plantimals.org

Genetically modified T cells which attack HIV have been shown to be both effective and safe after more than a decade.

A clinical trial testing a gene therapy for HIV patients is now 11 years old. Recently, the researchers running the study published an examination of the patients after all this time. Of the study’s 43 patients, all were healthy, and 41 of them confirmed that their immune cells which received a genetically-altered boost were still performing as hoped more than a decade after the initial infusions.

Researchers first collected some of the patients’ T cells, the type of white blood cell that fights infections and tumors. They then added a retroviral vector to the cells that inserted its DNA into the cells’ own DNA. The important part of the new DNA would cause the T cells to recognize a protein found on HIV and target the virus for attack. The modified T cells were injected back into the patients between 1998 and 2002.

One of major concerns with gene therapies is the risk that the inserted DNA will cause cell replication errors and turn the cell cancerous. Years ago, in a different study, two out of nine young boys developed leukemia after undergoing gene therapy for X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (“Bubble Boy disease”). But there is a key difference between that trial and the current one. The earlier trial involved genetic modification of blood stem cells. As none of the participants in the current study have developed cancer after 11 years, the researchers are concluding that the type of cell makes all the difference. “T cells appear to be a safe haven for gene modification,” Carl June, one of the lead researchers of the study said in a press release.

The study was co-led by Bruce Levine, head of the Clinical Cell and Vaccine Production Facility at Pennsylvania University’s Perelman School of Medicine. It was published earlier this month in Science Translational Medicine.

Eleven years of being both effective and safe is a gene therapy breakthrough. But as promising as the study is, there’s still room for improvement. Patient viral loads were not reduced to undetectable levels, something routinely achieved by drugs. This could be due to an inadequate dosage of T cells. But now that T cells have been shown to be gene friendly, a higher dose could be tried in the future. Also, they tested function of the modified T cells in lab dishes. But while there was no direct confirmation that the cells are performing effectively inside the body, the fact that all 43 patients are healthy seems to be pretty rigorous evidence.

The trial was led by University of Pennsylvania researchers Bruce Levine and Carl June.

So how is it possible that the modified T cells are still chugging along after 11 years? Human T cells can live for years, and they divide,  passing their genetic material on to their cellular progeny. In fact, the current level of gene function in the patients indicates that over half of the original modified T cells or their progeny should still be functional for 16 years following infusion.

Even though the modified T cells in the current study haven’t proved more effective than drugs, they may still yet as higher doses are tried. HIV can be effectively controlled with drugs but patients are often required to take multiple pills at specific times of the day for the rest of their lives. And the drugs often have unpleasant side-effects such as nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea. Even if HIV levels aren’t rendered undetectable, as they weren’t in the current study, just decreasing a patient’s dependency on drugs would be a major accomplishment.

The promising results a decade out isn’t just good news for HIV patients and clinicians alone. Gene therapies targeting other diseases could benefit from the protocol. Any malady that can be helped by setting the molecular sights of T cells on a target should be fair game. In fact, Levine and June are already reprogramming T cells to seek out and destroy leukemia tumors. In a paper published last October they reported how cancerous cells in three patients were wiped out in just three weeks. As in the HIV trial the T cells were modified to recognize and attack cells expressing a specific protein. CD19 is a protein found on leukemia cells but not on healthy ones.

It’s about time gene therapies began delivering on the promise that so many have hoped for. Researchers are busy trying to find out why gene therapies turn stem cells into tumors but behave so well in T cells. Answering that question could open the door to gene therapies in other cell types. The current study is the latest in a spurt of good news for gene therapies. Other trials have stopped bleeding in hemophilia patients, successfully treated Parkinson’s symptoms, and helped the blind to see. Let’s hope we’re entering an era in which successful gene therapy trials are becoming the norm rather than the exception.

[image credits: Scientific American and Philly.com]
images: Scientific American and Philly.com

*I’m sure these European and Canadian astronomers are properly excited about their fine discovery and the proper functioning of their observation instruments and so forth, but I’m not sure that “excitement” is really the proper emotional reaction to a thing as astronomically colossal as a “filament.” I’m thinking maybe “sublime wonderment mixed with deep Lovecraftian unease” is more in order here.

*Galactic superclusters are mentally hard to handle, but for superclusters to have huge blazing filament bridges? Why? Why are there filaments?

News feature: 2012-139 May 17, 2012

Herschel Sees Intergalactic Bridge Aglow With Stars

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-139&cid=release_2012-139

The Herschel Space Observatory has discovered a giant, galaxy-packed filament ablaze with billions of new stars. The filament connects two clusters of galaxies that, along with a third cluster, will smash together and give rise to one of the largest galaxy superclusters in the universe. (((Do filaments have to “smash”?)))

Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important NASA contributions.

The filament is the first structure of its kind spied in a critical era of cosmic buildup when colossal collections of galaxies called superclusters began to take shape. The glowing galactic bridge offers astronomers a unique opportunity to explore how galaxies evolve and merge to form superclusters.

“We are excited about this filament, because we think the intense star formation we see in its galaxies is related to the consolidation of the surrounding supercluster,” says Kristen Coppin, an astrophysicist at McGill University in Canada, and lead author of a new paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters. (((Now imagine Kristen’s colleagues — meaning other entities in the universe who somehow noticed that gigantic glowing star-smashing 7,000,000,000 year old filament.)))

“This luminous bridge of star formation gives us a snapshot of how the evolution of cosmic structure on very large scales affects the evolution of the individual galaxies trapped within it,” says Jim Geach, a co-author who is also based at McGill.

The intergalactic filament, containing hundreds of galaxies, spans 8 million light-years and links two of the three clusters that make up a supercluster known as RCS2319. This emerging supercluster is an exceptionally rare, distant object whose light has taken more than seven billion years to reach us.

RCS2319 is the subject of a huge observational study, led by Tracy Webb and her group at McGill. Previous observations in visible and X-ray light had found the cluster cores and hinted at the presence of a filament. It was not until astronomers trained Herschel on the region, however, that the intense star-forming activity in the filament became clear. Dust obscures much of the star-formation activity in the early universe, but telescopes like Herschel can detect the infrared glow of this dust as it is heated by nascent stars.

The amount of infrared light suggests that the galaxies in the filament are cranking out the equivalent of about 1,000 solar masses (the mass of our sun) of new stars per year. For comparison’s sake, our Milky Way galaxy is producing about one solar-mass worth of new stars per year. (((We can dare to hope that our sedate galaxy doesn’t somehow wander into a previously-unseen “filament.”)))

Researchers chalk up the blistering (((ouch))) pace of star formation in the filament to the fact that galaxies within it are being crunched (((ugh))) into a relatively small cosmic volume under the force of gravity. “A high rate of interactions and mergers between galaxies could be disturbing (((whoa))) the galaxies’ gas reservoirs, igniting bursts (((oof))) of star formation,” said Geach.

By studying the filament, astronomers will be able to explore the fundamental issue of whether “nature” versus “nurture” matters more in the life progression of a galaxy. “Is the evolution of a galaxy dominated by intrinsic properties such as total mass, or do wider-scale cosmic environments largely determine how galaxies grow and change?” Geach asked. “The role of the environment in influencing galactic evolution is one of the key questions of modern astrophysics.”

The galaxies in the RCS2319 filament will eventually migrate toward the center of the emerging supercluster. Over the next seven to eight billion years, astronomers think RCS2319 will come to look like gargantuan superclusters in the local universe, like the nearby Coma cluster. These advanced clusters are chock-full of “red and dead” elliptical galaxies that contain aged, reddish stars instead of young ones.

“The galaxies we are seeing as starbursts in RCS2319 are destined to become dead galaxies in the gravitational grip of one of the most massive structures in the universe,” said Geach. “We’re catching them at the most important stage of their evolution.”

Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. NASA’s Herschel Project Office is based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel’s three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
More information is online at http://www.herschel.caltech.edu , http://www.nasa.gov/herschel and http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel .

Written by Adam Hadhazy
Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

- end -

*Our programming blogger here says that little of consequence has changed in “programming style” since 1974. In matters of “style,” that’s pretty interesting.

*Then again, I’ve got the Strunk and White “Elements of Style,” originally written in 1918, and it has plenty of useful things to say about composition.

*I’m always wondering about how to aesthetically judge things like “processuality.” It would really be a help if a critic could look at some tortured plastic gobboon fresh from the fabricator and remark, for instance, “This needs clearer coupling between its modules.”

http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/programming-books-part-2-the-elements-of-programming-style/

“Appendix: “summary of rules” from EoPS

“Abstracted from the appendix SUMMARY OF RULES in The Elements of Programming Style (Second Edition) by Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger, pub. McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0-07-034207-5.

“This summary is designed to give a quick review of the points we covered in the book. Remember as you read the rules that they were presented in connection with one or more examples — go back and reread the pertinent section if a rule doesn’t call them to mind.

“To paraphrase an observation in The Elements of Style, rules of programming style, like those of English, are sometimes broken, even by the best writers. When a rule is broken, however, you will usually find in the program some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless you’re certain of doing as well, you will probably do best to follow the rules.

“INTRODUCTION
Write clearly — don’t be too clever. (((Man, that one’s tough.)))

“EXPRESSIONS
Say what you mean, simply and directly.
Use library functions.
Avoid temporary variables.
Write clearly — don’t sacrifice clarity for “efficiency”.
Let the machine do the dirty work.
Replace repetitive expressions by calls to a common function.
Parenthesize to avoid ambiguity.
Choose variable names that won’t be confused.
Avoid the Fortran arithmetic IF.
Avoid unnecessary branches.
Use the good features of a language; avoid the bad ones.
Don’t use conditional branches as a substitute for a logical expression.
Use the “telephone test” for readability.

“CONTROL STRUCTURE
Use DO-END and indenting to delimit groups of statements.
Use IF-ELSE to emphasize that only one of two actions is to be performed.
Use DO and DO-WHILE to emphasize the presence of loops.
Make your programs read from top to bottom.
Use IF … ELSE IF … ELSE IF … ELSE … to implement multi-way branches.
Use the fundamental control flow structures.
Write first in an easy-to-understand pseudo-language; then translate into whatever language you have to use.
Avoid THEN-IF and null ELSE.
Avoid ELSE GOTO and ELSE RETURN.
Follow each decision as closely as possible with its associated action.
Use data arrays to avoid repetitive control sequences.
Choose a data representation that makes your program simple.
Don’t stop with your first draft. (((One could only wish.)))

“PROGRAM STRUCTURE
Modularize. Use subroutines.
Make the coupling between modules visible.
Each module should do one thing well.
Make sure every module hides something. (((I wonder what this means.)))
Let the data structure the program.
Don’t patch bad code — rewrite it.
Write and test a big program in small pieces.
Use recursive procedures for recursively-defined data structures.

“INPUT AND OUTPUT
Test input for validity and plausibility.
Make sure input cannot violate the limits of your program.
Terminate input by end-of-file or marker, not by count.
Identify bad input; recover if possible.
Treat end of file conditions in a uniform manner.
Make input easy to prepare and output self-explanatory.
Use uniform input formats.
Make input easy to proofread.
Use free-form input when possible.
Use self-identifying input. Allow defaults. Echo both on output.
Localize input and output in subroutines.

“COMMON BLUNDERS
Make sure all variables are initialized before use.
Don’t stop at one bug.
Use debugging compilers.
Initialize constants with DATA statements or INITIAL attributes; initialize variables with executable code.
Watch out for off-by-one errors.
Take care to branch the right way on equality.
Avoid multiple exits from loops.
Make sure your code “does nothing” gracefully. (((There must be some literary equivalent to this, and I wish I knew what it was.)))
Test programs at their boundary values.
Program defensively.
10.0 times 0.1 is hardly ever 1.0
Don’t compare floating point numbers just for equality.

“EFFICIENCY AND INSTRUMENTATION
Make it right before you make it faster.
Keep it right when you make it faster.
Make it clear before you make it faster.
Don’t sacrifice clarity for small gains in “efficiency”.
Let your compiler do the simple optimizations.
Don’t strain to re-use code; reorganize instead.
Make sure special cases are truly special.
Keep it simple to make it faster.
Don’t diddle code to make it faster — find a better algorithm.
Instrument your programs. Measure before making “efficiency” changes.

“DOCUMENTATION
Make sure comments and code agree.
Don’t just echo the code with comments — make every comment count.
Don’t comment bad code — rewrite it.
Use variable names that mean something.
Use statement labels that mean something.
Format a program to help the reader understand it.
Indent to show the logical structure of your program.
Document your data layouts.
Don’t over-comment.” (((But… *splutter*… but if you don’t over-comment, how can you pretend to to be smarter than experts who know what they’re doing? How unfair!)))

Submitted by FrankAdamek 1 comment

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

• Pittsburgh: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: 18 May 2012 06:00PM
• Vancouver Minicamp Report-Back: 18 May 2012 05:00PM
• Brussels meetup: 19 May 2012 12:00PM
• Moscow meetup: general rationality: 20 May 2012 05:00PM
• DC Meetup: 20 May 2012 03:00PM
• Less Wrong Sydney - Bayes and Fun Theory: 21 May 2012 06:00PM
• Garden grove meetup: 22 May 2012 07:18PM
• First Berlin meetup: 05 June 2012 07:30PM
• Phoenix, Arizona: 15 June 2012 07:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

• Cambridge, MA Third Sunday Meetup: 20 May 2012 02:20PM
• Small Berkeley Meetup: 23 May 2012 07:00PM
• NO Chicago Meetup 5/19: 26 May 2012 01:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun!

If you missed the deadline and wish to have your meetup featured, you can reach me on gmail at frank dot c dot adamek.

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Helsinki, London,  Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here, or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know!

Want to help out the common good? If one of the meetups listed as regular has become inactive, let me know so we can present more accurate information to newcomers.

Also: Nickolai Leschov is collecting information on all LW meetups, and is working with Luke Muehlhauser to provide helpful materials and maybe even some coaching. If someone from your meetup isn't currently in touch with him, shoot him an email for great justice. More information here.

*Okay, wry Dutch humor, it’s funny, admit it.

*I used to live in Madras, but in my wildest teenage dreams I wouldn’t have invented an enterprise this out-there.

*Via Bowen Mendenhall.

http://blaftblog.blogspot.it/

“BLAFT PUBLICATIONS is an independent publishing house based in Chennai, India.

“Our list includes bestselling Indian crime novels, experimental fiction, pulp art, and graphic novels.

“In the future, we plan to branch out into encyclopedias, kitchen appliances and designer underwear.”

By Guest Author Tony Gleeson

A word or two about my interest in those toned paper drawings: this was a technique that was popularly taught by several of the old-school instructors at Art Center College of Design when I attended in the early 70s.



We would use charcoal pencil and white Prismacolor pencil on toned paper to work from models. It was a good technique to teach the study of tonal values and to develop judgment of spotting lights and darks against a middle tone.



Some of those instructors could create mind-boggling examples on the spot to demonstrate as they lectured. I suppose it was considered an outdated technique mostly good for student studies, and may have been regarded as such for many decades earlier.



It might also have been considered problematic for early reproduction processes-- I'm not sure.



Prince certainly used it to maximum effect in the 1930s and '40s.



William Meade Prince published a memoir of his youth, entitled The Southern Part of Heaven, in 1950, and was married to stage actress Lillian Hughes Prince.



The University of North Carolina apparently possesses an extensive archive of papers and correspondence from both of them.



WIlliam Meade Prince died in 1951.


Addendum: Curtis Publishing gives a nice overview of WM Prince's traditional Rockwellian covers on their SEP blog.


* Tony Gleeson is a freelance illustrator. Since 1974 he has created finished art for the book, editorial and advertising industries as well as character design and concept art for gaming, film, television and theme parks. He lives in Southern California.

* The reddish-toned scan in today's post is courtesy of Eric Bowman.

* The original art scan (and details) at the end of today's post are courtesy of Heritage Auctions

By tapping databases and connecting people, places, and things Google's Knowledge Graph enriches your search experience.

This week Google is rolling out a new search tool: the Knowledge Graph. Breaking with the old strategy of keywords and webpages, Knowledge Graph makes use of the vast amounts of online data to give you persons, places, and things that are related to what you’re looking for. This new search philosophy of “Things Not Strings” ceases to treat your query as a random string of characters, and treats them as real world ideas instead. And it’s only the beginning of the move away from having to wade through website after website to find what you’re looking for.

 

Without Knowledge Graph, Google search results are keyword-based and direct us to websites that contain our keyword or related keywords. But as we know words are often ambiguous. For example, if you type in “mercury” you could be interested in the elemental liquid, the planet, or the fleet-of-foot messenger of the Roman gods. By being connected to a network of relevant material, results become more narrow, getting us to our relevant “mercury” more quickly. They’re richer too, allowing us easy access to information about the first planet from the sun.

Now, instead of Googling to get to the Wikipedia page, much of the information you’re looking for will already be displayed in the results – a Googlepedia. Sort of.

When searching for a book, dog breed, or planet, an information panel will appear in that empty white space to the right of the results list. The section will contain a brief description, a collection of facts, the highest-ranking related images, related searches, and other related information such as a map, an upcoming concert for a band, or recently Google+ posts from people in your circles.

The information display won’t be nearly as complete as a Wikipedia page, and not all topics get an information display. Easily packaged subjects like specific sports teams, movies, locations, and famous people get a display. Cars, video games, and companies do not.

Of course, your facts are only as good as your sources. The Knowledge Graph draws from multiple online data sources including Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook, and Freebase, an open database generated by Metaweb, which Google acquired in 2010. Wikipedia has nearly four million articles, and Freebase has data on over 24 million people, places, and things. Subject-specific information is gathered from sites like Weather Underground for weather and the World Bank for global economics. As before, data from Google searches are used to make educated guesses of what people are searching for and what webpages they want to see. They’ve only just started building it up, but already the Knowledge Graph includes 500 million people, places, and things with connections to 3.5 billion attributes. And the bewildering network of connections will be honed by people using it with a feature that allows users to point out incorrect or irrelevant information.

Like the real world and information about it, the Knowledge Graph is a work in progress. Here’s a short video that describes how Google is reshaping itself from an “information engine to a knowledge engine.”

What will Google look like after the Knowledge Graph has had 5 or 10 years to gobble up databases? If it’s true that Google was already making us dumber, get ready to donate a few more IQ points for the sake of convenience.

For many searches we probably won’t notice the “extra knowledge” in the results (incidentally, the Graph has yet to grace the Google page on my laptop), but already we can see where all of this is going. Along with Google, tools like WolframAlpha and Siri, have conditioned people to expect more out their software – they want useful information and they want it quick and easy. Google Chrome’s text to speech function makes that happen, and so do Google Glasses. It doesn’t get any easier than looking at things and talking to yourself. The Knowledge Graph adds to these as part of Google’s effort to both shape the direction that people interact with technology, and to stay relevant and competitive in this increasingly AI-driven world.

[image credits: Google via YouTube]
[video credits: Google via YouTube]
images: Google
video: Google via YouTube

*I don’t have to believe it to admire it, folks.

http://smartdisorganized.blogspot.com/2012/02/spimescript.html

(…)

“So, I want to return to one part of that 2006 presentation which I still find relevant – the formation of Spime Script. We’re entering a phase where hardware will become increasingly as malleable as software which leads to a problem of choice – if I want to change the function of something, do I do this in software or hardware? The tendency today is obviously towards software because its more malleable but the future is never the past. However this creates a problem of skill – will I need to become proficient in both software and CAD / electronic design?

“In reality both CAD and whatever software language you use, compile down to instruction sets and the function of the device is the interaction of these instruction sets – one which is substantiated physically and the other which is substantiated digitally.

“Turning this on its head then why not write the function of what you want, the function of the device? Compilers can therefore undertake the complex decision trees (which is what they’re good at) required to determine what element of that function is encoded as physical and what element is digital.

“A future language is needed, something whereby the output is both physical and digital and I describe merely the function of what I’m after.

“A sort of …

class smartphone : public phone, public camera, public calculator, public GPC
mydevice smartphone
mydevice.colour = blue, .os = android, .connection = wifi, .storage = cloud
mydevice inherit public walkie_talkie
mydevice inherit public watch
mydevice.format = wearable, .location = wrist, .materials = recyclable
Make(mydevice)

“and let the complier work out the best way of making this. Maybe the watch will be digital, maybe it’ll decide that a mechanical self winding element is required etc.

“This may sound like crazy talk of the form “that’ll never happen”, “it’s too complex”, “technology could never do this” etc but I’m used to a world where today’s impossible things become tomorrow’s Walmart special offers….”

A neural interface device allows patients to control a robotic arm with their minds.

Cathy Hutchinson hasn’t moved her limbs of her own volition for 15 years, but by imagining she was using her own hand, she controlled a robotic arm to pick up a thermos of coffee and took a sip. The technology is a neural interface system called BrainGate2, currently in clinical trials, which connects Cathy’s brain to a robot. The device is the result of over 10 years of research at Brown University and an extension of the first BrainGate in 2006, which allowed patients to control a computer cursor on a screen.

Cathy was one of two patients on the study, which was recently reported in Nature, who suffer from tetraplegia, a condition in which communication between the brain and the rest of the body is disconnected either through a stroke or damage to the spinal cord. Prof. John Donoghue, principal investigator on the BrainGate project, described their approach to Nature: “Our idea is to bypass that damaged nervous system and go directly from the brain to the outside world, so the brain signals cannot control muscles but machines and devices, like a computer or a robotic limb.” When Cathy controlled the arm with her mind to bring the coffee over for her to drink, the team was amazed.

Check out the video to see the moment for yourself:

As we previously introduced, BrainGate2 has three components: a sensor, a decoder, and assistive technology. The sensor consists of an array of 96 hair-thin electrodes the size of a children’s aspirin that is surgically implanted into the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls body movements. Neural activity is relayed through a gold wire to a computer (the decoder), which interprets the signals and produces a command for the robot arm. Two robotic arms have been tested in the study: the DEKA Arm System and the heavier DLR Light-Weight Robot III arm from the German Aerospace Centre.

Cathy has had the BrainGate sensor implanted in her brain for the last five years, as she was involved in previous studies with the system. During testing that took place one year ago, Cathy was able to successfully raise the coffee and drink from it using BrainGate2 four times out of six attempts. In another test of the BrainGate2 system, the two patients had to reach out and grab a ball in a 30-second window, and Cathy experienced better success with the DEKA arm (46 percent success rate) than the DLR arm (21 percent).

Prof. Donoghue explained to Nature that controlling the robotic arm is much more complicated than moving the cursor on a screen in the original BrainGate study: “To move from this type of two-dimensional movement to movements involving reaching out for an object, grasping it and then guiding it in three-dimensional space is a huge step for us. It seems like more than one additional dimension in complexity.” He emphasized that a lot of work needed to be done to improve the rate and accuracy of motion as well as improving the decoding algorithms for more complex motions.

The Brown researchers already have plans to make the sensor wireless and improve the robotic arm to allow for more complicated tasks, such as brushing teeth. In the long term, an alternative approach is being considered in which the signals from the decoder are transmitted to the patient’s muscles, allowing them to reuse their own limbs.

This is a huge stride for the field of brain-computer interfaces, and will undoubtedly inspire more surgical and nonsurgical approaches. Controlling objects with the mind makes for great science fiction, but people who suffer from conditions that prohibit motion due to spinal cord damage are on the cusp of regaining a part of themselves that they thought was lost forever. Furthermore, similar technologies will open up even more possibilities for mind control of objects as the programs that can translate neural signals into instructions become more sophisticated.

“All of us were standing in awe, more or less, because we’re watching her drinking the coffee,” Prof. Donoghue commented in the video. “It was really such a stunning scene.”

[Media: YouTube]

[Sources: Arstechnica, BrainGate, Nature, Nature Video]

*If I didn’t blog this, I’d have to be put out to pasture and shot as a mercy.

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14041

http://justinpickard.net/gonzo-futurist-manifesto.pdf

(…)

“The gonzo futurist is a super-empowered hopeful individual. She may have been a ‘graduate with no future’ (Mason, 2011), or the victim of public sector cuts, but has since grieved and moved on. She plays, tests, and play tests; making the best of the tools and technologies at her disposal. Comfortable calling on (and being called on by) her friends, peers, and tribe, her sense-making skills are social and connected. Her thinking may, occasionally, ‘be located inside the brains of other people.’ (Wheeler, 2011)

“The gonzo futurist is a ‘deep generalist’ (Cascio, 2011) and ‘analytical polyglot’ (Smith, 2011). She has an ‘almost supernatural awareness of impacts and implications … [is] ready to adapt when necessary, building long-lasting systems when possible.’ (Cascio, 2011) Like Cayce Pollard, she is a ‘woman of affect, not of feeling (…) [an] empress of the amygdala.’ (Berlant)

“The gonzo futurist is resilient. She works smart, not hard. She has one eye on the ‘adjacent possible’, switches codes, and contributes to the commons. She may be privileged, but has no time for competition, alpha male dick-waving, or beggar-thy-neighbour. Her success does not come at your expense.

“Bombarded by stimuli, the gonzo futurist is an OODA cyborg. Observe, orient, decide, act….”

*Wait a minute… There’s something vaguely familiar about this new science paper, “Automated Cognome Construction and Semi-automated Hypothesis Generation”…

http://blog.ketyov.com/2012/05/journal-of-neuroscience-methods-paper.html

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/10-in-the-future-doing-science-is-like-blogging

By Guest Author Tony Gleeson

William Meade Prince was born in Roanoke, VA in 1893, grew up and would later reside for much of his life in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.



He studied at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts 1913-1915, and upon winning a contest sponsored by Collier’s Magazine, embarked upon a career as a magazine and book illustrator.



He painted no less than 48 covers for The Country Gentleman magazine-- published by Curtis Publishing as a companion publication to the Saturday Evening Post-- from 1924 to 1940. He also created numerous interior illustrations for the Post, Collier’s, and other publications.



He worked quite effectively in that popular cover style so well plied by Rockwell, Leyendecker and so many others-- expertly-painted, humorous, human-interest themes, quintessentially American--



... but for some reason he did not remain in the public consciousness like some of his more celebrated contemporaries.



He was obviously a highly talented painter and draughtsman, and I have no idea why he developed his particular technique with graphite and white gouache on toned paper.



Perhaps it was a way to set himself apart from the crowd?



I may never learn the answer, but he certainly did succeed in doing so.



Prince was head of the Art Department at the University of North Carolina during the Second World War and produced drawings and posters in the war effort.



He also illustrated the newspaper comic strip "Alladin Jr.," written by Les Forgrave, in 1942 and 1943.



(The last bit of info comes from Lambiek.net, which is always a treasure of a resource).

Continued tomorrow.

* Tony Gleeson is a freelance illustrator. Since 1974 he has created finished art for the book, editorial and advertising industries as well as character design and concept art for gaming, film, television and theme parks. He lives in Southern California.

* The original full colour art scan in today's post is courtesy of Heritage Auctions

Will the future involve wiping your memory of any copyrighted works you haven't paid for?

What will post-Singularity life be like in 2052 if you died and your mind was uploaded to a computer? Possibly mired in data rate throttling, advertiser-sponsored consciousness, immoral thought extraction, and memory wipes of copyrighted material.

A new witty video called “Welcome to Life” offers a little glimpse into what it might be like for your mind to awake in a digital world after your biological self has expired. Taking jabs at the Apple experience, terms of service agreements, and all the legal hurdles one might anticipate that could hinder future existence, the video humorously approaches a subject that is rather difficult to imagine. The creator of “Welcome to Life”, Tom Scott, is also responsible for a parody of the Google Glasses video, which captured over 2 million views on YouTube.

Here’s a glimpse into your possible future:

For me, the most intriguing part is the end with the question, “Do you wish to continue?” When the technology becomes available to upload our minds and never fear failing health or aging, we can answer “Yes” to that question perpetually, so long as our service providers can keep the lights on.

Thanks to Noah, a Singularity Hub member, for sending the video to us!

[Media: YouTube]

[Sources: Tom Scott]

The H5N1 virus, or Bird Flu, was easily transmissible between birds but not humans. Two scientists have changed that and are publishing how they did it.

The emergence of the avian flu in 2003 caused alarm around the world as it spread through countries in Asia, leaving victims in its wake. While largely contained to the bird population, for the relatively few humans unlucky enough to catch it the flu proved deadly. Now, two groups of perhaps seemingly mad scientists have successfully modified the H5N1 virus so that it could be passed easily between humans. One of them has already published the work for all the world to see, and the second is soon to follow. What kind of dangers will materialize in a world where the laboratory formulas for superflus and other potential bioweapons are out in the open?

Of the 603 people infected since the 2003 H5N1 outbreak, 356 have died – a 59 percent mortality rate (by comparison, the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 that claimed the lives of over 50 million had a mortality rate of just 2 percent). Still, people could take solace in the fact that the flu, luckily, while very well suited to being passed between birds, was not effective at passing from human to human.

Until now.

Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ron Fouchier at Erasmus University in the Netherlands have both been able to modify the virus so that it now is easily transmitted between humans.

Understandably, some are none too happy.

The wisdom of making the DNA sequence of a potentially very deadly virus public was discussed extensively in the media and behind closed public health office doors in the months prior to publication. The University of Pittsburgh’s D. A. Henderson, who helped eradicate smallpox, issued an editorial last December in response to the “ominous news,” arguing that “the benefits of this work do not outweigh the risks.” That same month the World Health Organization expressed “deep concern” about the “possible risks and misuses associated with this research” and about “the potential negative consequences.” Also in December, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton provoked concerns further by being clear that we’re all talking about terrorists, citing “evidence in Afghanistan that…al Qaeda…made a call to arms for – and I quote – ‘brothers with degrees in microbiology or chemistry to develop a weapon of mass destruction.’”

The growing concern and condemnation seemed justified when the December tumult concluded with a ruling by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) that Kawaoka’s paper and Fouchier’s paper that was also in the works, be censored – that the mutations shouldn’t be published lest terrorist groups be given the secret formula for a superflu.

Now the debates raged within the scientific community, with one side rejecting the censoring of science in any form, the other side echoed D. A. Henderson’s doubt that the research was even merited in the first place. Long story short, the advisory board reversed their ruling in March after receiving ‘revised’ versions of Kawaoka and Fouchier’s papers. I use that term lightly, as all the mutation data is still there.

The key to Kawaoka’s (controversial yet FBI-approved) breakthrough was a viral protein called hemagglutinin that affects the ability of a virus to bind host cells. The hemagglutinin in H5N1 was well-suited to promote transmission of the virus between birds but not between humans. Kawaoka produced millions of H5N1 variants in which the hemagglutinin was mutated in different ways. When they screened the variants they found a version that, unlike its naturally-occurring counterpart, was very good at infecting human cells in a Petri dish.

The hemagglutinin of the human-targeting H5N1 virus showed four new mutations. Three of the mutations changed the shape of the protein from its normal shape and the fourth changed the pH level at which the virus attaches to cells and injects their genetic material. Sifting through the millions of mutations revealed a secret molecular formula for gaining deadly entry into human cells. To maximize the lethality of their creation, the team combined the mutated gene with the seven remaining genes – flu viruses have a total of eight genes – of a particularly transmittable flu virus; specifically, from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic virus.

And then they gave the modified viruses to ferrets. The new virus worked ‘beautifully,’ rapidly infecting ferrets separately housed in different cages. Assuming ferrets are a good model for viral transmission among other mammals, like humans, the scientists would have taken a virus that was relatively harmless to humans and turned it into a Franken-flu with a monstrous potential for harm were it ever to get out.

The paper, detailing what mutations went where, was published May 2nd in the journal Nature.

Only four or five mutations were needed to turn the relatively harmless bird flu into a potential nightmare.

So should we be concerned about the world knowing that switching asparagine-224 to a lysine and a few other like changes turns a relatively harmless bird disease into a superbug threat for humans? A couple months ago during one of our Google+ Hangouts we brought up the debate to New York Times science columnist and writer of The Loom Carl Zimmer who’d last year wrote a book about viruses.

“I can sleep at night knowing that that’s going on but I don’t rule out the danger of it. On the other hand I do think there’s a danger in totally stifling this type of research. If somebody did release some sort of horrible bioweapon we would probably find a vaccine or cure if this information was available to people as easily and quickly as possible so that you’re essentially crowdsourcing a solution as opposed to, say, if anybody wants this data you’re going to have to fill out three thousand pages of paperwork and then we’ll get back to you, and in the meanwhile another thousand people have died.”

The practicalities of a quick and effective response aside, Zimmer isn’t too alarmed by the threat of a superbug let loose in the first place.

“I think an argument could be made that [a virus] is a pretty lousy bioweapon. There’s good chance that if you were…trying to make a very virulent kind of flu you might very well be the first person to die. But let’s imagine you were able to transport it to some other country and unleash it. Take a look at what happened in 2009 with the Swine Flu. It was first noticed in Mexico, and by the time scientists really had a good handle on it in Mexico, we now know that it was already all over the world, because people have been getting on planes and going all over the place. So, if some horrible person unleashed a very virulent flu in New York, a lot of people would get on planes and go back to that terrorist’s home country trying to escape the flu.”

Of course, anyone willing to unleash a virulent flu in New York might not have cared to think these matters through.

And the second recipe, Fouchier’s, which will be published shortly in Science, is rumored to formulate an H5N1 virus even more lethal than Kawaoka’s. Fouchier’s group took a slightly different strategy by jumpstarting it with mutations that fostered its transmission from birds to ferrets, but then instead of screening for mutations that made the virus transmissible between ferrets, they took viruses from sick ferrets and injected them into healthy ferrets. Mimicking the way the viruses adapt in nature the viruses mutated as they were artificially transmitted from ferret to ferret, until they began transmitting on their own. As Fouchier told the New Scientist, his flu “is transmitted as efficiently as seasonal flu.” With a near 60 percent mortality, let’s hope his observation is never confirmed. The seasonal flu already leaves between 250,000 and 500,000 around the world dead each year.

But the method by which Fouchier’s bird flu was created could be considered an argument for creating superflus in the lab in the first place. Injecting viruses from sick ferrets into healthy ones until they adapted simulates the worst case scenario for humans. Conceivably, all it would take for the bird-to-human H5N1 to become a human-to-human H5N1 would be a finite number of transmissions between humans. As with the ferrets, the virus would adapt. How many direct contact transmissions would it need before it became airborne? The virus passed between Fouchier’s ferrets need just ten transmissions.

Ten transmissions and five mutations – one more than Kawaoka’s virus needed. Either way, it’s a very short jaunt along evolution’s path to go from a relatively benign bird flu to the potentially most destructive infectious agent ever to face humanity. So if similar mutations are needed to make the virus airborne between humans, knowing ahead of time what those mutations are, as Zimmer pointed out, gives us a head start in creating a vaccine.

A good enough reason? You tell me. But in the end it doesn’t really matter which side of the issue you’re on because the superflu recipe is already out there. We know it’s the first of two, and we can bet that other publications will follow that are potential bioweapon cheat sheets for “horrible persons.” Surely the debate will rage on as these papers come out, with one side saying benefits don’t outweigh risk, the other side saying we can’t afford to not be prepared.

[image credits: Wall Street Journal, International Business Times, and Nature]
images: China, China2, Paper

*Okay, check out these two videos — the one where computers can register in three dimensions, and the other one where data flows through the human body. It’ll take a while. That’ll give you time to contemplate the truly weird operational environment you’ll be living in as your Minority Report augments flow right through your conductive flesh.

*This Underkoffler speech is super, just chock-full of awesome lines. It’s like a entire TV episode composed entirely of ear-snagging elevator-pitches. No wonder Los Angeles loves that guy.

*Plus! Be first on your block to upload a selfshot through your own arm!

“Uploaded by ericssonmultimedia on Jan 13, 2012

“In Human Body Communication (HBC) we use the body as the communication channel. Very weak signals pass through the body from a smartphone for example to external devices like electronic locks, printers, speakers, screens.

“The technology that Ericsson has developed can transmit data at a speed of 6-10 MBps, but our studies shows that the speeds can be further increased.”

*I enjoyed that. It was a joke, but also a milestone.

Published on May 15, 2012 by Ogmento

“Will Wright, Bruce Sterling, Mark Billinghurst, and Daniel Suarez caught with their “pants down” as Oriel Bergig from Ogmento demonstrates “X-Ray Vision tank”, during Augmented Reality Event 2012. The tank can also be witnessed on Minesta street in New York City, showcasing the coming revolution Ogmento brings to real world games. It is the first time in history such an experience is demonstrated on a mass market smartphone device like an iPhone.”

Credits to Ogmento, Ogmento ReDnX team, and Robert Castle.

Category:
Gaming

Tags:
Will Wright Bruce Sterling Mark Billinghurst Daniel Suarez live demo X-Ray Computer Vision CV Augmented Reality AR ARE2012 Location Based games game tank commander of a tank Mobile Device iPhone Android Video Game NY LA Santa Clara

*Wow. I bet this’ll be every bit as exciting as watching people make law and sausage.

*We’ll drop by later when all the hard work’s been done by other people. In the meantime, feel free to opendesign us something nice. We’ll be lazily waiting here next to the Update button, ready to describe all its flaws, blogger-style.

http://design.okfn.org/2012/05/16/open-design-definition-we-are-ready-to-start/

“Open Design definition: we are ready to start!

May 16, 2012 in Definition

“We’ve been busy preparing the tools and the documentation for starting the discussion about the Open Design definition, but now we are ready to start! After checking the different technical solutions for handling a distributed discussion about the Open Design definition, the best option turned out to be using Git as a distributed version control system and Github as the online platform. (((“But wait — is GitHub properly defined as an opendesign platform for an opendesign definition? And shouldn’t you opendesign the hardware and software with which you access GitHub? I bet you flew to this conference on a plane that wasn’t opendesign,” etc etc etc)))

“Github is really popular for developing open source applications, and the platform is really well developed for collective discussion and easiness of use. You can also read this article about Github on Wired, (((soon to be obsolesced by the exciting new publication “OpenWired,” printed entirely on fabs with Raspberry Pi Arduinos and flown free to subscribers with tiny hobbyist drones))) which was then published as a Github repository as well. Furthermore, this will also mean having a real open source and collaborative process and experience! If you don’t know Git and Github already, don’t worry, (((oh good))) we will provide you with information and help, and the process will start with easy tasks. We also chose Github for its simplicity!

“We have created then an organization account in Github for our group:

https://github.com/organizations/OpenDesign-WorkingGroup

“And there we’ve just launched the repository for developing collaboratively the Open Design Definition, with all the information that are necessary to start the process:

https://github.com/OpenDesign-WorkingGroup/Open-Design-Definition

“What can you do next then? (((Yeah, that’s what I always ask, because I always forget what I did already. That’s not called “being harebrained,” mind you, that’s called “New Aesthetic n-dimensional layered contexts of PolySociality.”)))

“Create your own basic / free Github user.
“Send your username to the mailing list so that we can add you to the group and the repository (only the username, no passwords!!).

“Start reading the documentation about the whole process that’s in the repository.
“Start reading the existing Open definitions already in the repository, and for any comments open an issue ticket on Github.
“If you need help, just send an e-mail to the mailing list.

“And, this week we are going to have an Open Design Definition workshop at Fab* in Manchester, the first meeting of the European FabLabs and part of the Future Everything Festival! (((<--- cool festival; can destroy planetary means of production in its spare time, through methods even the Chinese can't understand))) If you cannot attend it, don’t worry: the most important part of the process is the online discussion, the local workshops are very useful for speeding up the process and help people jump in the Github platform, but we want to have as many participants as possible with the online discussion!"

*Check out Massimo's hardware here.

http://www.slideshare.net/openp2pdesign

*It’s pretty awesome hardware, right? Yeah, you bet it is. So, you guys do all the hard work of learning how to use that stuff, and make something for us on the blog here. We’ll be sure to tell you what’s wrong with it.

*Grinding it out in the ground game.

http://www.urbeingrecorded.com/news/2012/05/15/the-state-of-augmented-reality-are2012/

“Last week I attended and spoke at the Wednesday session of ARE2012, the SF Bay Area’s largest conference on augmented reality. This is the 3rd year of the conference and both the maturity of the industry and the cooling of the hype were evident. Attendance was lower than previous years, content was more focused on advertising & marketing examples, and there was a notable absence of platinum sponsors and top-tier enterprise attendees. On the surface this could be read as a general decline of the field but this is not the case.

“A few things are happening to ferry augmented reality across the Trough of Disillusionment. This year there were more headset manufacturers than ever before. The need for AR to go hands-free is becoming more & more evident [my biases]. I saw a handful of new manufacturers I’d never even heard of before. And there they were with fully-functional hardware rendering annotations on transparent surfaces. In order for AR to move from content to utility it has to drive hardware development into HUD’s. Google see’s this as does any other enterprise player in the mobile game. Many of the forward-looking discussions effectively assume a head’s-up experience.

“At the algorithmic level, things are moving quickly especially in the domain of edge detection, face tracking, and registration. I saw some really exceptional mapping that overlaid masks on people’s faces in realtime responding to movement & expressions without flickers or registration errors (except for the occasional super-cool New Aesthetic glitch when the map blurred off the user’s face if they moved too quickly).

“Machine vision is advancing at a strong pace and there was an ongoing thread throughout the conference about the challenges the broader industry faces in moving facial recognition technology into the mobile stack. It’s already there and works but the ethical and civil liberty issues are forcing a welcome pause in consideration.

“Qualcomm was the sole platinum sponsor, promoting its Vuforia AR platform. Sony had a booth showing some AR games (Pong!?) on their Playstation Vita device. But pretty much everyone in the enterprise tier stayed home, back in the labs and product meetings and design reviews, slowly & steadily moving AR into their respective feature stacks. Nokia is doing this, Google of course, Apple has been opening up the camera stream and patenting eyewear, HP is looking at using AR with Autonomy, even Pioneer has a Cyber Navi AR GPS solution. The same players that were underwriting AR conferences in exchange for marketing opportunities and the chance to poach young developers are now integrating the core AR stack into their platforms. This is both good & bad for the industry…”

http://beat.baidu.com/?page_id=2

“About the Baidu Beat

“China’s Internet culture is fascinating. The Web is where all the new Chinese memes are born, where celebrities—for better or for worse—are created, where new writers hone their skills, and where songs become hits. The Internet has become the crucible of contemporary Chinese culture, and is the de facto public sphere of Chinese life, where ideas are exchanged, often with remarkable candor. (((Boy, I’ll say — “candour” might be better described as “4chan-style sleazebag raunch.”)))

“Here at Baidu, as China’s leading search engine, we sit at the white-hot center of the Chinese Internet. We get to see what, in aggregate, all those individual search queries add up to. We get to see what the hottest topics are on Baidu PostBar, the largest online community site in China. We get to see what questions are on the minds of the Chinese Internet users as reflected in Baidu Knows, our question and answer service. We get to see what videos people are searching for most.

“It’s the mission of Baidu’s English blog, the Baidu Beat, to give you a peek into what Chinese Internet users are looking for online: Who they’re fascinated with, what they’re fighting about, who’s making them laugh, and what’s making them cry….”

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬

Top10 (May10): Caucasian “rapes” Chinese woman in public, Japanese PCgame involves killing Chinese. http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5157

9 May

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top 10 (May 9):BBQ rat meat skewers,chemical spray on chives. More: http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5151

8 May

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top10 (May8): Kidney traffickers arrested,”beggar gang” harrasses newlyweds for “red pockets” http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5146

4 May

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top10 (May 4): Unsafe Chinese cabbages, 19 year-old runs organized sex trade group.http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5136

4 May

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top10 (May3): Official gets special treatment from school, hospital closed due to powerful local family. http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5129

3 May

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top 10 (May 2): New type of gutter oil, animal caregiver licks baby monkey bum. http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5126

26 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Baidu Mobile Map Now Offers Free Voice Navigation to Android OS Users: http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5114

26 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top10 (April26): Four food scandals, online users sued for slander, Bo Xilai’s brother resigns from investment company. http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5105

26 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top10 (April25): Under-age rape, man bullied at work vents on ATM machines.http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5094

24 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top10 (April24): Restroom demolition, patient spits out needle tube, CCTV host disappears: http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5077

24 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Baidu Joins Hands with Kingsoft Powerword, Close Cooperation to Lead Online Dictionary and Translation Services: http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5080

23 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Netizens get free licensed music, Baidu pays the bills:http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5070

23 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top10 (April23): Students hospitalized from eating “stinky beans,” university group brawl over seating. http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5063

23 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top10 (April20):Netizens protest 20yrold’s appointment to bureau director, corrupt officials arrested thx to online user. http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5059

20 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top 10 Search (April 19): Supermarket scams,old cows get hormone injections and antibiotics to produce milk. More@ http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5054

19 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top10 Search (April 18): Contaminated cokes, ancient tomb robbers and new online celeb “storm brother.” More@ http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5049

17 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top 10 (April 17): Death threat, lethal explosion, angry flight passengers attempted to stop gliding aircraft. More at: http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5034

13 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top 10 (April 10):Beijing sidewalk collapse woman falls in, overpaid super nannies, poisonous yoghurt. More at http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5007

13 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top 10 (April 13):Official victimized by microblog prank, doctor assaulted, country’s jelly industry in PR crisis. More:http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5028

13 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top 10 Search (April 12): Questionable meat buns, car thief’s diary, trouble-making nun caught half-dressed. More: http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5023

13 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Top 10(April11): Official’s wife murders British man, hotel use same towel for cups & toilets. More at: http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5012

13 Apr

The Baidu Beat ‏ ‪@BaiduBeat‬
Baidu is not a condom, court rules: http://beat.baidu.com/?p=4999