As if we didn't already have enough to worry about, NASA is now warning of space storms that could spawn devastating solar flares. The Telegraph UK reports:

Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs.

Due to humans’ heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion pound damage bill and “potentially devastating” problems for governments.

“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa's Heliophysics division, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

“It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world.

“Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time.”

Dr Fisher added: “Systems will just not work. The flares change the magnetic field on the earth that is rapid and like a lightning bolt. That is the solar affect.”

MIT's Technology Review wonders if a drug can extend good health and postpone the effects of aging. Early results are not promising:

In 2003, Sinclair made headlines around the world when he announced that the red-wine component resveratrol, which had previously been linked to a reduction in heart disease, extended life span in yeast. He argued that the compound activated one of the sirtuins and proposed that it mimicked the effects of caloric restriction. Sinclair and Westphal launched Sirtris in 2004 with the aim of developing molecules that could stimulate the enzyme much more potently. The company is developing treatments not for aging itself--which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn't consider an illness--but for diseases of aging, such as diabetes, Alzheimer's, and cancer.

As Stipp recounts, hopes for antiaging drugs captured media attention and investors' imaginations. But a different conversation has played out in the academic community. Some scientists doubted whether resveratrol truly targeted the sirtuins. Researchers at drug maker Pfizer also published a study in January questioning whether one of Sirtris's newer compounds targets the enzyme. The study failed to confirm the health benefits seen in earlier trials. To make matters worse, safety concerns have arisen over one of Sirtris's resveratrol compounds. In May, Glaxo announced that it would not expand a clinical trial for multiple-myeloma patients until it better understood why some participants developed a dangerous kidney ailment.

The field of antiaging research is littered with failures, and the controversy over Sirtris's compounds highlights just how difficult it has been to transform exciting scientific discoveries about the aging process into useful drugs. As Stipp illustrates, many candidates with promising antiaging benefits later failed to work in mammals or showed conflicting results.

I recently co-authored an open commentary with bioethicist Linda MacDonald Glenn that has been published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Bioethics (Volume 10 Issue 7 2010).

The article, "Dignity and Agential Realism: Human, Posthuman, and Nonhuman," was in response to Fabrice Jotterand's critique of transhumanism, "Human Dignity and Transhumanism: Do Anthro-technological Devices Have Moral Status?"

I can't republish our entire article at this time, but here's a taste:

The notion that beings exist as individuals with inherent attributes (such as dignity) anterior to their representation, is a metaphysical presupposition that underlies the belief in political, linguistic, and epistemological forms of representationalism (Barad, 2003). Within the framework of representionalism, dignity is most certainly tied into capacity; it is fair, within that framework, to suggest that the diminishment or deliberate withholding of certain attributes results in the lessening of one's dignity (That being said, one should not confuse dignity with the ways in which all human persons deserve equal status in the eyes of the law). Consequently, the inverse also holds true, whether it be the alleviation of a debilitating syndrome or the augmentation of a physical or cognitive characteristic. As far as the agent in question is concerned, human or otherwise, these interventions are dignifying. Representationalism, on the other hand, separates the world into the ontologically disjointed domains of words and things. (Barad, 2003)

A performative understanding, in contrast, contests this metaphysical assumption that dignity is an inherent attribute, as if dignity existed in a vacuum, independently of an individual’s actions or interactions with other beings. A performative understanding shifts the focus from description and questions of correspondence to matters of practice, doings and/or actions; the active participation, phenomena and “intra-actions” (Barad 2003, 2007) are what help create agreed upon meaning. The phrase made popular by M. Scott Peck, “Love is as love does” is an illustration of this shift in understanding; so is Forrest Gump's “Stupid is as stupid does.”

So a performative understanding of dignity includes recognition that the dignity of a person is contingent on the ways in which they are treated by others (including institutions) and the ways in which they are capable of interacting with their external environment. What should not be tied into notions of dignity is the value of persons or the questioning of a person's degree of equality under the law. Nor should dignity tied into the Kassian notion of embodied human life—an inherently speciesist notion that carries with it unjustifiable conditions for exclusionism. Dignity is not status; rather, it is a measurement (or assessment) of the quality in which persons are treated, the depth of their interactions, and the degree to which they are capable of engaging in life. Consequently, a performative understanding of dignity recognizes it as more an issue of treatment and social justice than abstract and confusing notions about equality, value and status.