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News Briefs 21-06-2011

The gentle falling links of reminder for your amnesia.

  • Genetic analysis of shrunken head verifies accounts of violent head-hunting in South America.
  • State of the ocean: report warns of mass extinction.
  • Can cities feed us?
  • Encounters with biblio-amnesia.
  • The biology of ethics.
  • Feedback loops are changing what people do.
  • New rocketplane could fly Paris-Tokyo in 2.5 hours.
  • Alfvén triumphs again and again.
  • Africa’s great wall of trees.
  • Pigs could grow human organs in stem cell breakthrough.
  • Why we have college.
  • Chipmunks and woodchucks eavesdrop on each other.
  • Why being male is bad for you.
  • Life between snowball earths.

Quote of the Day:

You, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

Socrates, Plato’s Phaedrus

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