Gene Mappers May Have Missed Half The Genes- How many genes are nestled in a human being's DNA? A year ago, when the Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics unveiled their maps of the human genetic code, it seemed there was a definitive answer: about 30,000. But now that answer is turning out to be less than final, with new data suggesting there could be 70,000 or more human genes.

British Panel Endorses Cloning - A British Parliament review panel yesterday endorsed regulations passed last year that legalized cloning to create human embryos for research. The House of Commons easily had passed regulations allowing creation of embryos as a source of stem cells, the primitive master cells that turn into other cell types and could be used to find cures to a range of diseases. Parliament's House of Lords, however, approved the regulations only after setting up the review committee to explore ethical concerns about the procedure. Many said they were concerned that ethical worries were being sidelined in the rush to be at the forefront of potentially lucrative medical research. In the U.S., President Bush has barred federal spending for research that uses embryo cells, making an exception for stem-cell lines already in existence.

Floods At Mars' Equator Appear To Be "Recent" - Not only lava, but water has recently flooded from fissures near Mars' equator, University of Arizona scientists have discovered. And they're not talking about a trickle. They're talking possibly 600 cubic kilometers of water. That's one and a quarter times as much water as in Lake Erie, four times as much water as in Lake Tahoe, and 65 times as much water as in California's Salton Sea.

Vast Fields of Ice Found on Mars - Only days after starting its science mission, a new spacecraft orbiting Mars has struck pay dirt, detecting vast fields of ice that scientists say provide evidence of sufficient water to make it possible for the planet to have harbored life. The discovery is a coup for NASA, whose leaders are using a "follow the water" strategy to understand the evolution of Mars and look for signs of past and present life there. The presence of water also would be key to a future attempt to have astronauts explore the Martian surface.

Facing Your Genetic Destiny - The use of predictive gene tests is still limited to a handful of relatively rare and highly hereditary diseases. But that scenario is about to change: scientists in academic and corporate laboratories are tirelessly digging through human DNA to find genetic variations that make individuals susceptible to common diseases, including Alzheimer’s, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and stroke. Whereas today doctors calculate our risk profile for disease using a few one-size-fits-all parameters, such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure and the number of cigarettes we smoke, tomorrow they might instead consider our complex, and personalized, genetic risk pattern.

Anti-Ageing a Step Closer - It's something most of us fear - getting old. You're born, you live, you die. A depressing thought. But one small group of dancing septuagenarian rats is providing a ray of hope to all those wishing science would get a move on and discover a way to reverse ageing. A combination of two chemicals was given to the old rats, and now they're seriously considering a new career in ballroom dancing. A team of scientists led by Dr Bruce Ames, from the University of California at Berkeley, found in recent experiments that a combination of two chemicals commonly found in health food shops was enough to transform the elderly rats (70+ in human terms) into lively, young-again dancers with nary a care i' the world, reports Ananova.com.

Microbes May Survive 50 Miles Down - Until now, scientists thought that only specially adapted organisms they call extremophiles could exist in seemingly intolerable environments such as high-pressure, high-temperature oceanic hydrothermal vents or in the ice sheets of Antarctica. A study published in the February 22, 2002, issue of Science, however, shows that even common bacteria are viable under high-pressure conditions equivalent to about 50 kilometers beneath the Earth's crust or 160 kilometers in a hypothetical sea. This finding may expand the habitable zone for life within the solar system and it opens new doors for looking for life much deeper inside planetary bodies than previously considered.

TECHNOLOGY

Enron 'Created Fake Trading Room' - Enron created a fake trading room in order to impress Wall Street analysts, a former top executive at the firm has admitted. Four years ago, the company built a command centre for its Enron Energy Services (EES) power supply arm, and ordered staff to pretend they were doing deals as analysts gathered in Houston for their annual meeting with the firm. EES later went on to be an active part of the business, but former chairman Kenneth Lay and ex-president Jeffrey Skilling rehearsed staff in looking busy, in the hope of convincing investors that it was already a going concern in 1998.

Andersen Seeking Quick Settlement - Arthur Andersen is pushing hard to settle all claims over its Enron audits, offering a total payment of $750 million to cover civil lawsuits and seeking to persuade the Justice Department not to indict the firm. Andersen is focusing intensely on trying to get the Enron litigation behind it in as soon as two weeks, before corporations send out annual ballots asking shareholders to ratify their choice of independent auditors, a source close to the firm said. The firm has been saying its very survival could be at stake if it can't get the agreements -- under a cloud of possible civil and criminal sanctions, Andersen could have difficulty hanging on to its corporate clients and keeping its top talent from bolting to other firms.

How To Do The Right Thing - Creating and sustaining an ethical corporation isn't as difficult as you might think; it's actually easier than some of the day-to-day business challenges you face. The keys to running an ethical company are accountability, honesty, and information transparency. The trouble is many companies are structured so that nobody has complete information, nobody makes complete decisions, and nobody has clear responsibility. This kind of structure lets managers hide within it and breeds an atmosphere of irresponsibility. Corporations aren't ethical or evil in and of themselves--but people can be. So ethics must focus on you and the people you work with. Most people want to do the right thing, but organizational structure can lead them to do the wrong thing, without meaning to or even knowing it. Structuring an ethical corporation makes the goal easier to achieve.

Faster Company - By the time you read this, the Speed Team at IBM will have just about raced right out of existence. It has been a brief -- but intense -- journey. Last November, during dinner with some members of his nearly 200-person leadership council, Steve Ward, VP of business transformation and chief information officer at IBM, decided that saving time -- making decisions faster, writing software faster, completing projects faster -- needed "to be much higher up on the agenda." To the hungry startups that were gnawing at the edges of IBM's businesses, working in Internet time seemed as natural as, well, sitting through review meetings did to veteran IBMers. Ward was worried that if IBM didn't reset its clock, those startups would clean its clock.

Reaching For Innovation - The most popular boardroom game of the 1990s was creating new business models that would radically redefine industries. But the new century clearly has brought sobering shifts in priorities. Businesses are battening down the hatches, scaling back R&D, winnowing product and service lines, and slashing payrolls. Cost-cutting and streamlining are back in senior executives' job descriptions. If the end goal of your company is to create shareholder value, though, the search for great new business models needs to proceed in good economies and bad. Indeed, playing it safe can leave a company vulnerable to the even greater risk of watching someone else redefine your industry. The histories of innovation at companies such as AOL Time Warner, Charles Schwab, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart demonstrate that economic uncertainty is actually a fertile time for spawning new business models.

Will This Asian Project Fly? - DATELINE: Tokyo, January 1, 2012. " The pan-Asian aerospace consortium, Aeroasia, today rolled out the first of its gleaming new medium-sized jetliners that it hopes will be the forerunner of a stable of passenger jets to rival the fleets produced by Boeing and Airbus. "Former Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, the man whose vision led to the formation of Aeroasia headed the VIP passenger list on an inaugural flight which was crewed by a team drawn from all shareholder Asian nations in the project." A futuristic flight of fancy perhaps - but it could become reality if Ishihara's vision of creating an all-Asia aerospace consortium, similar to Airbus Industrie in Europe, is transformed into reality over the next decade.

SOCIETY AND POLITICS

The Software Says You're Just Average - More and more, companies are turning to Web-enabled employee performance software that allows them to analyze with cold, hard data just how effective their ranks are. Back in the 1980s and '90s, the focus was on business units, with compensation tied to the group's overall performance. Today, tracking software can zoom in on the finest-grained measure of an individual's output, so that everyone from customer service reps to marketing execs can be paid in the modern equivalent of a piece-rate system. Think of it as a kind of Six Sigma program for human capital. By identifying which workers are best at which skills, companies can quickly assemble the most stellar teams. The technology's performance data help managers identify whom to lay off, thus helping to cut costs and lift productivity--even in the midst of a downturn. Moreover, it's another tool in the emerging corporate star system, in which top players are lavished with rewards, while the middling make do with less.

Terror’s Legacy is a New Volunteerism - Soon after the twin towers of New York City's World Trade Center were destroyed on September 11, many people did some serious soul-searching about their job satisfaction, and how they had been balancing work, family, and other commitments. Some reshuffled their priorities with the goal of spending more time at home and less in the office. Others have embraced more dramatic changes in their working lives. Recruiters say, for example, that more employees are putting their careers on hold to work as volunteers in developing countries, where they often share their entrepreneurial skills with small-business owners.

Russia’s Population Meltdown - In July 2000, in his first annual presidential address to the Russian people, President Vladimir Putin listed the 16 "most acute problems facing our country." Number one on the list, topping even the country´s dire economic condition and the diminishing effectiveness of its political institutions was the declining size of Russia´s population. Putin put the matter plainly. The Russian population is shrinking by 750,000 every year, and (thanks to a large excess of deaths over births) looks likely to continue dropping for years to come. If the trend is not altered, he warned, "the very survival of the nation will be endangered." Unfortunately, even Putin´s grim reckoning of the numbers may understate the dimensions of the calamity confronting his country. Its birthrate has reached extraordinarily low levels, while the death rate is high and rising.

Homeless Haven Rethinks Tolerance - It takes only a few blocks to realize that street people and panhandlers are as much a part of this gilded hill city as the Golden Gate, the Presidio, or the striking views of Alcatraz from Russian Hill. San Francisco belongs to them as much as it does to the scions of Pacific Heights or former dotcomers now working in temp jobs. In this tolerant city, politicians who have sought to remove them from street corners have long been labeled callous - and often rousted from office. Here, urinating in public is a cherished right. As the problem grows, however, San Francisco appears to be reaching its breaking point. According to some estimates, it has roughly the same number of homeless people as New York, even though it has one-tenth the population. Two years ago, nearly 200 people died on the streets - twice as many as in the state of Florida.

U.S., EU Clash Over Tracking Satellites - The European Union Friday rejected fresh criticism from Washington of a proposed EU network of navigation satellites that would rival the U.S. military Global Position System. The State Department said in a statement Thursday that the U.S. government saw no compelling need for Galileo, the European project, because GPS would meet the world's needs for the foreseeable future. Chief European Commission spokesman Jonathan Faull retorted that it was none of Washington's business and "we don't like monopolies, as you know."

ENVIRONMENT

Let's Hear it from the Frogs!  - Worldwide, disturbing reports of population declines, mass mortalities and species extinctions of amphibians have been accumulating for the last two decades, so much so that the World Conservation Union (IUCN) has established a Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force. Although the amphibian declines are not fully understood, and several factors are implicated, there is no doubt that many populations and species are experiencing extraordinary environmental pressures.

U.S. Regulation of Transgenic Plants Called Inadequate - Regulations now in place to protect the public and the environment from potential harmful effects of genetically engineered crops are inadequate, concludes a new review by the National Research Council. The report, released Thursday, says the government must do a better job of screening these crops - both before and after they are planted. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should more rigorously review the potential environmental effects of new genetically engineered, or transgenic, plants before approving them for commercial use, argues the report from the National Research Council, which helps advise the federal government on scientific issues.

Water Wars - Cambodia and Vietnam are nervous but China plans to push ahead with ambitious plans to tame the rapids of the Upper Mekong to make the fabled river navigable for barges and tourist craft. The 4,200-kms long Mekong has never realised its full commercial potential because river craft could not get past its many natural obstacles: rocks, rapids, shoals. But a short ceremonial boat trip by a smiling Chinese tourism delegation to a Thai river bank in December underlines the far-reaching plans by Chinese officials to dynamite all remaining obstacles. The aim? To create a shipping channel for cargo and other ships. China sees the Mekong - known to Thais as the "Mother of Waters" - as a natural conduit between its backward southwestern provinces and Southeast Asia's export markets and raw materials.

Complete Collapse of North Atlantic Fishing Predicted - The entire North Atlantic is being so severely overfished that it may completely collapse by 2010, reveals the first comprehensive survey of the entire ocean's fishery. "We'll all be eating jellyfish sandwiches," says Reg Watson, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia. Putting new ocean-wide management plans into place is the only way to reverse the trend, Watson and his colleagues say. North Atlantic catches have fallen by half since 1950, despite a tripling of the effort put into catching them. The total number of fish in the ocean has fallen even further, they say, with just one sixth as many high-quality "table fish" like cod and tuna as there were in 1900. Fish prices have risen six fold in real terms in 50 years.

Ten Eyes on the Environment - Envisat, Europe's largest environment-monitoring satellite, will check Earth's vital signs and hopefully make the first ever space-based measurements of carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere. The satellite is space science's equivalent of a Swiss army knife. Other Earth-monitoring programmes rely on smaller, cheaper satellites with just one function. Envisat carries 10 instruments, each dedicated to different environmental criteria.

E-Waste is Cited As Threat to Poor States - The global export of electronics waste, including consumer devices, computer monitors and circuit boards, is creating environmental and health problems in the Third World, a report issued Monday by five environmental organizations says. The report says that 50 percent to 80 percent of electronics waste collected for recycling in the United States is placed on container ships and sent to China, India, Pakistan or other developing countries, where it is reused or recycled under largely unregulated conditions, often with toxic results.

Last Three Months in U.S. Warmest in History - According to government scientists, the past three months were the warmest ever recorded in the United States, and January was the warmest in the 123 years that temperatures have been recorded around the world. The nation's temperature measured from November 2001 to January 2002 averaged 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit above average temperatures recorded between 1895 and 2001, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government's climate study arm.

Arctic Melting Will Open New Sea Passages - The Arctic ice cap is melting at a rate that could allow routine commercial shipping through the far north in a decade and open up new fisheries. But a report for the US Navy seen by New Scientist reveals that naval vessels will be unable to police these areas. It was in 1906, after centuries of attempts, that Roald Amundsen finally navigated the North-West Passage through the sea ice north of Canada. Even today, only specially strengthened ships can make the trip. But in 10 years' time, if melting patterns change as predicted, the North-West Passage could be open to ordinary shipping for a month each summer. And the Northern Sea Route across the top of Russia could allow shipping for at least two months a year in as little as five years time.

THE FUTURE

The Connector - John Brockman is a virtuoso of the art of networking. He inspires the best brains for projects, establishes contacts with provocative thinkers, asks the right questions, combines answers, and thinks the unthinkable. John Brockman is a central figure of the intellectual avantgarde in the United States.