A cancer-proof mouse, which can survive being injected with any number of cancer cells, has been discovered by US scientists. The discovery of the resistant mouse could pave the way for future gene or drug therapies if the mechanism by which it fights cancer can be understood.

Researchers at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina have now bred a colony of 700 cancer-proof mice from the resistant male they stumbled across while doing other experiments.

More research for ANT THING.

Lillix: Avril Lavigne develops ability to asexually reproduce; four identical Avril-buds break off her body and form own band.

More ant stuff (this doesn't really apply to what I'm working on, but it's cool nonetheless):

A battalion of 120 military robots is to be fitted with swarm intelligence software to enable them to mimic the organised behaviour of insects.

The project, which received funding this week from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is aimed at developing ways to perform missions such as minesweeping and search and rescue with minimum intervention from human operators.

The first online computer game designed to accommodate a million simultaneous players will be previewed on Friday.

The game, called Rekonstruction, is not scheduled for commercial release until autumn 2004. But some of the challenges involved with building it will be revealed at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara, California.

A customisable form of copyright license will soon be available internationally through the Creative Commons, a non-profit organisation based in the US. The organisation already offers US artists a way build their own copyright agreement.

Each custom-made license is also designed to incorporate an identifying piece of code that can be stored on a central database operated by the Creative Commons. This tag should make it simple for other artists to search for a piece of music or video that they can legally incorporate in their own work.

It's ironic that masked wrestler turned politician The Great Sasuke has been accused of horsing around by appearing in a dirty movie because, according to Asahi Geino (5/1-8), he's hung like a stallion. Perhaps his endowment has something to do with how the vote-catching grappler earned the moniker The Great?

The Great Sasuke's appearance in a video surfaced while he was campaigning for the Iwate Prefectural Assembly seat he eventually won in an April 12 poll.

(Go here for the earlier Great Sasuke story.)

Lawmakers in Georgia on Tuesday moved one step closer to passing a bill that could give voters a chance to resurrect a discarded state flag that bears a giant emblem of the pro-slavery Confederacy.

South Central Los Angeles has been removed from the map of LA, in an effort to rid the area of its international image of gang violence and poverty.

Members of the Los Angeles City Council passed the move, which has taken many residents by surprise, unanimously.

A contraceptive vaccine that makes dogs temporarily sterile could soon be available. But critics say the cost of repeated visits to the vet and human unreliability mean spaying or neutering should still be the first choice to avoid unwanted puppies.

Human liver cells harbouring the hepatitis C virus can be selectively targeted and destroyed by a new gene therapy approach, according to new research.

The key is a genetically-engineered "suicide" gene, delivered aboard a harmless virus, which is triggered only when it enters a hepatitis-infected cell.

The Faint with Les Savy Fav & Schneider TM, Henry Fonda Theatre, Hollywood, CA, Sunday, April 20, 2003

1. The Faint appear to be the band of choice for high school kids (of both sexes) who are really into eyeliner. At 23, I am officially one of the oldest people at the show, at least for the first hour after the doors open. The kids get there early and slouch against the wall, or huddle in packs on the steps like Dickensian orphans, if Dickens wrote Oliver Twist in 1977, or else they run around giggling in matching too-tight Yeah Yeah Yeahs T-shirts, looking for extra tickets. Will looks at the kids and says there's going to be a Conor Oberst lookalike contest at the halfway point of the show--and if you get that joke, you could probably win.

2. No Death Nurses tonight, but I get the feeling a lot of the girls here really are Death Nurses, just not wearing the uniform. Off-duty Death Nurses. (Death Nurse is a term coined by Will Brooks and James Renfro, denoting the particular brand of Goth girl who favors black nurse-style dresses that hit about mid-thigh, usually worn in conjunction with fishnets and big chunky boots, etc.) Nonetheless, we do make a new anthropological discovery: the Death Lawyer, the male version of the Death Nurse. Death Lawyers wear tight black button-up shirts with a tie, usually black also, and black hair that's been carefully sculpted to look dishevelled. Most Death Lawyers are skeletally thin, androgynous males, though a few females were spotted as well. It's worth noting that female Death Lawyers look a lot like male Death Lawyers.

3. Schneider TM--"from Berlin," says the singer, as if it wasn't obvious--are the musical equivalent of a Volkswagen. It's all very streamlined and efficient, and it'd probably sound great in a car commercial. The band gives off a very "This is the time on Sprockets when we dance" vibe. Though Schneider TM plays what I have to assume is meant to be dance music, all the cool kids stand perfectly still, only really coming alive for a droidpop cover of the Smiths' "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out." Somehow, hearing that ridiculously, melodramatically romantic song being sung by a German guy though some kind of robot vocoder ("Isn't that the droid that scared C-3PO in Cloud City?" asks Will) sums up the whole atmosphere of this show--a weird confluence of naked emotion and chilly electronics.

4. Les Savy Fav look like a band of ex-male models fronted by a deranged bum suffering from DTs. Their singer is this flabby, balding guy with a huge beard, wearing fucking sweatpants for christ's sake, and he's just a total rockstar. I'm finding it hard to remember what the band actually sounds like, but I remember pretty clearly the singer running out into the audience to steal some girl's cell phone and call his parents in the middle of a song. And then feeding chunks of chocolate Easter bunny to audience members from his mouth.

5. And The Faint just shake the place down, coming on like New Order jacked up on mutant amphetamines and corporate paranoia. Though their music is by no means intellectually empty, they've managed to subvert the style/substance paradigm--their style has become the substance. It'll be interesting to see how/if they evolve from Danse Macabre, but tonight they're superheroes for an audience that places as much importance on symbols as on what they represent. (If you haven't already, watch the video for "Agenda Suicide" by design firm MK12.)

Recent workplace obsessions:


Sub PoP Bionic, the breakdancing Homie

Snood, horrible addictive monster game

Barbecued pork from Chin Chin in Burbank

A Japanese research team announced Wednesday it has developed a more convenient technique for storing and delivering genes by literally creating "DNA books" using genes extracted from animal cells.

The technique involves attaching the genes themselves to paper and binding them into a book, said Yoshihide Hayashizaki, project director at the Genome Exploration Research Group of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN).

Why do people experience religious visions? BBC Two's Horizon suggests that in some cases the cause may be a strange brain disorder.

Controversial new research suggests that whether we believe in a God may not just be a matter of free will. Scientists now believe there may be physical differences in the brains of ardent believers.

Hooray: Info on new Wes Anderson movie.

Fell asleep to train sounds last night. I haven't even seen railroad tracks in this city, but the industrial rumble of trains, muffled and warmed by distance, sometimes punctuates the city's pre-dawn quiet.

The soft thrum of machines in the dark is the sound of home. A train rattling through the night, miles away; an electric fan agitating the air in a bedroom; a dishwasher gurgling and murmuring in a darkened kitchen: for a moment I forget where I am, and once more I know what the future holds.

As the sky shifts from black to a dull, dirty orange, the morning's first helicopter calls out its staccato song, signalling an end to the certainty of night.

Reviews of new records by The White Stripes, The Black Keys and Idlewild now up at Flagpole.com.

As well as a mini-essay-review on the new Essential Clash, Willie Nelson and Sly and the Family Stone.

Read my words, for they will heal you.

Stroll by with a fever, and it will beam red.

Singapore's latest weapon to combat the deadly SARS virus is a high-tech thermal-imaging thermometer that automatically checks the temperature of air travelers as they step off the plane.

A happy Yellow Alert day to you all.

The US Government has lowered a national terror alert introduced in March on the eve of the war in Iraq.

It downgraded the high "orange" alert to "yellow" on Wednesday in recognition that the war was "winding down", officials said in Washington.

Greek riot police have fired tear gas at protesters in violent clashes close to a key European Union summit in Athens.

Reporters said some of the demonstrators threw petrol bombs and red paint at police, after breaking away from a large anti-war protest.

An avalanche of unwanted post could be released upon an unsuspecting victim using nothing more than an internet connection and some simple code, a team of US researchers says.

The attack, devised by Aviel Rubin at Johns Hopkins University and Simon Byers and David Kormann at AT&T Labs, involves automatically subscribing a victim to hundreds of thousands of catalogue request forms that are available online.

Elocution lessons are helping staff working at call centres in India neutralise their accents and make their sales pitch more effective.

Increasing numbers of Western firms are turning to so-called off-shore service centres to handle customer calls or sell new services on their behalf.

Once a true medical oddity, children with adult diabetes are becoming commonplace. Doctors blame the twin evils of too much food and too little exercise and fear a tragic upswing in disastrous diabetic complications as this overweight generation reaches adulthood.

At hospitals everywhere, boys and girls who range from chubby to hugely obese are being diagnosed in unprecedented numbers with type 2 diabetes. Most are barely into their teens. Some are as young as 6.

This may be related to the ant stuff.

Strong smells can trigger a change in mood in women and even influence their behaviour, a study suggests.

Saddam Hussein has become an unlikely internet celebrity, with memorabilia connected to the former Iraqi leader appearing for sale on the web.

More than a thousand items pertaining to Saddam Hussein are for sale on the auction website, eBay, including banknotes and even a fork supposedly from one of his many palaces.

The biological code crackers sequencing the human genome have said they have finished the job - two years ahead of schedule.

Their announcement came less than three years after a "rough draft" was published to worldwide acclaim.

Gourd fragments unearthed in Peru have pushed back clear evidence of religion in the Americas by a thousand years, to 2250 BC.

The two key pieces are incised with an image of the fanged "staff god", a major deity in later Andean cultures. They were discovered at a burial site in the Patavilca River valley and dated using carbon isotopes.

An angry crowd stoned to death an Indian man accused of practicing witchcraft in a southern Mexico town with a long tradition of religious violence.

The man, Domingo Shilon Shilon, was also hacked with machetes Sunday by the crowd in San Juan Chamula, a majority Catholic township on the outskirts of the colonial city of San Cristobal, 460 miles (735 kms) southeast of Mexico City.

Who is that masked man? One of Japan's newest politicians. A professional wrestler fought his way to victory in local assembly elections under his ring name and wearing his trademark mask, and has vowed the mask will not leave his face even after he enters the staid halls of Japanese politics.

"This is my face," the wrestler -- known as "The Great Sasuke" -- was quoted by the Nikkan Sports newspaper as saying of his black and white full-face mask with bright scarlet streaks and golden wings by the eye holes.

A Web site that pokes fun at Saddam Hussein's minister of information became such a global hit that its operators had to temporarily pull the plug Friday as they scrambled for more powerful computers.

To help pay for the upgrades, the site will sell T-shirts, mugs and barbecue aprons featuring choice quotes from Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, who maintained with a straight face that Iraqi troops were routing the Americans even as U.S. tanks busted through Baghdad.

The site, WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com, features quotes as well as obviously doctored photos showing al-Sahhaf boasting of the Confederacy's successes during the Civil War and Darth Vader's victories in the "Star Wars" movies.

A fun night out last night, for a change. Two lessons learned:

1) The jukebox at The Short Stop in Echo Park is cooler than you or I will ever be.

2) Wild Turkey and ginger ale is a wonderful drink, as long as you don't have to operate heavy machinery or generally stay awake.

Best of the week!

Comic: StormWatch: Team Achilles #10 by Micah Ian Wright, Whilce Portacio & Sal Regla (DC/Wildstorm)

Song: "Ball and Biscuit" by The White Stripes, from Elephant

Book: Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson (More on this later.)

Movie-type thing: The new Matrix Reloaded trailer

Quote: "I do believe this city is freakin' ours." --Capt. Chris Carter of Watkinsville, GA

I'm just surprised the administration hasn't made a "dead man's hand" reference yet.
And also here.

More fun with ants:

"He has your eyes," says Lisa, her voice rising at the end of the sentence, turning it into a question: "Do you still love me?" Because it was her idea in the first place, and even before she had the idea it was her fault. When we realized we couldn't conceive, Scharfe checked us both out, and I was working fine. So of course he has my eyes, because we flipped a coin and it came up heads. I always call heads.

We haven't named him yet, because Scharfe said it probably wasn't a good idea to get too attached, but privately I call him Roger, my dad's name. The machine he's in--whatever it's called, the incubator--they had to bring in special because the one they had in the hospital wasn't big enough. It fit Roger's head, and that was it. They put him in that small one just for a second, and he looked out at me from under the dome, his soft head pressed up against it, his two giant watery eyes bulging, and he looked like a balloon with my face printed on it, overinflated and ready to burst.

They've got him in the bigger machine now, and Scharfe says we probably don't want to see what's happening. Lisa can't leave her bed anyway, so I spend most of my time with her, watching Wheel of Fortune on the corner-mounted TV with the sound off. I'm surprised Lisa isn't dead. They recommended that Lisa carry Roger to term--it would feel more real, they said, and we could avoid the questions if we wanted, everybody wondering where the baby came from if Lisa never showed. We'd heard about the problems, the giant clones born five years ago, but Scharfe said they'd worked the kinks out. He said the chances were one in a million, but, you know, someone has to win the lottery. He had to cut Lisa open two months early, and Roger was already thirty-five pounds. He was born a wet, rubbery, formless mass, his mouth open but silent.

Scharfe says it won't be long now, they're just trying to make Roger's final days as painless as possible. That's good, I guess. I want to go down there and see him again, see if his eyes are still open. I remember learning in Sunday School years ago about the angels that came to earth because they lusted after the human women, and the women gave birth to these giants that ruled the land. Nobody agreed whether the giants were good or bad. I guess it doesn't matter. Lisa'll be able to go home soon, maybe next week, and then we can talk. I guess I'll miss Roger, but they've still got my DNA there in their freezer or wherever they keep it. Maybe next time it won't be so bad.

I'm interested in ants today.

Squabbling parties within the European Union could learn a lot about how to get along from the invasive Argentine ant population. Researchers have discovered an enormous "supercolony" of these ants that extends across 6,000 kilometers (3,728 miles) of Southern Europe.

A newly discovered quirk of primate cell biology suggests that monkeys - and humans - are nearly impossible to clone with current techniques.

"There's a molecular obstacle that stops the technology from working in primates," says Gerald Schatten, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania. "Charlatans who claim they have cloned humans clearly don't understand the biology."

Bad News:

Congressional Republicans, working with the Bush administration, are maneuvering to make permanent the sweeping anti-terrorism powers granted to federal law enforcement agents after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, officials said Tuesday.

The move is likely to touch off strong objections from many Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress who believe that the Patriot Act, as the legislation that grew out of the attacks is known, has already given the government too much power to spy on Americans.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- One of a pair of cloned bantengs, a rare species of Asian cattle, has been euthanized because it was abnormally large, its creators said on Wednesday.

A compilation of bizarre MP3s, available until April 15.

WASHINGTON, April 8 (Reuters) -- A pair of banteng calves born last week were cloned from an animal that died more than 20 years ago, researchers said on Tuesday -- adding they hoped to rescue more endangered animals using cloning.

While searching for the Vampire Boy video game I found this craziness from Wales:

A teenage vampire fanatic accused of killing a pensioner and drinking her blood was arrested two months earlier when he asked a policeman to bite his neck, a court has heard.

Old news, but Jesus Christ.

This just in: Janeane Garofalo is now more un-American than George Clooney. After uttering at least two "anti-Americanisms" and having more than 200 people pledge to boycott her future work, Garofalo has edged out Clooney, Martin Sheen and Susan Sarandon as the single most offensive celebrity, according to the "Famous Idiot" Web site.

Famous Idiot's list of true patriots includes such luminaries as Kid Rock, Charlie Daniels and noted bowhunter/occasional musician Ted "The Nuge" Nugent.

Scientists have created a drug which they say could protect people from the effects of a nuclear attack.

The controversial UK Biobank is an ambitious project designed to produce a mass database to help in tackling many diseases such as cancer, heart disease and Parkinson's.

The organisers expect to begin looking for a representative sample of 500,000 middle-aged people aged 45-69 to volunteer a DNA sample and confidential health information next year.

Fascinating interview with Jack White of The White Stripes:

JW: I like when people limit themselves. I love when artists do something with very little opportunity. I love forced creation. I used to own a record by William S. Burroughs, called Break Through In Grey Room. I always thought that was so great, just him in a room with a recording machine, cutting up the tape. I love that notion, anyone saying "I'm going to set up rules for myself and live by them." You find that in the great designers and the great architects and the great painters and the great songwriters, I think.

O: Do you find exceptions to that?

JW: Very much so, but it's appealing to know that people had standards. I think people are always attracted to that. If you were touring the house of some old famous person, and he never liked any lightbulbs in the house, and he only lit the house by candle... People are so enthused by that. "Oh, that's interesting that he had these rules." It makes you feel like this guy lived by certain notions that propelled him to be happy and to create. I like that idea. It at least symbolizes that that person is working toward something. When you see flagrant excess and rule-breaking and chaos in songwriting and art nowadays, you think that it's not really coming from anything, that they're just getting lucky.

Go Dawgs, I guess.

Saw Phone Booth this weekend (more interesting cinematography from Requiem for a Dream genius Matthew Libatique, a solid performance from Colin Farrell, but it's so short and ultimately both so ludicrous and unambitious as to not merit much discussion), and noticed a pretty weird feeling among my fellow moviegoers: there was a definite strain of sympathy in the audience for the sniper, and at least one guy was pretty actively rooting for the sniper. Is this indicative of a hatred for a) Colin Farrell, b) New York publicists, c) New Yorkers in general, d) guys with idiotic chin-only goatees, d) guys who think about cheating on their wives with Katie Holmes, e) guys who have the opportunity to cheat on their wives with Katie Holmes but don't, f) some combination of the above, or g) something else I haven't even considered? And would this sympathy have been present if the movie had been released last fall, as intended?

Mr. Hassiotis goes to Austin:

8 a.m. I'm on my Greyhound back to Houston, where I'll uneventfully wrap up my trip, except for this: I'm watching another Keanu Reeves movie. On a bus. Can you guess which one? Yes, the driver decided to show Speed. On a bus. I don't know, maybe he thought he was funny. Maybe the movie spoke to him, really tells it how it is. But I tell you this: it is not a good movie. And two Keanu movies in under five hours? In their own small way, the terrorists - at least the kind that show Speed - won on that Texas bus.

Chris's misery is our entertainment.

It's noisy in Glendale. The winds are back today, winds of a force so great that walking down the street becomes nearly parodic, and they set off a rattle in my bathroom vent and whoosh through the living room windows. All day there's been the constant racket of someone trying to break in, and it's just unnerving. And really cold.

Yesterday afternoon two helicopters hovered in the sky over Glendale, facing each other at a distance of about fifty yards, for twenty minutes. I couldn't tell if they were news choppers or police or what, but their whap-whapping drowned out every other sound. The sound of helicopters overhead produces a gut-level fear reaction in me, and I doubt I'm the only one. They're like giant carrion birds, circling, scanning for signs of rot. There's been a marked increase in helicopters above Glendale over the last few weeks.

I want quiet.

Good news for fans of the panserbjorne:

Philip Pullman, often described as the most dangerous author in Britain, has set the publishing world alight by announcing a surprise addition to his bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy.

Can't wait. Article also mentions that Sam Mendes, director of American Beauty and Road to Perdition, might be helming the film version(s). Hmm.

My roommate worked on this, so watch it:

Pirates of the Caribbean trailer

Plus it comes out on my birthday. Happy birthday, me.

Is it just my imagination, or is Johnny Depp playing Capt. Jack Sparrow as Hunter S. Thompson in a Long John Silver costume?

It came from Ideaspace:

'Imagine that, sometime around 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe every kind of novel from the canon of the future but the nurse romance. Not merely from the critical canon, but from the store racks and library shelves as well. Nobody could be paid, published, lionized, or cherished among the gods of literature for writing any kind of fiction other than nurse romances...Instead of "the novel" and "the nurse romance," try this little Gedankenexperiment with..."short fiction" and "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story."

'Suddenly you find yourself sitting right back in your very own universe.'
-Michael Chabon, from his introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

'Fuck superheroes, frankly. The notion that these things dominate an entire genre is absurd. It's like every bookstore in the planet having ninety percent of its shelves filled by nurse novels. Imagine that. You want a new novel, but you have to wade through three hundred new books about romances in the wards before you can get at any other genre. A medium where the relationship of fiction about nurses outweighs mainstream literary fiction by a ratio of one hundred to one. Superhero comics are like bloody creeping fungus, and they smother everything else.'
-Warren Ellis, from his Old Bastard's Manifesto

Two great music videos:

"Hurt" by Johnny Cash, directed by Mark Romanek

"Go with the Flow" by Queens of the Stone Age, directed by Shynola.

When not near a magnetic pull, so-called MR fluids appear as gray, unextraordinary oily liquids. But apply a magnetic force and the fluid instantly becomes the texture of thick clay. By pumping the fluid into an electronic sensing system that activates a magnetic field, it can be used to power robots, stabilize buildings and smooth bumpy automobile rides.

A grey blob oozes down the side of a laboratory beaker. It's heading for the table, but before it gets there a low hum fills the air. Someone just switched on an electromagnet. The goop stiffens, quivers, then carries on oozing only after the hum subsides.

Posted by Larry Young over at the Matt Fraction forum. This is seriously awesome--like the Jetsons version of that corn starch-and-water thing we did in High School physics. I have this feeling that MR fluids have something to do with the screenplay I just finished writing. Just have to figure out what.