film at the University of Southern California, where he met John Carpenter. Dark Star began as a student film about four astronauts whose job it is to travel through space blowing up unstable planets. They are accompanied by a pet alien, a beachball with claws. O'Bannon and Carpenter wrote it together and financed the original 45-minute, 16mm version themselves, with Carpenter directing and O'Bannon doing virtually everything else, including acting, editing and production design. There was not much action, but a lot of humour and imagination — the ship's captain is dead, but still conscious in the freezer, and the alien beachball is becoming increasingly belligerent. Carpenter described it as "Waiting for Godot in space". Producer Jack H. Harris put up the money to expand it into a feature film for commercial release.


Carpenter went on to become one of Hollywood's top directors. O'Bannon meanwhile worked on digital visual effects for Star Wars and determined that he would like to do another science-fiction film about an alien on a spaceship, but with the focus on horror rather than comedy and a purpose-built alien rather than a modified beachball.


He and Ronald Shusett co-wrote Alien and they pitched it as "Jaws in space", though O'Bannon said his creature had been inspired by earthy bugs and the life cycle of parasitic organisms. "One thing I realised hadn't been exploited in science fiction movies were the physical aspects," he said. "The real world offered many examples which were extremely loathsome, and I thought, if it's good enough for Mother Nature, maybe it will work on an audience. One review said that watching this movie was like turning over a rock and finding something disgusting. That was a pretty good description of what I was going after."


They almost signed to do it as a low-budget feature with Roger Corman, but Walter Hill got involved as producer, reworked the script and steered it into production at 20th Century Fox. Key changes included changing the sex of the main character, played by Sigourney Weaver. O'Bannon also got one of the most memorable aliens in cinema history, designed by H.R.Giger.


O'Bannon was one of the writers on the cult sci-fi animation anthology film Heavy Metal (1981) and he and Don Jakoby co-wrote Blue Thunder (1983), a hit thriller with Roy Scheider as a police helicopter pilot. There was a spin-off TV series, to which O'Bannon also contributed, though he was unhappy about changes in the original script.


He wrote and directed the zombie horror film The Return of the Living Dead (1985), which again put a heavy emphasis on black comedy. It was a hit, there were several sequels and it retains a passionate following, though it was one of only two films O'Bannon directed. He worked with Jackoby again on the space vampire movie Lifeforce (1985) and the remake Invaders from Mars (1986).


He also continued to work with Shusett, on an adaptation of "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966), a Philip K. Dick story about implanted memories. Shusett had been working on it since before meeting O'Bannon. It was eventually shot as Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger and was a major hit. But O'Bannon fell out with Shusett over the ending and again he was unhappy with the final film.


Other credits include Screamers (1995), another Philip K.Dick story that he adapted. He had been suffering from Crohn's disease for years. He is survived by his wife and son.


Dan O'Bannon, writer, was born on September 30, 1946. He died on December 17, 2009, aged 63

Well I love it. childish of me but...

Well there's one thing disgussing a theroy. But we are a long, long way from putting it into practice. And so far it is a theroy. We haven't even mastered basic cloning

It's alright. I am now getting used to the new system. Why do people feel the need to change things for changes sake?

Bloke looks at womens underwear - or lack of - on the internet at work. Except his screen is facing a camera recording a live news broadcast... Busted...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8500037.stm

Oh, that's a classic!

Is anybody else having the same damed toruble with the redesigned Facebook?

I've "lost" two applications, Knighthood & Superhero city... Grrr

Congratulations...

But the practical is harder.

Well I think this is the future of food production

Mad science? Growing meat without animals
Pork chops or burgers cultivated in labs could eliminate multiple problems.
Winston Churchill once predicted that it would be possible to grow chicken breasts and wings more efficiently without having to keep an actual chicken. And in fact scientists have since figured out how to grow tiny nuggets of lab meat and say it will one day be possible to produce steaks in vats, sans any livestock.

Pork chops or burgers cultivated in labs could eliminate contamination problems that regularly generate headlines these days, as well as address environmental concerns that come with industrial livestock farms.

However, such research opens up strange and perhaps even disturbing possibilities once considered only the realm of science fiction. After all, who knows what kind of meat people might want to grow to eat?


Advantages touted
Increasingly, bioengineers are growing nerve, heart and other tissues in labs. Recently, scientists even reported developing artificial penis tissue in rabbits. Although such research is meant to help treat patients, biomedical engineer Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and his colleagues suggest it could also help feed the rising demand for meat worldwide.

The researchers noted that growing skeletal muscle in labs - the kind people typically think of as the meat they eat - could help tackle a number of problems:

· Avoiding animal suffering by reducing the farming and killing of livestock.

· Dramatically cutting down on food-borne ailments such as mad cow disease and salmonella or germs such as swine flu, by monitoring the growth of meat in labs.

· Livestock currently take up 70 percent of all agricultural land, corresponding to 30 percent of the world's land surface, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Labs would presumably require much less space.

· Livestock generate 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all of the vehicles on Earth, the FAO added. Since the animals themselves are mostly responsible for these gases, reducing livestock numbers could help alleviate global warming.

Need to scale up
Stem cells are considered the most promising source for such meat, retaining as they do the capacity to transform into the required tissues, and the scientists pointed to satellite cells, which are the natural muscle stem cells responsible for regeneration and repair in adults. Embryonic stem cells could also be used, but they are obviously plagued by ethical concerns, and they could grow into tissues besides the desired muscles.

To grow meat in labs from satellite cells, the researchers suggested current tissue-engineering techniques, where stem cells are often embedded in synthetic three-dimensional biodegradable matrixes that can present the chemical and physical environments that cells need to develop properly. Other key factors would involve electrically stimulating and mechanically stretching the muscles to exercise them, helping them mature properly, and perhaps growing other cells alongside the satellite cells to provide necessary molecular cues.

So far past scientists have grown only small nuggets of skeletal muscle, about half the size of a thumbnail. Such tidbits could be used in sauces or pizzas, Post and colleagues explained recently in the online edition of the journal Trends in Food Science & Technology, but creating a steak would demand larger-scale production.

Dark thoughts
The expectation is that if such meat is ever made, scientists will opt for beef, pork, chicken or fish. However, science fiction has long toyed with the darker possibilities that cloned meat presents.

In Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's epic sci-fi satire "Transmetropolitan," supermarkets and fast food joints sell dolphin, manatee, whale, baby seal, monkey and reindeer, while the Long Pig franchise sells "cloned human meat at prices you like."

"In principle, we could harvest the meat progenitor cells from fresh human cadavers and grow meat from them," Post said. "Once taken out of its disease and animalistic, cannibalistic context - you are not killing fellow citizens for it, they are already dead - there is no reason why not."

Of course, there are many potential objections that people could have to growing beef, chicken or pork in the lab, much less more disturbing meats. Still, Post suggests that marketing could overcome such hurdles.

"If every package of naturally grown meat by law should have the text, 'Beware, animals have been killed for this product,' I can imagine a gradual cultural shift," Post said. "Of course, we still have a long way to go to make a product that is even remotely competitive with current products."

But what I am really saying is that St George is a poor choice of patron saint. Now I acknowlage that it is too late to remove the Cross of St George from our national iconography... especially as it is incoperated into the union flag. In fact should we in a multicultral society HAVE a patron saint?

Hang on... because we're a 'multicultural society', you're arguing against the continued use of a patron saint who was born in Israel, married an Egyptian princess and died in Turkey...?

Yes because he probably didn't exist and killing a memeber of an endangered speices is a very BAD excuse for sainthood.