Saturday, April 6, 2013
Friday, April 5, 2013
Eye for an Eye Until We're All Blind
One obstacle to overcoming mental afflictions is righteousness in its most hideous form: retribution. Forgiveness is not a divine act or a favor that you bestow on someone. It's salvation for your own small self on the way to becoming your big self. If eye for an eye worked as a preventative measure against crime, we'd be in paradise by now.
Right?
Surgical Paralysis Ordered in Saudi Arabia as Punishment for Teenage Assault
Spine-for-a-spine punishment has mother 'frightened to death'
reSaudi police stand guard outside the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia,.
By STEVEN NELSON for US News April 4, 2013
Ali Al-Khawahir, 24, is awaiting court-ordered surgical paralysis in Saudi Arabia for an assault he committed when he was 14 years old, according to news reports.
Al-Khawahir has reportedly spent 10 years in prison since stabbing a friend in the spine during a fight. The wound left his friend paralyzed. The Saudi legal system allows eye-for-an-eye punishments.
The convicted man's mother told Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat that the family is seeking help raising $270,000 in "blood money," which in Saudi Arabia can be requested by a crime's victim – or victim's family in cases of murder – in exchange for punishment.
"We don't have even a tenth of this sum," she said, according to a translation by The Guardian.
"Ten years have passed with hundreds of sleepless nights," his mother told Al-Hayat, according to the English-language Saudi Gazette. "My hair has become grey at a young age because of my son's problem. I have been frightened to death whenever I think about my son's fate and that he will have to be paralyzed."
Amnesty International condemned the sentence as "outrageous" in a statement released this week. "Paralysing someone as punishment for a crime would be torture," said Ann Harrison, the organization's Middle East and North Africa deputy director. "That such a punishment might be implemented is utterly shocking."
Tooth extractions, said Amnesty, have also been ordered in Saudi Arabia.
Israeli news website Ynet reports that 13 years ago a Saudi hospital gouged out an Egyptian man's eye as punishment for an acid attack that injured another man. A similar sentence for an Indian man six years later was set aside after international outrage.
If victims do not seek "blood money" or perpetrators cannot afford to pay the amount requested, the sentence is carried out.
Saudi Arabia's legal system is a perpetual object of scorn. In March, seven men were executed for committing jewelry heists and armed robberies. One of the men said he was 15 at the time he was arrested, claimed he was tortured into confessing and said the defendants did not have legal representation during court proceedings.
Monday, April 1, 2013
The Computerized Cell as Warrior
Biological Computer: Stanford Researchers Discover Genetic Transistors That Turn Cells Into Computers
By Aaron Sankin for Huffingtonpost.com
Researchers at Stanford University announced this week that they've created genetic receptors that can act as a sort of "biological computer," potentially revolutionizing how diseases are treated.
In a paper published in the journal "Science" on Friday, the team described their system of genetic transistors, which can be inserted into living cells and turned on and off if certain conditions are met. The researchers hope these transistors could eventually be built into microscopic living computers. Said computers would be able to accomplish tasks like telling if a certain toxin is present inside a cell, seeing how many times a cancerous cell has divided or determining precisely how an administered drug interacts with each individual cell.
Once the transistor determines the conditions are met, it could then be used to make the cell, and many other cells around it, do a specific thing--like telling cancerous cells to destroy themselves.
"We're going to be able to put computers into any living cell you want," lead researcher at the Stanford School of Engineering Drew Endy explained to the San Jose Mercury News. "We're not going to replace the silicon computers. We're not going to replace your phone or your laptop. But we're going to get computing working in places where silicon would never work."
The team demonstrated their work using E. Coli bacteria, an organism commonly used in genetic research.
Traditional computers use millions of tiny transistors, which control the flow of electrons in the form of the zeros and ones that make up binary code. Multiple transistors working together can form something called a "logic gate," which serves as the basic building block of all computations performed by computers the world over.
The researchers' biological transistors, which they've dubbed "transcriptors," use enzymes to control the flow of RNA proteins along a strand of DNA, just like a computer would use silicon transistors to control the flow of electrons.
In addition to changing the way people think about the human body, biological computers made using these transcriptors could be used to learn more about an litany of other living systems.
"For example, suppose we could partner with microbes and plants to record events, natural or otherwise, and convert this information into easily observed signals," Endy told the Independent. "That would greatly expand our ability to monitor the environment."
Extreme Tech reports:
You need more than just...[logic] gates to make a computer, though. You also need somewhere to store data (memory, RAM), and some way to connect all of the transcriptors and memory together (a bus). Fortunately, as we've covered a few times before, numerous research groups have successfully stored data in DNA--and Stanford has already developed an ingenious method of using the M13 virus to transmit strands of DNA between cells...In short, all of the building blocks of a biological computer are now in place.
This isn't to say that highly functional biological computers will arrive in short order, but we should certainly begin to see simple biological sensors that measure and record changes in a cell’s environment. Stanford has contributed the...gate design to the public domain, which should allow other research institutes, such as Harvard's Wyss Institute, to also begin work on the first biological computer.
The researchers have published some of their findings under a public domain license, in the hopes that other scientists will more easily be able to build off their discoveries.
By Aaron Sankin for Huffingtonpost.com
In a paper published in the journal "Science" on Friday, the team described their system of genetic transistors, which can be inserted into living cells and turned on and off if certain conditions are met. The researchers hope these transistors could eventually be built into microscopic living computers. Said computers would be able to accomplish tasks like telling if a certain toxin is present inside a cell, seeing how many times a cancerous cell has divided or determining precisely how an administered drug interacts with each individual cell.
Once the transistor determines the conditions are met, it could then be used to make the cell, and many other cells around it, do a specific thing--like telling cancerous cells to destroy themselves.
"We're going to be able to put computers into any living cell you want," lead researcher at the Stanford School of Engineering Drew Endy explained to the San Jose Mercury News. "We're not going to replace the silicon computers. We're not going to replace your phone or your laptop. But we're going to get computing working in places where silicon would never work."
The team demonstrated their work using E. Coli bacteria, an organism commonly used in genetic research.
Traditional computers use millions of tiny transistors, which control the flow of electrons in the form of the zeros and ones that make up binary code. Multiple transistors working together can form something called a "logic gate," which serves as the basic building block of all computations performed by computers the world over.
The researchers' biological transistors, which they've dubbed "transcriptors," use enzymes to control the flow of RNA proteins along a strand of DNA, just like a computer would use silicon transistors to control the flow of electrons.
In addition to changing the way people think about the human body, biological computers made using these transcriptors could be used to learn more about an litany of other living systems.
"For example, suppose we could partner with microbes and plants to record events, natural or otherwise, and convert this information into easily observed signals," Endy told the Independent. "That would greatly expand our ability to monitor the environment."
Extreme Tech reports:
You need more than just...[logic] gates to make a computer, though. You also need somewhere to store data (memory, RAM), and some way to connect all of the transcriptors and memory together (a bus). Fortunately, as we've covered a few times before, numerous research groups have successfully stored data in DNA--and Stanford has already developed an ingenious method of using the M13 virus to transmit strands of DNA between cells...In short, all of the building blocks of a biological computer are now in place.
This isn't to say that highly functional biological computers will arrive in short order, but we should certainly begin to see simple biological sensors that measure and record changes in a cell’s environment. Stanford has contributed the...gate design to the public domain, which should allow other research institutes, such as Harvard's Wyss Institute, to also begin work on the first biological computer.
The researchers have published some of their findings under a public domain license, in the hopes that other scientists will more easily be able to build off their discoveries.
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