Fields of Insulin

At least I have some good science to balance out yesterday's totally sucky, irritating, insane crime against humanity.

A biotech company in Canada has developed a way to harvest human insulin from genetically modified safflower oil, at dramatically reduced cost compared to the typical methods for generating insulin for diabetics. If all works as planned, they could "meet the world's total projected insulin demand in 2010 with less than 16,000 acres of safflower production." (Globe and Mail coverage)

While this is business, they are at least upfront with sound bites about wanting to expand insulin availability to the developing world...

(originally seen on /.)

Those petri dishes are full of people!

"President Bush has threatened vetoes on 141 bills during his presidency, but had never actually vetoed a measure before Wednesday."
(more here)

What finally did it? A bill that included federal funding for stem cell research.

Will anyone ask Chimpy McTurdforbrains why fertility clinics aren't charged with murder when they throw out petri dishes?

Time to go running so I don't throw things...

Recent Bloggy Goodness

Here's another collection of interesting drops from the internets that I've failed to pass along in this format over the last few weeks...

• More private space exploration, this time testing an inflatable space station
• Shooting War: a very violent, dystopian graphic novel about a real-time video blogger embedded with the US army in Iraq... in 2011. New episodes every week.
• The Nature Conservancy has gone so far as to invest in federal trawling permits and boats, thereby preserving 3.8 million acres off the California coast from... trawling.
• There's an exhibit at the Writers Guild of America Library in LA, now through September 8, 2006, of oversized photos of work-for-hire screenplays shotup by guns by the author.