The Journal of the American Medical Association receives a letter from jail. Boston Globe

Double chip speed: The inventor of the world’s smallest transistor suggests that Moore’s Law may not be dead yet. Many were claiming we were nearing the limits of increasing chip power achieved by shrinking components. New Scientist

Gene mutation could increase life span in humans. It’s been done in fruit flies, and we have the same gene, whimsically named “I’m not dead yet.” It works by restricting calorie absorption on a cellular level. Better news yet: the fruit flies upheld their quality of life to the end, maintaining their enthusiasm for the fruit fly’s complex courtship rituals. Nando Times

Another reason to eat your sushi (as if we needed one…)

Why some people just can’t seem to pay attention.

Chronic alcoholism has long been associated with neuropsychological deficits.

These deficits include an inability to maintain attention.

A recent study examined the cerebral basis of involuntary attention shifting in alcoholics and social drinkers.

Alcoholics seem to be more sensitive to task-irrelevant stimuli.

Alcoholics that begin to drink heavily in their teens seem to be particularly susceptible. Eurekalert

Top laser printers: It appears to be a good time to buy a cheap monochrome laser printer, if all you thought you could afford was an inkjet. PC World via CNN

New report offers compelling evidence of Mars life. “The presence of
extraordinary magnetic fossils in a
meteorite from Mars suggests that the
planet once hosted primitive life,
scientists reported this week.

The only known sources of such
microscopic magnetic crystals on
Earth are certain types of bacteria that
produce them to seek food and energy.” CNN

Exotic vents found in undersea mountains: “Imagine walking through a field with
180-foot-tall vertical structures overhead
that continually vent warm fluids and
which have delicate flanges and
stalagmites on them.” Environmental News Network

Elephants on the brink in Asia. “The Asian elephant is in serious decline
throughout its entire range, according to a
report released Tuesday by the Worldwide
Fund for Nature.

Logging, agriculture and human resettlement
programs are pushing the elephants out of
their traditional homes and into increasing
conflict with humans, the report notes. About
20 percent of the world’s human population
lives within the present range of Asian
elephants, and that number is growing by
nearly 3 percent each year.

Today, an average of 2.4 elephants are killed each week in Sri Lanka alone. Environmental News Network

News Analysis: Another Kind of Bitter Split. “The conservative
justices in the majority set aside their concern for states’ rights,
for judicial restraint, for limitations on standing, for their usual
insistence that claims raised at the Supreme Court level have
been fully addressed by the lower courts.” New York Times

Building a Better Ballot Box. “Two of the largest technology research universities in the United States are linking up to develop voting
machines they hope will render error-prone punch cards and optically scanned ballots obsolete.

On Thursday, professors at MIT and the California Institute of Technology announced that they plan to build
a new line of reliable, secure, and modestly priced voting machines they think can become standard
equipment for national elections.” Wired

As the Guardian weblog puts it: “Only In America: Watch the next US president, pupils wandering and glass of
unknown liquid in hand, being compassionately conservative
about a couple of his friends at a wedding in 1992 – for the
record, eight years after he kicked the booze. From The
Smoking Gun. Quicktime plug-in required.

Meanwhle, here is Astrozine’s reading of Bush’s birth chart. Top
three pull-out quotes: “You express yourself well”; “Others see
you as a lively, intelligent person”; “Your thinking is somewhat
sober and you visualize everything with complete reality”.
Anyone care to agree?”

Cockburn: No closure, no peace. “Beyond
the obsession about defiant punch card machines, obstacle course
ballots, and pregnant or hanging chads, there are more serious
issues that, in the miles of print written about the election
in Florida, have received barely a mention: the systematic intimidation
of poor people, blacks, hispanics, immigrants and the disabled.” Counterpunch

The editor of Luddite Reader writes:

“Eliot: You’re wrong about Luddite Reader forgetting Local Hero. It’s
on our film pages at ludditereader.com (along with dozens of others), it
just didn’t make the top 12(15) list…”