Spidergoat-silk + Human Skin = (nearly) Bulletproof Flesh

Bioartist Jalila Essaïdi attempted to create bulletproof human skin by implanting transgenic spider-silk (extracted from a spider-goat, of course) with human skin. Essaïdi was hoping for skin that could stop a 2.6g projectile at 329 m/s (the performance standard for bulletproof vests, apparently), but didn't quite make it.

By implementing this bulletproof matrix of spider silk produced by transgenic goats in human skin I want to explore the social, political, ethical and cultural issues surrounding safety in a world with access to new biotechnologies. Issues which arise on the basis of ancient human desire for invulnerability. It is legend that Achilles, the central character of Homer’s Iliad was invulnerable in all of his body except for his heel. Will we in the near future due to biotechnology no longer need to descend from a godly bloodline in order to have traits like invulnerability?

2.6g 329m/s (via Medgadget)

Spidergoat-silk + human skin = (nearly) bulletproof flesh

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/7DBPlWFspF0/spidergoat-silk-human-skin-nearly-bulletproof-flesh.html

Science Saturday: Nuclear Energy, Melting Ice Caps, And Human Adaptation

I was on Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday this week, talking with Jessa Gamble, a science journalist and the author of Siesta and the Midnight Sun, a book about how culture and biology effect the way we experience time.

Science Saturday: Nuclear energy, melting ice caps, and human adaptation

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/iOctwQVJlXc/science-saturday-nuclear-energy-melting-ice-caps-and-human-adaptation.html

DDoS versus human rights organizations

Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet Law and Society has released a new report on the use of Distributed Denial of Service attacks by censors and oppressive governments against human rights organizations. It's pretty grim.

Our research suggests that:

• DDoS attacks against independent media and human rights sites have been common in the past year, even outside of elections, protests, and military operations. With recent highly publicized DDoS attacks on Wikileaks, and "Operation Payback" attacks by "Anonymous" on sites perceived to oppose Wikileaks, we expect these attacks to become more common.

• Independent media and human rights sites suffer from a variety of different types of cyber attacks, including filtering, intrusions, and defacements in addition to DDoS attacks, and those attacks interact with each other in complex ways.

• Independent media and human rights sites suffer from both application DDoS attacks, which exhaust local server resources and can usually be mitigated by a skilled system administrator; and network DDoS attacks, which exhaust network bandwidth and can usually only be mitigated with the help of a hosting provider at considerable expense.

• Mitigating DDoS attacks against independent media and human rights sites will likely require moving those sites closer to the core of the Internet: inside the small number of major ISPs, websites, and content distribution networks* (CDNs) that have the experience and resources to defend against these attacks, particularly network DDoS attack

2010 Report on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks

DDoS versus human rights organizations

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/qpIVWdPcrDg/ddos-versus-human-ri.html

Data mining the intellectual history of the human race with Google Book Search

Harvard's Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden and colleagues have been analyzing the huge corpus of literature that Google digitized in its Book Search program, and they're uncovering absolutely fascinating information about our cultural lives, the evolution of language, the secret history of the world, censorship and even public health. It's all written up in a (regwalled) paper in Science, "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books":

When the team looked at the frequency of individual years, they found a consistent pattern. In their own words: "'1951' was rarely discussed until the years immediately preceding 1951. Its frequency soared in 1951, remained high for three years, and then underwent a rapid decay, dropping by half over the next fifteen years." But the shape of these graphs is changing. The peak gets higher with every year and we are forgetting our past with greater speed. The half-life of '1880' was 32 years, but that of '1973' was a mere 10 years.

The future, however, is becoming ever more easily ingrained. The team found that new technology permeates through our culture with growing speed. By scanning the corpus for 154 inventions created between 1800-1960, from microwave ovens to electroencephalographs, they found that more recent ones took far less time to become widely discussed.

The cultural genome: Google Books reveals traces of fame, censorship and changing languages (via Beyond the Beyond)

 

• Google Book Search will never have an effective competitor - Boing ...
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• Google Book Search and privacy for students - Boing Boing
• Boing Boing: Why Publishing Should Send Fruit-Baskets to Google
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Data mining the intellectual history of the human race with Google Book Search

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/TZdhjPX72A0/data-mining-the-inte.html

Human rights organizations around the world condemn Wikileaks censorship

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Katitza Rodriguez has rounded up the responses of many human rights organizations around the world to the commercial and governmental attacks on Wikileaks. It coincides with EFF's new Say No to Online Censorship campaign.

• On December 10, International Human Rights Day, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights addressed this issue in her statement: "While it is unclear whether these individual measures taken by private actors directly infringe on states' human rights obligations to ensure respect of the right to freedom of expression, taken as a whole they could be interpreted as an attempt to censure the publication of information thus potentially violating Wikileaks' right to freedom of expression."

• Amnesty International ~ "Freedom of expression is an internationally recognized human right that limits the power of the state to prohibit the receipt and publication of information. The burden is on the state to demonstrate that any restriction is both necessary and proportionate, and does not jeopardize the right to freedom of expression itself."

• Human Rights First ~ "This issue transcends the particulars of the Wikileaks case. No matter what you think of Julian Assange, anyone who cares about Internet freedom should be concerned that in its zeal to cripple Wikileaks, governments and companies are taking steps in this case that pose a threat to fundamental rights."

• Reporter without Borders ~ "We stress that any restriction on the freedom to disseminate this body of documents will affect the entire press, which has given detailed coverage to the information made available by Wikileaks, with five leading international newspapers actively cooperating in preparing it for publication."

Human Rights Organizations Worldwide Decry Attacks on Freedom of Expression

 

• 2600 Magazine condemns DDoS attacks against Wikileaks censors ...
• MPAA: ACTA's censoring firewalls will help governments avoid ...
• Wikileaks.de domain-owner's house raided over publication of ...
• Wikileaks 'ousted' from Amazon - Boing Boing
• Wikileaks reveals secret blacklist behind proposed Great Firewall ...

Human rights organizations around the world condemn Wikileaks censorship

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Vowx77zMx0Y/human-rights-organiz.html

Body Works: Human Body Quiz

You remember a little ditty about the thigh bone being connected to the hip bone, which was in turn connected to the backbone. But what else do you remember about human anatomy? The answers to this quiz are all inside of you -- literally.

Body Works: Human Body Quiz

Backlink: http://feeds.howstuffworks.com/~r/DailyStuff/~3/r1pNFn3-iwM/human-body-quiz.htm

White House commission will review human research

Today, I am wearing my happy-with-the-government face. Why? Because somebody, somewhere in Washington, seems to have realized that the past actually has an impact on the present.

White House commission will review human research

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/1LsfVQvAwxM/white-house-commissi.html