“White House adviser Karl Rove should either apologize or resign for saying liberals responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes by wanting to ”prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers,” Democrats said Thursday.

Adding to the rancor, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., suggested that Republican charges that Democrats were undermining the war on terror with their criticism of administration policies amounted to an act of desperation.” (New York Times )

Chinese Oil Giant in Takeover Bid for U.S. Corporation: “One of China’s largest state-controlled oil companies made a $18.5 billion unsolicited bid Thursday for Unocal, signaling the first big takeover battle by a Chinese company for an American corporation.” (New York Times )

…and the Movie That Dares to Tell It, Repeatedly: “How do you sell a movie about the dirtiest joke ever told?

… (T)he “funny human beings” in the film – famous comedians from Robin Williams to Chris Rock to Phyllis Diller to Jon Stewart – are not merely swearing… They’re telling their versions of a joke that involves every imaginable form of sexual perversion in graphic detail, including but not limited to incest, scatology, bestiality and sadism. Rabelais would blush.” (New York Times )

“Sally Potter – a dancer, choreographer, actress, singer, composer, writer, poet and filmmaker – has a new movie, Yes, opening on Friday. It follows Orlando (1993), The Tango Lesson (1997) and The Man Who Cried (2000) and several short films and documentaries. Yes stars Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian and Sam Neill. It is written in verse (iambic pentameter), one of the few films to use an unusual form of dialogue. (Two others are Force of Evil, 1948, in blank verse, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964, which is sung through.) Yes has two main characters, She (Ms. Allen), an Irish-American, and He (Mr. Abkarian), an Arab from Beirut, who begin an affair in London and end it in Havana.” (New York Times )

“Police say three lions rescued a 12-year-old girl kidnapped by men who wanted to force her into marriage, chasing off her abductors and guarding her until police and relatives tracked her down in a remote corner of Ethiopia.” (CNN via boing boing)

Do the inner workings of nature change with time?: “…Physics has progressed by making ever more accurate measurements of their values. And yet, remarkably, no one has ever successfully predicted or explained any of the constants. Physicists have no idea why they take the special numerical values that they do. In SI units, c is 299,792,458; G is 6.673 X 10-11; and me is 9.10938188 X 10-31–numbers that follow no discernible pattern. The only thread running through the values is that if many of them were even slightly different, complex atomic structures such as living beings would not be possible. The desire to explain the constants has been one of the driving forces behind efforts to develop a complete unified description of nature, or ‘theory of everything.’ Physicists have hoped that such a theory would show that each of the constants of nature could have only one logically possible value. It would reveal an underlying order to the seeming arbitrariness of nature.” (Scientific American)

Do games prime brain for violence?: “A small study of brain activity in video-game veterans suggests that their brains react as if they are treating the violence as real.

…He found that as violence became imminent, the cognitive parts of the brain became more active. And during a fight, emotional parts of the brain, such as the amygdala and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex, were shut down. This pattern is the same as that seen in subjects who have had brain scans during other simulated violent situations such as imagining an aggressive encounter. It is impossible to scan people’s brains during acts of real aggression so Mathiak argues that this is as close as you can get to the real thing. It suggests that video games are a “training for the brain to react with this pattern,” he says.” (New Scientist)

“Obsessed with reruns of the TV sitcom Friends? Well then you probably have at least one “Jennifer Aniston cell” in your brain, suggests research on the activity patterns of single neurons in memory-linked areas of the brain. The results point to a decades-old and dismissed theory tying single neurons to individual concepts and could help neuroscientists understand the elusive human memory.

“For things that you see over and over again, your family, your boyfriend, or celebrities, your brain wires up and fires very specifically to them. These neurons are very, very specific, much more than people think,” says Christof Koch at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, US, one of the researchers.

In the 1960s, neuroscientist Jerry Lettvin suggested that people have neurons that respond to a single concept such as, for example, their grandmother. The notion of these hyper-specific neurons, coined “grandmother cells” was quickly rejected by psychologists as laughably simplistic.

But Rodrigo Quiroga, at the University of Leicester, UK, who led the new study, and his colleagues have found some very grandmother-like cells. Previous unpublished findings from the team showed tantalising results: a neuron that fired only in response to pictures of former US president Bill Clinton, or another to images of the Beatles…” (New Scientist)

“The Wall Street Journal reports that patients in Virginia and California have a new way to get refills of their medications: an ATM-like automatic dispensing machines. From the article:

Once customers have filled an initial prescription with the pharmacist, they can register to retrieve and pay for their refills at a vending machine inside the store–even when the pharmacy counter isn’t open. Consumers order their refills in the usual way, either online or by phone. A pharmacist then fills the script and places packaged medicines in the machine. To pick up the order, consumers log on with a user name and password and swipe a credit or debit card. Their pre-wrapped package drops into the bin.

The California and Virginia pharmacy boards have cleared the way for the machines in their states, granting waivers of rules that require a pharmacist be present in order for drugs to be dispensed. And other states are considering allowing the machines.”

(MedGadget)

“It’s rare that an author wants to see his most famous work taken out of print.

But that’s the case with Willaim Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook, a guide to weapons and bomb-making, written 36 years ago, during the turbulent 1960s, by a 19-year-old fresh out of high school.

Powell has taken the unusual step of renouncing his work in an author’s review on Amazon.com, one of many retail venues still selling the book.” (WorldNetDaily)