Gary Monro’s blog

If you’ve read William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ - which I’m currently in the middle of - you’ll know why this story caught my eye:

An international research team has proposed new techniques that may lead to the mass production of meat reared not on the farm, but in the laboratory.

Developments in tissue engineering mean that cells taken from animals could be grown directly into meat in a laboratory, the researchers say.

It could be the answer to a number of problems:

“With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world’s annual meat supply. And you could do it in a way that’s better for the environment and human health.

If it involves no actual animals, no cruelty and no killing could vegetarians eat it?

The new techniques could also provide a dilemma for vegetarians.

Some may feel able to eat meat that has been grown without an animal being harmed.

Others feel that question marks remain about the way the cells would be taken from animals.

“It won’t appeal to someone who gave up meat because they think it’s morally wrong to eat flesh or someone who doesn’t want to eat anything unnatural,” Kerry Bennett of the UK Vegetarian Society told the Guardian newspaper.

I asked my wife - who is vegetarian - whether she’d eat meat that was produced in this way. She would not. The habit is lifelong and meat - however it’s produced - is meat.

Parents’ primary reason for sending their offspring to faith schools is because the standard of education there tends to be that much better than that in the mainstream. Now if you are the kind of person who would avoid such schools because they’re religious and you’re not then be glad you’re not educating the sprogs in the US:

THE GOD VS. Darwin debate went to the White House last week when President Bush weighed in, stating in a roundtable interview with reporters that ‘’intelligent design” should be taught along with evolution in public schools.

(Note: in America, a ‘public school’ is actually a government-run school - it’s not private as it would be in the UK).

Now ‘intelligent design’ is this circular argument that, in a nutshell, states: X works well so it must have been manufactured according to some pre-conceived plan. ‘Intelligent design’ takes the beauty and apparent perfection of the natural world as proof of supernatural intent. The reasoning is, ‘It’s awesome, it works and you can’t prove this evolution nonsense therefore there must be a god’.

Whereas, applied to biology, for example, the evolutionary view is that X works so well - or, to be more accurate, it works as well as this (because it could possibly work better) - because this is the version that helps get the organism as far as reproduction. X is ’successful’ therefore and is passed on to future generations.

So why might Bush be in favour of such teaching in taxpayer financed schools?

One such argument is intellectual diversity: Those who believe that only evolution should be taught in science classrooms are supposedly trying to stifle opposing viewpoints. A related claim is that a left-leaning, elitist scientific establishment, backed by aggressively secularist groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, is using taxpayer dollars to promote its own agenda in the classroom and teach children to despise their parents’ religious beliefs.

My concerns about teaching ‘intelligent design’ - the weak version of creationism - is not so much that it’s taught but where it’s taught - in which lesson. If it’s taught in Religious Education classes then fine, that’s an appropriate place to explain a religious description of life. If it’s taught in a science lesson then I object. ‘Intelligent design’ can have no scientific basis because the designer itself is only posited as the ‘well, so it must be god’ response when there’s a gap - real or perceived - in the scientific theory.

Whatever happens, we should not mix rigorous and disciplined scientific exploration with religious opinion. By all means live with both and respect the freedoms of proponents of each to air their views but the two should not be regarded as similar disciplines. They are very different and they achieve their conclusions in totally unrelated ways. ‘Intelligent design’ is not scientific.

Tim Berners-Lee is British - a Londoner, to be precise. So am I actually. But I didn’t invent the world wide web whereas he did. There’ll be other differences between us no doubt but that’s the main one.

Anyway. I’ve learnt a few things courtesy of Wikipedia today. One thing I’ve learnt: the world wide web isn’t actually the internet; the internet is a collection of servers and connections over which the world wide web operates.

Berners-Lee created many of the web items that many of us use in our explorations around the web and which we take for granted. Hyperlinks, which allow you to click on words like this one - hyperlink - and be transported to a place of my choice is just one of them. A collection of related pieces of information, created and then bound together by an individual (or group or company) in some logical or meaningful way and navigated through using hyperlinks is called a web site. The web site’s unique address - the place from which it is summoned by the web surfer (you, for example) - is designated by its Uniform Resource Locator - or URL.

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol - HTTP to most of us - specifies how the browser and server send the information to each other, and Hyper Text Markup Language - good ol’ HTML - is a method of encoding the information so it can be displayed on a variety of devices.

Berners-Lee’s world wide web fixed a number of problems that existed in the vanilla internet environment. For example, unidirectional links means I can now create a link to your webpage myself without you having to do something your end to make that link work. You, in turn, can create a link to this blog without me having to do anything. So go on then.

Also, his world wide web is non-proprietary - which means you don’t need to build hardware to specific - and restrictive - operating standards.

You’d think, then, that the first ever website would have been created by this man also. And you’d be right. Click here to check out the semi-naked babes on this humdinger…

(You just had to, didn’t you…)

Actually, the first image on the web is here and isn’t the worst (nor is it the best) picture I’ve ever seen.

The world’s first web-site was viewed, naturally enough, on the world’s first web browser. The browser is a tool used to retrieve the desired information - a document of text or images, for example - from the internet server at which it is stored. Berners-Lee’s browser was a little ropey; it could only run on CERN’s (who he worked for) computers. Mosaic was the first text and graphics browser more generally available, beginning life in 1987 and becoming an ex-browser in 1997. It later morphed into Netscape’s Navigator.

So there you have it: the world wide web was created by a Brit from London. Tell your friends.

Despite the fact that people like me - and, possibly, people like you - are under the impression that most of what we think the world needs to know it already knows it seems that this isn’t the case at all.

Apparently there’s absolutely loads of stuff out there just waiting for some egg-head to come along and prod and probe it a bit.

Science Magazine is celebrating its 125th birthday by producing a list of the top 125 questions that science needs to answer. It is, in their words, a ’survey of our scientific ignorance, a broad swath of questions that scientists themselves are asking.’

They divided the questions into two groups: the top 25 and then the next 100.

Here is a couple of the top 25 that caught my eye. You can find the top 25 - with brief accompanying articles - here. Once you’ve answered that lot, here are the next 100. Click on ‘more’, below, for my own comments on a couple of the questions raised…

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Crikey. Even the title scares the life out of me.

It gets worse once the programme actually starts. One of the strengths of good science programmes - like Horizon - is that they manage to turn science into stories. Sometimes it’s a detective story, sometimes a scary story but always a story. And a story that keeps you glued to the very end. Forget tripe like EastEnders - give me something like this:

So these super-massive black holes (SMBHs from now on or my fingers will drop off) - not super, not massive but super and massive - are really very, very big indeed. In fact, they are between 1 million and 1 billion times bigger than the standard black hole.

And the standard black hole is a frightening enough thing. Caused by the ongoing contraction of its own matter the black hole - previously a star, now dead - becomes smaller and smaller and increasingly dense. Its gravitational pull becomes super-strong, pulling in gas from nearby stars, literally stripping them of all substance. Such is the intense pull of a black hole’s gravity that light itself cannot escape - hence its blackness. The more the black hole consumes the more massive - and therefore the more strong - it becomes. For me, black holes are the ultimate nightmare scenario. In my fevered imagination, one could drift by earth and simply relieve it of its atmosphere. That would be the end of us all.

You can’t see a black hole because it’s black. And it’s a hole. But you know they’re where they are by the effects they have on surrounding matter - other stars particularly. What scientists first discovered was a really big one - a SMBH - in the middle of a galaxy and it was quite a find in the world of cosmology. So they decided to look for some more.

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