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Designer babies considered lawful
Creating so-called "designer babies" to help
parents treat sick children is lawful and should not
be banned, Britain's highest court ruled this month.
The country's five Law Lords unanimously backed a 2003 ruling
that gave the green light to parents who want to extract genetic
material from a baby brother or sister to treat a terminally
ill sibling.
The case centred on six-year-old Zain Hashmi, whose parents
wanted a baby with a correct tissue match to help treat his
life-threatening blood disorder.
Proponents say the technology, which involves harvesting
stem cells - or master cells - for transplantation to an ill
child, is ultimately about saving lives.
But the procedure of choosing a child based on his or her
genetic material has raised complex legal and ethical
arguments and led critics to charge scientists and parents
with "playing
God ".
Libraries take a stand against
Google
·Nineteen European
national libraries have joined forces against Internet
search giant Google’s planned attempt to
create a global virtual library.
The 19 libraries are instead backing a multi-million
euro”counter-offensive” to put European
literature online.
"
The leaders of the undersigned national libraries
wish to support the initiative of Europe's leaders
aimed at a large and organised digitisation of
the works belonging to our continent's heritage," a
statement said. The statement was signed by national
libraries in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic,
Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,
Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands,
Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain and Sweden.
The move, organised by France's national library, comes after
Michigan University and four other top libraries - Harvard,
Stanford, New York Public Library and the Bodleian in Oxford
- announced in December a deal with Google to digitise millions
of their books and make them freely available online.
The entire project is still expected to take up to 10 years,
with cost estimates ranging from $US150 million to $US200
million.
European supercomputer to eavesdrop
on stars
Europe's biggest
supercomputer will crunch data from thousands of
radio antennae eavesdropping on the history of the
universe, its Dutch developers and US computer giant
told media.
The computer, based in the northern Netherlands,
will process signals from up to 13 billion light
years from Earth, as far back in time as the beginnings
of the earliest stars and galaxies after the formation
of the universe.
"Unlike current observatories that use large
optical mirrors or radio dishes to point to distant
galaxies, ASTRON will harness more than 25,000
simple radio antennas," IBM and Netherlands
Foundation for Research in Astronomy (ASTRON) said.
Running on 12,000 PowerPC microprocessors, the
computer can execute 27.4 teraflops, or 27.4 trillion
floating-point operations, per second, the two
organisations said in a statement.
The new computer will consume 150 kilowatts of
power - the equivalent of 2,500 60-watt light bulbs,
which is considered economical for a supercomputer,
IBM said.
"
This a very low power device," an IBM spokesman
said.
It will form the heart of a new type of radio telescope
developed by ASTRON and gather and analyse information
from ASTRON's Low Frequency Array "software
telescope" network.
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