A rat is impressing American scientists with her extraordinary intellect.
Hobbie-J has been dubbed the smartest rat in the world after its NR2B gene, which controls memory, was boosted as an embryo. The rodent can remember objects three times as long as its smartest peers and can better solve complicated puzzles like mazes.
Darwin looked forward to a time when Europeans and Americans would exterminate those he termed “savages”. Many of the anthropomorphous apes would also be wiped out, he predicted, and the break between man and beast would then occur “between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon; instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla”. He took a sanguine view of genocide, believing it to be imminent and inevitable. “Looking to the world at no very distant date,” he wrote to a friend in 1881, “what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”All very interesting, and (I assume) kind of annoying to Richard Dawkins.
I wonder if McKee can explain the relative dearth of good movie ideas coming out of Hollywood for the last 5 to 10 years.Rule One: Drop names shamelessly. McKee tells us that he once received a doctor recommendation from his friend John Cleese, bummed a cigarette from Toni Morrison, and corrected his pal Paul Haggis when he confused two genres over lunch. But my favorite is his anecdote about telling Stephen Hawking (whom he calls “Hawkings”) that he has never read a book by the scientist but is fascinated by the Big Bang. I imagine Hawking rolling quickly away.
Rule Two: Never express a scintilla of doubt. McKee is insightful about some things, especially with regard to structure, but his relative knowledge or ignorance of a subject in no way affects the manner in which he discusses it. He holds forth on politics (“Terrorism is a police problem and that’s all it is”) and the theater (“there is very little crime drama onstage”) as confidently as he does on the Incitement Incident.
Rule Three: Start in a rage and end with poetry. In Adaptation, a wildly imaginative movie that first sends up, then celebrates, and ultimately condescends to McKee, the teacher advises the screenwriter that any flawed movie can be saved with a “big finish.”
Alarmed by a rise in people jumping to their deaths in front of trains, some Japanese railway operators are installing special blue lights above station platforms they hope will have a soothing effect and reduce suicides.Sadly, suicide is still a popular response to difficult times in Japan, although I bet everyone wishes people would choose a less public method:
As of November, East Japan Railway Co has put blue light-emitting diode, or LED, lights in all 29 stations on Tokyo’s central train loop, the Yamanote Line, used by 8 million passengers each day.
There’s no scientific proof that the lights actually reduce suicides, and some experts are skeptical it will have any effect. But others say blue does have a calming effect on people.
Suicide rates in Japan have risen this year amid economic woes, and could surpass the record 34,427 deaths in 2003.
Last year, nearly 2,000 people committed suicide in Japan by jumping in front of a train, about 6 percent of such deaths nationwide.
The smart money is on the level of solar contribution being somewhere between the two extremes. In other words, both solar activity and industrial gases play a role. There is credible scientific work that ascribes up to a third of current warming to solar influence. Studies show that the Earth’s temperature mirrored solar activity until the 1980s. Then the number of sunspots stabilised but the temperature continued to rise. In other words, something overtook the Sun as the primary driver of the Earth’s temperature. That is generally thought to be industrial gases.
Now the test can be made. It is time for all sides to put away the rivalry and begin to work together. Observations must be made, experiments performed and all data must be published, not cherry-picked. This golden opportunity to reach consensus must not be squandered.
Above all, we must not let any downturn in temperatures be used as an excuse by reluctant nations to wriggle out of pollution controls. Just as certainly as the solar activity has gone away, so it will return. If we have done nothing in the interim to curb man-made global warming, we will be in worse trouble than ever.
Even though the signs of water were clear and definitive, the Moon is far from wet. The Cabeus soil could still turn out to be drier than that in deserts on Earth. But Dr. Colaprete also said that he expected that the 26 gallons were a lower limit and that it was too early to estimate the concentration of water in the soil.Well, they'll just have to send some astronauts there to check it out.
About the only thing you forgot to mention about Deveny is how she manages to combine screeching obnoxiousness with hair tossing smugness, to the detriment of all our digestion...Hmm. I can't find the comment now that said reading her provoked as many laughs as Schindler's List.
Catherine Deveny is the Pauline Hanson of the intelligent left. A complete embarrassment of flippant stereotypical arrogance based on pseudo analysis...
I have no problem with undergraduate humour, and when I first read her comments I thought she was a junior writer, but at her age it's just embarrassing.
