HorsePerson and the ShoeMan

• 9,000-Year-Old Beer Re-Created From Chinese Recipe
  

  "It wasn't a beer, it wasn't a mead, and it wasn't a wine or a cider. It was somewhere between all of them...



• Circumcision Can Reduce AIDS Risk, Study Says
  Ouch, but...
  

  The results show that circumcised men in the study were 63 percent less likely than uncircumcised men to be infected through sex with HIV-positive women. That's a far better level of protection than the 30 percent reduction risk set as a target for an AIDS vaccine.



• Seems like we just never learn: Mars Life May Be Contaminated by Spacecraft, Experts Warn
  

  The early spacecraft that landed on Mars were thoroughly sterilized. But as money for the space program got tight, the expensive cleansing process was cut back.



• The whole article is only an excerpt, but is still interesting: The Stem Cell Divide. To those who can get their hands on the print issue - recommended.
  

  In such varied political climates, scientists around the globe are racing to see which techniques will produce treatments soonest. Their approaches vary, but on one point, all seem to agree: How humanity handles its control over the mysteries of embryo development will say a lot about who we are and what we're becoming.



• Ultra-Lifelike Robot Debuts in Japan - I've seen it on TV a few weeks ago and it's so cool. Go look at the pics.
  

  Internal sensors allow the android to react "naturally." It can block an attempted slap, for example. But it's the little, "unconscious" movements that give the robot its eerie verisimilitude: the slight flutter of the eyelids, the subtle rising and falling of the chest, the constant, nearly imperceptible shifting so familiar to humans.

This is the funniest movie I've see in a while: it's a short film of the guys doing the voice over of movie trailers.

Five Men And A Limo

Via Yankee Fog

In a study done at Stanford University, the team managed to target cancer cells. With all the breakthroughs that I hear of lately, I think there's room for cautious hope about the disease.
The article, Nanotube-Laser Combo Selectively Targets Cancer Cells, Study Shows, published in Scientific American is very encouraging:

"One of the longstanding problems in medicine is how to cure cancer without harming normal body tissue," notes study co-author Hongjie Dai. Thus, to ensure that the carbon nanotubes were attracted only to diseased cells, the researchers coated them with folate molecules. The team then shined a flashlight-size near-infrared laser on aqueous solutions of both tumor and normal cells. Although harmless to regular cells, the light heated the nanotubes to 70 degrees Celsius within two minutes, killing the cancer cells they had invaded.