The latest issue of Uncanny X-Men I got (I should drop it, I don’t really read it, but whatever) has a new Japanese artist, who draws in a “Manga” style. I think Marvel are making a big deal out of it and using it to give the comic a bit of a push. The funny thing is that he draws everyone in the comic with great big fucking noses. I mean huge honkers. And the reason he does that, I suspect, is that he’s drawing Europeans (i.e, Caucasians, non-Japanese, white folk), and that’s how westerners look like, to Japanese.
Author: Dotan Dimet
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Malleus Maleficarum
Here’s an online version of The Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch Hammer). First published in 1486, this is the infamous “witchfinder’s handbook” which argued that disbelief in witches is heretical: Whether the Belief that there are such Beings as Witches is so Essential a Part of the Catholic Faith that Obstinacy to maintain the Opposite Opinion manifestly savours of Heresy.
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latitude and longitude
lattitude and longitude for Hod HaSharon are 32° 09′ 03″ N , 034° 53′ 18″ E
according to the NIMA site on geographic names.
I looked it up after following a link to geoURL. Not many sites in Israel – it lists one about Lebanon and one about Jordan, as well as 3 Israeli sites – a personal page of someone in Hod Hasharon who has some nice pictures and aerial photography (I could have just pinched the coordinates from his page, really), and two blogs, one by someone in Jerusalem and one about BDSM, currently on hiatus.
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Tissue Cloning
Can they rebuild us? is an article from Nature (dating from April 2001) about the possibilities of cloning and using stem cells for tissue replacement: The idea of therapeutic cloning, which offers the potential of growing replacement tissues perfectly matched to their recipients, is falling from favour. But there are alternatives…
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Extending the Genetic Code
The New Scientist has an interesting story about scientists who set up a bacteria with an “extended” genetic code: they got the bacteria to create a new amino acid (p-aminophenylalanine, which is not one of the 20 amino acides that appear in the genetic code), and incorporate it into a protein when the sequence being translated (from DNA/RNA to protein) contained a specific group of 3 nucleic acid bases (a “codon”, a basic unit of the genetic code) that doesn’t code for any amino acid.
Now, is this feat of genetic engineering just an incredible party trick, or will it have widespread applications? I say it’ll take 10 years before they find something cool to do with this, but I’m not backing that bet with money.