The contaminated product, which Baxter calls “experimental virus material,” was made at the Orth-Donau research facility.

Baxter makes its flu vaccine — including a human H5N1 vaccine for which a licence is expected shortly — at a facility in the Czech Republic.

People familiar with biosecurity rules are dismayed by evidence that human H3N2 and avian H5N1 viruses somehow co-mingled in the Orth-Donau facility. That is a dangerous practice that should not be allowed to happen, a number of experts insisted.

Accidental release of a mixture of live H5N1 and H3N2 viruses could have resulted in dire consequences. While H5N1 doesn’t easily infect people, H3N2 viruses do. If someone exposed to a mixture of the two had been simultaneously infected with both strains, he or she could have served as an incubator for a hybrid virus able to transmit easily to and among people.

That mixing process, called reassortment, is one of two ways pandemic viruses are created.

Read more

Those other people – those everyday people who weren’t supposed to have thoughts, who aren’t known for reading David Foster Wallace or Dostoevsky or James Joyce, those overlooked people from whom we buy groceries, who fix our cars, clean our houses, and vote differently than we do – weren’t supposed to become writers.

Now that suburban housewives in Missouri are letting their thoughts be known via Twitter, it’s as if writing itself is thought to be under attack, invaded from all sides by the unwashed masses whose thoughts have not been sanctioned as Literature™. In many ways, I’m reminded of Truman Capote’s infamous put-down of Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.”

So there seem to be quite a lot of assumptions at work here, with so many class, political, and even gender implications for who is allowed to speak, who we are meant to listen to, who can write, how they are permitted to do so, in what social contexts writing is meant to occur, and what topics can be legitimately addressed by others, that I’d hope a much longer discussion about this might someday take place. Until then, we get Maureen Dowd.

Read more

The tweetbomb is a single, simple message that is sent into the wild of cyberspace, causing a minimum of 100 million people to act at its behest within hours, or perhaps at some future pre-determined date and time. It is not enough for 100 million people to receive the message – those who receive the message must act upon its contents for the message to rise to true tweetbomb status. The distinction of receiving vs acting on the message may seem minor, but in fact it is a defining feature of the powerful tweetbomb phenomenon.

Read more

Ascension Island, a remote outpost buffeted by trade winds in the mid-Atlantic, may be a blueprint for this type of bioengineering. Until people arrived in the 17th century, vegetation was limited to just 25 scrubby species. But plantings by British servicemen posted there produced a verdant cloud forest. “It shows that if you have rainfall, forest can grow within a century,” says ecologist David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, who studied the phenomenon.

Read more

“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

Read more

According to McCabe’s research team, white male undergraduates at highly competitive schools—especially in the Northeast—are the most frequent collegiate users of neuroenhancers. Users are also more likely to belong to a fraternity or a sorority, and to have a G.P.A. of 3.0 or lower. They are ten times as likely to report that they have smoked marijuana in the past year, and twenty times as likely to say that they have used cocaine. In other words, they are decent students at schools where, to be a great student, you have to give up a lot more partying than they’re willing to give up.

Read more

The first trade of Doktor Sleepless is what pulled me through the rabbit hole on magic, from reading a lot about magic, to actually DOING a lot of magic.

Read more

Clinton said the State Department will “explore ways to track and freeze pirate assets,” similar to measures used against drug traffickers and terrorists.

Noting that the pirates have been buying more sophisticated vessels with the ransom money they have been collecting, Clinton said it could be possible to stop boat-building companies from doing business with pirates.

Read more

I would read any comic that was full of stories about humans interacting with each other, facing a constantly shifting future and trying to define the 21st century condition while framed by the presence and use of giant fictional machines.

Read more

We are, frankly, living in the last days of the Roman Empire once more, and it’s entirely typical that I’m pissed off that I can’t use my Wi-Fi to investigate current trends in jenkem use on the Ivory Coast instead of, I dunno, planting food or fomenting revolution or something.

Read more