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Domain: highwire.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to highwire.org.

Stories · 2

  1. Gene Therapy Restores Sight To Blind

    Science · Biotech · · posted by kdawson · from the falling-scales dept. · 157 comments
    An anonymous reader writes "Looks like we have found a cure for genetic blindness (clinical trial — abstract — paper [PDF] — ABC News video). This gene therapy treatment increases both cone and rod photoreceptor-based vision. These engineered viruses are implanted to do our bidding to restore vision. Clinical trials on 6 children and young people proved the therapy and didn't find any notable side effects." Any blind person, especially any adapted and competent one, who wants to gain the sense of sight would be well advised to study Oliver Sachs's classic piece "To See and Not See."

  2. Ensuring Permanence Of Online Scientific Journals

    Science · Science · · posted by timothy · from the honey-have-you-seen-my-SciAm-collection? dept. · 107 comments
    wtpooh writes: "Many librarians and archivists are concerned about the impermanence of online scientific journals. They are accustomed to saving the paper journals for decades and do not have faith that the online versions will still be accessible in the future (What happens when a publisher goes out of business and shuts down its Web site, for example)." (Read more.)

    "To help solve this problem, the Stanford Library is collaborating with the National Science Foundation and Sun to create a system called LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe). LOCKSS is an open source, java/linux based server system which is designed to run on cheap computers at libraries and permanently cache journals to which the libraries subscribe. The LOCKSS systems talk to each other to preserve the integrity of their caches and ensure that there are always at least a minumum number of copies of each article around the world. Read about the current alpha test at the LOCKSS homepage or in this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education "

    Sounds like self-interrogating distributed file systems can be useful to people unlikely to get sued by rock bands, as if that wasn't obvious.