The ancient peoples of Mexico and Central America loved to drink chocolate. But their beverage was nothing like the modern one - it was a frothy, bitter brew of fermented, roasted and ground cacao seeds, often spiced with chile peppers, more like mole poblano than Swiss Miss. New archaeological findings by John S. Henderson of Cornell and Rosemary A. Joyce of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues push the date of the first use of cacao back to about 1100 B.C., 500 years earlier than previously known. What’s more, the researchers suggest that this early beverage was something different again - a fermented beer made from cacao pulp, not seeds. Dr. Henderson and Dr. Joyce have been digging for years at Puerto Escondido, a village in the Ulúa Valley in what is now Honduras. They have found elegant pots, cups and other pieces of pottery and have developed a theory that the pottery was probably used on ceremonial occasions to serve cacao beverages. ‘Cacao was the social grease of Mesoamerica,’ Dr. Henderson said. But this theory was based only on circumstantial evidence, he added. ‘We were thinking we didn’t have much potential for chemical confirmation.’ […]
OSLO– The world should quickly ban cloning of humans and only allow exceptions for strictly controlled research to help treat diseases such as diabetes or Alzheimer’s, a U.N. study said on Sunday. Without a ban, experts at the U.N. University’s Institute of Advanced Studies said that governments would have to prepare legal measures to protect clones from ‘potential abuse, prejudice and discrimination’. ‘A legally-binding global ban on work to create a human clone, coupled with freedom for nations to permit strictly controlled therapeutic research, has the greatest political viability of options available,’ the study said. ‘Whichever path the international community chooses it will have to act soon — either to prevent reproductive cloning or to defend the human rights of cloned individuals,’ said A.H. Zakri, head of the Institute, which is based in Yokohama, Japan. Almost all governments oppose human cloning and more than 50 have legislation outlawing cloning. But negotiations about an international ban collapsed in 2005 because of disagreements over research cloning, also known as therapeutic cloning. Research cloning can produce tissues that are a perfect genetic match of a person and so help grow cells to treat diseases such as strokes, spinal […]
SAN FRANCISCO — Intel Corp. plans to roll out its newest generation of processors Monday, flexing its manufacturing muscle with a sophisticated new process that crams up to 40 percent more transistors onto the company’s chips. The world’s largest semiconductor company expects to start shipping 16 new microprocessors — which also boast inventive new materials to stanch electricity loss — for use in servers and high-end gaming PCs . The most complex chips being launched Monday have 820 million transistors, compared with the 582 million transistors on the same chips built using the current standard technology. Intel’s first chips, introduced in the early 1970s, had just 2,300 transistors. Advances in chip technology occur as smaller and smaller lines are etched onto the chips. Intel’s new chips shrink the width of those lines to an average of 45 nanometers, or 45 billionths of a meter, compared to 65 nanometers on the previous generation of chips . The smaller circuitry allows Intel to squeeze more transistors — the building blocks of computer chips — onto the same slice of silicon. That accelerates performance and drives down manufacturing costs. The transistors on the new chips are so small that […]
WASHINGTON — A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy. Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people’s private communications and financial information. Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act. Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S. The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans’ privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering. The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people’s private e-mails and phone calls without a court order between 2001 and 2007. Some lawmakers, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appear reluctant to grant immunity. Suits might be the only way to […]
A technical breakthrough has enabled scientists to create for the first time dozens of cloned embryos from adult monkeys, raising the prospect of the same procedure being used to make cloned human embryos. Attempts to clone human embryos for research have been dogged by technical problems and controversies over fraudulent research and questionable ethics. But the new technique promises to revolutionise the efficiency by which scientists can turn human eggs into cloned embryos. It is the first time that scientists have been able to create viable cloned embryos from an adult primate – in this case a 10-year-old male rhesus macaque monkey – and they are scheduled to report their findings later this month. The scientists will also demonstrate that they have been able to extract stem cells from some of the cloned embryos and that they have managed to encourage these embryonic cells to develop in the laboratory into mature heart cells and brain neurons. Scientists who know of the research said it was the breakthrough that they had all been waiting for because, until now, there was a growing feeling that there might be some insuperable barrier to creating cloned embryos […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
