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DARPA Sponsoring Limb Regeneration Research
fragmentate writes "Wired News is reporting: 'In response to the hundreds of soldiers coming home from war with missing arms or legs, Darpa is spending millions of dollars to help scientists learn how people might one day regenerate their own limbs. Prosthetics are getting better all the time, but they will never be as good as the limbs we were born with. So two teams of scientists at 10 institutions across the country are competing to regrow the first mammalian limb ... The researchers' first milestone is to generate a blastema — a mass of cells able to develop into various organs or body parts — in a mammal.' Apparently this is a relatively new area of research, even Wikipedia's stub on blastemas is very terse."
I know that this has already been beaten to death, but, for instance, Wikipedia's stub on Radiometry, one of the oldest fields in optics, is also rather terse--and that's the entry for an _entire field in optics._
It DOES, I might add, as a saving grace contain the most important radiometric lesson that anyone in the sciences needs to learn: if you say the word "intensity," you probably ACTUALLY mean irradiance. This bothers optics folks to NO END.
If the Republicans stay in control of congress come November,I hope DARPA can figure out how to grow a new moral reputation for the USA.
And maybe a new Constitution, because the one we started with has been battered badly by 6 years of the Bush Administration.
Can you believe we're even discussing torture, secret prisons, domestic wiretapping?
Yeah, they better learn how to grow a new conscience for the great Nation.
You are welcome on my lawn.