Weezer, you get me! I heart Internet fame.

Scientists in the UK can now legally combine human and animal embryos. Manimals. Why? For the sake of finding cures for diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

From Times Online:

The Minister admitted that the Bill was not a promise that cures for diseases could be found. “It is an aspiration that it may.”

The main kinds of admixed embryo permitted by the Bill are “cytoplasmic hybrids” or “cybrids”, which are made by moving a human nucleus into an empty animal egg. These are genetically 99.9 per cent human. As well as true hybrids, it also allows chimeras that combine human and animal cells, and transgenic human embryos that include a little animal DNA.

Of course, they can’t really (legally) grow a mermaid or centaur or whatever weird manimal (yet). Scientists can only cultivate the embryos for 14 days, and it is illegal to transfer them into a human or animal womb. BUT, rules were made to be broken and chances are if they make it illegal, someone will do it. Mother nature, prepare to be f*cked with.

Let me start out by saying I’m one of the many iPhone diehards that parade around the interwebs… in truth, I’m using an old Motorola Razor with the battery taped in and 1/2 the screen blank due to some drunken mishaps involving tequila .

With that over and done with, the new Blackberry Bold successfully achieved nothing in terms of advancing on the iPhone market. Despite the camera being 2 megapixels (which is still trash by camera standards) and the retention of their keyboard, I’m not seeing the big deal about this lil gadget.

From US News.com:

A new hand-held joins the BlackBerry family, but we’ll withhold the oohs and ahs despite the “Bold” name. The phone appears to be a good step forward—and not much more.

The Bold essentially soups up earlier BlackBerry models, adding a higher-resolution screen that has some reviewers singing its praises. And Kevin Micaluk at CrackBerry.com has a gushing review of the phone’s look and feel, having scored one off eBay. The phone doesn’t officially go on sale until this summer.

Besides its sharp screen, the handset works on high-speed data networks and includes Wi-Fi networking, both pluses. The camera captures a hefty 2 megapixels, and the media player syncs with Apple’s iTunes software.

Meh. No touchscreen, no dice.

The Fermi Paradox is defined as the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. In other words, in a universe as big, and as old as ours seems to be, the fact that we have yet to be contacted by a civilization advanced enough to reach us seems pretty improbable. It has been speculated previously that there must be some sort of Great Filter which prevents such life from arising, or reaching the technological level necessary to achieve interstellar communications. A recent article by Nick Bostrom in the Technology Review explores the possibility that this Great Filter is technology itself: that all civilizations eventually seal their own doom by way of technology, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or the Unabomber’s favorite, Gray Goo. To this list, Tim O’Reilly (aka the guy who coined the term Web 2.0) has added a far more tangible possibility: Peak Oil:

I’ve been thinking of Fermi’s Paradox since I saw the documentary film A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, with its dire predictions of the wars and disruptions that could occur on the downward slope of the Hubbert curve. While I remain an optimist about the power of human ingenuity to surmount enormous challenges, I have enough sense of history to know that catastrophes do happen, that societies fail to make the right choices, and that civilizations fail. What if the answer to Fermi’s paradox is not the absence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but merely the absence of high technology? The movie makes the case that the extraordinary flowering of our society has been driven by our profligate use of oil as an incredibly cheap energy resource — and one that won’t last. With haunting images of once vibrant oil fields that are now ghost towns, the movie is a thought-provoking counterpoint to An Inconvenient Truth. If the movie’s contentions are correct, we’re truly caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Either global warming or peak oil will lead to an urgent transformation of civilization as we know it, or our failure to transform quickly enough might well lead to the end of civilization as we know it. And if indeed cheap oil is a prerequisite to the first flowering of technological civilization, might a Roman-Empire-style collapse due to some future disaster make it difficult to rebuild to spaceflight-capable levels due to lack of said resource the next time around? Many of the large scale energy technologies that we imagine replacing oil are energy intensive to build. They are, in a sense, themselves dependent on oil.

Those longing desperately to find prove of ancient civilizations on planets like Mars might want to think twice, since, as O’Reilly puts it “once we find evidence of primitive life elsewhere, we’ve narrowed the likelihood that the Great Filter is behind us, and increased the likelihood that it is still ahead of us, in some unknown disaster to come.” FUCKKKKKKKK

Remember that one time I posted a video of a flying humanoid figure that a “leading Mexican UFO researcher” had proclaimed to totally, unquestionably “real”? Well apparently, if you listen to the version of the video without the creepy X-Files music, you can hear a woman looking through binoculars tell the assembled crowd that it’s just a bunch of balloons. I don’t know though, I’m still holding out for proof that it’s an alien on a jetpack or a Carlos Castaneda-type Don Juan character on some gait of power shit…

It’s been 5 days since GTA IV came out and Rockstar has already sold 6 million copies of the game, beating out Halo 3’s launch week. 4 million people bought it the day it came out, which happened to be the 16th anniversary of the LA Riots. The game has generated $390 million. Violent video games are AWESOME!!!!11