Utopian Trace

US government cash for research on human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) is safe for now, thanks to a ruling by judges sitting in the US Court of Appeals in Washington DC. Last August, a lower court granted an injunction blocking new grants to hESC research. The ruling came in response to a suit brought by two scientists who claim that President Barack Obama’s policy to widen funding for the research is illegal. The injunction caught scientists and the US National Institutes of Health by surprise, and was based on a controversial interpretation of a law called the temporarily lifted the injunction back in September. Today’s appeals court decision, made by a 2-1 majority, overturns the injunction.

A review of technologies that create three-parent embryos to avoid mitochondrial disease has found no evidence that the methods are unsafe, calling for further research. Medical charities have followed up the report with a call to the UK’s health secretary to prepare to regulate the technology in clinics.

“Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback,” read an email sent to Google Video users. “Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re removing the remaining hosted content. We’ve always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the Web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.”

The latest rumor to emerge from the Google campus is that the company’s much anticipated music service is just about at the end of their rope with the major label licensing process. A source close to the negotiations characterizes the search giant as “disgusted” with the labels, so much so that they are seriously considering following Amazon’s lead and launching their music could service without label licenses. I’m told that, though very remote and my guess is that it would never come to this, Google may go so far as to shut down the music service project altogether.

A visual study of computer GUI in cinema.

I don’t know why, whether it’s something in the Communion wafers at certain churches, but there are many instances of Christian games that are just… odder than just about anything you’ll find elsewhere in gaming.