Stuff and Nonsense

missionary killing
Police are taking painstaking efforts to avoid any disruption to the Sentinelese as they seek




PORT BLAIR, India: Indian officers had a nervous long-distance face-off with the tribe who killed an American missionary, in their latest bid to locate his body on a remote island, police said Sunday (Nov 25).

The police team, who took a boat just off Indian-owned North Sentinel island on Saturday, spotted men from the Sentinelese tribe on the beach where John Allen Chau was last seen, the region's police chief Dependra Pathak told AFP.

Using binoculars, officers - in a police boat about 400 metres from the shore - saw the men armed with bows and arrows, the weapons reportedly used by the isolated tribe to kill Chau as he shouted Christian phrases at them.

"They stared at us and we were looking at them," said Pathak. The boat withdrew to avoid any chance of a confrontation.

Police are taking painstaking efforts to avoid any disruption to the Sentinelese - a pre-neolithic tribe whose island is off-limits to outsiders - as they seek Chau's body.

The death of the 27-year-old on Nov 17 has cast a new spotlight on efforts to protect one of the world's last "uncontacted" tribes whose language and customs remain a mystery to outsiders.

Fishermen who took Chau to North Sentinel - which is one of the Andaman and Nicobar islands in the Bay of Bengal - said they saw the tribe burying the body on the beach.

The Sentinelese normally attack anyone who goes to the island and Pathak said police are monitoring to see if there is a repeat of an incident after two fishermen who strayed onto the island were killed in 2006.

One week after their deaths, the bodies of the two Indians were hooked on bamboo stakes facing out to sea.

"It was a kind of scarecrow," Pathak said.

"We are studying the 2006 case. We are asking anthropologists what they do when they kill an outsider," the police chief added. "We are trying to understand the group psychology."

Though Chau's death is officially a murder case, anthropologists say it may be impossible to retrieve the American's body and that no charges will be made against the protected tribe.

Seven people, including six fishermen who were involved in ferrying Chau to North Sentinel, have been arrested.

The fishermen have accompanied the police teams to the island to help efforts to pinpoint where Chau was killed.

Anthropologists and tribal welfare experts who have had the previous rare contacts with the Sentinelese have been heavily involved with the inquiry.

"Their advice will be important," said Pathak. "We are taking the advice of the people in the field to advance this case."

This is how the Oligarchs will do when they retreat to their bunkers....and will either bury you , eat you, or use you as cordwood when dead if you trespass..they will prolly use automated systems as too risky to keep  use human guards who can turn on you on a whim

Crystal

Good morning lovely UFOCasebookers,

My computer is down so all I have is my cell phone. I will be back as soon as possible.

Damn computer gremlins 😬

Crystal

It has been 200 years since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was published, and while scientists still haven't figured out how to create a walking, talking complex life in a lab, they may be getting closer.

A growing number of researchers are mastering the creation of organoids: simplified, miniature versions of real human organs. These structures aren't being harvested to make Frankenstein's monster. Instead, they're helping develop new drugs, and they are forcing the medical establishment to seriously consider the ethics of lab-grown life.

Developing pharmaceuticals is typically an expensive and risky process. Roughly 90 percent of drugs that make it to human trials are never submitted to the FDA for approval because they're found to be unsafe or ineffective. Most estimates place the cost of developing a new drug at somewhere around $3 billion. Organoids, which are grown from human stem cells, may be able to remove some of the guesswork in patient trials.

"Researchers have gotten really good at curing diseases in mice, but unfortunately animal studies don't really translate to human bodies," says Kevin Costa, chief scientific officer at Novoheart, a stem cell biotechnology firm known for creating heart organoids. "There are differences in how cardiac muscle cells behave in rodents versus primates and humans. Consequently, one of the main reasons that drugs fail in clinical trials is because of cardiotoxicity, problems related to heart function."

Novoheart's miniature beating hearts can be designed to reflect healthy heart function, or they can reproduce the genetic abnormalities of a patient who originally donated their cells. These heart models can then be used by pharmaceutical companies in preclinical testing to determine the safety and efficacy of a potential treatment. While the organoids aren't nearly as complex as a full-sized heart, the idea is to utilize human-specific models when forecasting drug effects.

Understanding potential side effects is also key when developing a new drug. Side effects are rarely confined to a single organ system, which is why Costa believes connecting organoids is the logical next step. Late last year, Novoheart also filed a patent for a modular "bioreactor" that scientists can use to monitor multiple organoids at once. This means a number of different mini organs — from kidneys to brains — could be linked up to simulate drug reactions that occur throughout the body.

"Heart tissue doesn't behave in isolation," he explains. "There are interactions at the systems level between the heart and other organs in the body, and if we ultimately want to realize the potential for replacing animal studies with human-based organoids, then we need to start to create systems comprised of different organ types."

But things begin to stray into Frankenstein territory when scientists talk about designing realistic miniature brains. Earlier this month, researchers from the University of California, San Diego revealed they had grown organoids that spontaneously produced human-like brain waves for the first time. The electrical patterns observed by biologist Alysson Muotri and his team resembled those of infants born at 25 to 39 weeks' gestation.

There are important differences between these lab-grown brains and their real-life counterparts. First of all, they don't yet contain all of the cell types found in the cerebral cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for cognition and awareness. Second, they don't have connections to other brain regions. But the very existence of electrical waves in these organoids raises uncomfortable questions about whether they could develop consciousness.

"Right now, you can grow organoids for over a year, but it's difficult to get them to the point where their size and capacity matches the real human brain," says Insoo Hyun, a professor of bioethics and philosophy at Case Western Reserve University. "As you meet short-term research goals, such as maintenance and growth, and attain a full complement of cell types, you're potentially getting closer to having conscious brains in a dish."

The medical establishment isn't currently trying to create consciousness, but these new brain organoids could effectively be drawing a roadmap for doing just that. According to Hyun, international stem cell research guidelines don't presently require close scrutiny of brain organoid work. "If you're making something that looks like an embryo model, then it needs to be reviewed," he explains. "But if you're using brain organoids to do drug screenings, it flies under the radar."

In other words, scientists may want to proceed with caution. In September, Hyun and a team of scientists from Harvard, Stanford, and MIT launched a study to identify ethical issues in the emerging field of brain bioengineering. The Brainstorm Project is designed to be the first step in building a philosophical framework that will guide regulations and policies around brain organoids. "This is such a new field that we want to map out the terrain of what is permissible and identify whether there are things we wouldn't want people to do with organoids," Hyun says.

Biologically speaking, we still have a way to go before we can make conscious brains in the lab. In a way, that's a relief. But the development of complex human tissue is no longer a thing of science fiction — it is fast becoming a