Researchers have managed to grow this square bacterium in the laboratory for the first time. The square bacteria was first discovered twenty-five years ago near the ultra-salty Red Sea. To grow it in the lab, the scientists used a culture with the salt concentration of soy sauce.

More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too.

Luckily for us, the bacteria are on the whole commensal, sharing our food but doing no real harm. (The word derives from the Latin meaning to share a table for dinner.) In fact, they are often beneficial: Our commensal bacteria protect us from potentially dangerous infections. They do this through close interaction with our immune systems.

It's understood that incumbents campaigning for re-election will spotlight the good news and downplay the bad. The problem for President Bush, with the election just three weeks away, is that the bad news keeps cascading in and there is very little good news to tout.

So the president and his chief supporters have resorted to the odd tactic of claiming that the bad news is good.

The double talk reached a fever pitch last week after the release of two devastating reports - the comprehensive report by Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector, which destroyed any remaining doubts that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; and the Labor Department's dismal employment report for September, which heightened concerns about the strength of the economic recovery and left Mr. Bush with the dubious distinction of being the first president since Herbert Hoover to stand for re-election with fewer people working than at the beginning of his term.

Mr. Bush turned the findings of the Duelfer report upside down and inside out, telling crowds at campaign rallies that it proved Saddam Hussein had been "a gathering threat." It didn't matter that the report, ordered by the president himself, showed just the opposite. The truth would not have been helpful to the president. So with a brazenness and sleight of hand usually associated with three-card-monte players, he pulled a fast one on his cheering listeners.

Vice President Cheney had an equally peculiar response to the report, which said Iraq had destroyed its illicit weapons stockpiles in the early 1990's. Referring to the president's decision to launch the war, Mr. Cheney said, "To delay, defer, wait wasn't an option."

The September jobs report, released on the same day as Mr. Bush's second debate with Senator John Kerry, was deeply disappointing to the White House. Just 96,000 jobs were created, not even enough to keep up with the monthly expansion of the working-age population.

The somber findings forced the president's spin machine into overdrive. Reality, once again, was shoved aside. The administration's upbeat public response to the Labor Department report was described in The Times as follows: "The White House hailed it as evidence of continued employment expansion, saying that it validated Mr. Bush's strategy of pursuing tax cuts to support a recovery from the 2001 economic downturn."

In the president's parallel universe, things are always fine.

Kerry: The president got $84 from a timber company that he owns, and he's counted as a small business. Dick Cheney's counted as a small business. That's how they do things. That's just not right.

Bush: I own a timber company? That's news to me. ..... Wanna buy some wood?

The BBC doesn't have the bandwidth to netcast its programming to all 66 million of its viewers. Fortunately it doesn't that kind of capability, because the BBC has cleverly designed the Flexible TV application to act as a node in a Peer-to-Peer network. Anyone using Flexible TV has access to the programs which have been downloaded by any other Flexible TV client, and can get those programs directly from them. All BBC need do is provide a single copy of a program into the network of P2P clients, and they handle the work themselves. More than this, because of the P2P technology used by the BBC .. a Flexible TV user can get a little bit of the program from any number of other peers; rather than going through the process of downloading an entire program from one other peer, the Flexible TV client can ask a hundred other clients for small sections of the program, and download these hundred sections simultaneously. Not only does this decrease the amount of traffic that any clients has to handle, it also means that it produces a virtuous cycle: the more popular a program is, the more copies of it will exist in the network of peers, and therefore the more easily a peer can download it.

How is this bit of technological magic achieved? Through the use of a new technology known as BitTorrent - something some of you may have already used. BitTorrent is a P2P filesharing system specifically designed to prohibit one of the biggest social ills which plague P2P networks - a phenomenon known as "leeching". A leech grabs files from a P2P network without providing anything in return. With BitTorrent your download speed - how fast you receive your data - is determined by how much data you're sharing. This means that a torrent starts slowly - because you haven't much to share - and then increases nearly exponentially; as you have more of the file, you have more to share, so your bandwidth increases, until the file is fully downloaded.

BitTorrent was also designed to avoid one of the biggest technical issues which affect P2P networks - the fact that peers come and go at will. BitTorrent creates a "tracker" - a list of all peers which have the file you're downloading - and gives you access to all of those peers. The file itself is divided into smaller sections, and each of these sections can be downloaded from any peer, in any order. If a peer goes off-line while transmitting a section of the file, BitTorrent simply requests that section from another peer. Whenever there's more than 2 or 3 peers, this is sufficient to guarantee a hassle-free download. When there are tens or hundreds of peers - which is often the case - file transfers can happen very quickly and efficiently.

Within a decade - and perhaps a lot sooner - the television networks will have been deprived of nearly all their pre-produced programming. Television will become a live medium - as it was in its beginning, so it will be in its old age. Sports, news and event programming (terror attacks and awards shows) will be the staples for broadcasting in the 21st century. Advertisers will love live television - because it's where the people are - but never again will a television broadcaster be able to dictate to you what you can watch and when you can watch it. Those days are already past - at the price of a small crime of copyright violation.

All this means that as the Internet rises, broadcast television falls. That means cable as well as free-to-air broadcasters, because cable will also be competing against this Internet-based television. As more and more material becomes more consistently available to the TV viewer, the trend will be away from the circumscribed choices offered by the TV channel (five or five hundred channels, neither are very alluring when compared to the near-infinity of programming available over the Internet already) and toward the Internet.

Which gives all of this triumph of the media megacorps the flavor of a Greek Tragedy: when they reached their zenith of power, at that moment the seeds of their downfall were sewn.

What we need is a single tool to wrap it all up in a nice, easy to use form. We need a tool which makes publishing content into this media stream no more difficult than selecting a audiovisual file. We need a tool which makes finding the programming you're looking for as easy and straightforward as Google. And we need all of this to be one single tool, so that we can forever erase the false distinction between producer and audience, between professional and amateur which has kept most voices silenced as a few have used their positions as professional producers to push a pack of lies down our throats.

When we get that, it's game over. The networks will no longer matter, they will no longer determine our diet of pre-digested truths. The truth will return to its natural state: crazy, anarchic, contradictory, subjective and as wildly mercurial as a manic depressive who's gone off his meds. In place of a few well-controlled voices, we'll have hundreds, then thousands, then millions of competing points of view, and our job will be to figure out how to find some signal in the midst of all that noise.

Cheney wrongly implied that FactCheck had defended his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co., and the vice president even got our name wrong. He overstated matters when he said Edwards voted "for the war" and "to commit the troops, to send them to war." He exaggerated the number of times Kerry has voted to raise taxes, and puffed up the number of small business owners who would see a tax increase under Kerry's proposals.

Edwards falsely claimed the administration "lobbied the Congress" to cut the combat pay of troops in Iraq, something the White House never supported, and he used misleading numbers about jobs.

Short form: The rise of online distribution and its unlimited shelf space is leading to a dramatic shift in the entertainment business from hit-driven economics to niche-driven economics. Content that was once relegated to the fringe, beneath the threshold of commercial viability, is now increasingly able to find a market in distributed audiences. The interesting work is now in finding way to push demand down the Long Tail.

These far-flung developments have all been driven by Pro-Ams -- committed, networked amateurs working to professional standards. Pro-Am workers, their networks and movements, will help reshape society in the next two decades. ..

In the developing world, Pro-Ams are solving a historical scarcity of professional resources. The Grameen Bank, founded by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economics professor, trains barefoot bankers to deliver loans to people earning less than a dollar a day. This Pro-Am workforce makes it possible to cost-effectively administer 2.8 million loans worth more than $4 billion. Had Grameen relied on professionals, it would have reached a tiny proportion of the population. ..

Astronomy used to be done in national "big science" research institutes. Now it is also done in global, Pro-Am, open-source collaboratives. There is still a huge gulf between amateur astronomers and theoretical astrophysicists. But the line between professional and Pro-Am astronomers has become fatally blurred. Much the same will happen in other fields.

Some professionals will find that unsettling; they will seek to defend their monopolies. The more enlightened will understand that the landscape is changing. Knowledge is widely distributed, not controlled in a few ivory towers. The most powerful organizations will enable professionals and amateurs to combine distributed know-how to solve complex problems.

Pro-Am activity will continue to expand. Longer healthy life spans will allow people in their forties and fifties to start taking up Pro-Am activities as second careers. Rising participation in education will give people skills to pursue those activities. New media and technology enable Pro-Ams to organize.

It has been assumed that money increases well-being and, although money can be measured with exactitude, it is an inexact surrogate to the actual well-being of a nation. In a 1985 survey, respondents from the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans and the Maasai of East Africa were almost equally satisfied and ranked relatively high in well-being. The Maasai are a traditional herding people who have no electricity or running water and live in huts made of dung. It follows, that economic development and personal income must not account for the happiness that they are so often linked to.

Instead, the authors propose that a population's "engagement, purpose and meaning, optimism and trust, and positive and negative emotions in specific areas such as work life and social relationships" should be considered when measuring the strength of a nation.

When things seem out of control remember that, indeed, they are. It is only the belief that you are ever in control that makes life seem to go awry. The harder you try to rule life, the harder it fights back. Learn to tell the difference between creating in the present and trying to control the future. One feels good, the other bad.

I have come to believe that dreams are actually quite real, more real the so-called “waking life” and that this waking life is simply part of what we must make authentic via this dream world. I can’t speak for others, but I am now quite certain (as certain as I can be about anything) that my dream life is trying desperately to become manifest here in the real world. This might sound too new agey for some people, but it all makes perfect sense to me. When things go right in my life, they have this unmistakable resonance with my dream life – the feelings, sensations, gestalts and so on. In my dream life all the answers are there, the solutions to our problems, to world peace, to sustainable society, to genuine happiness for everyone. It seems so obvious, so simple in my dream life, and yet so complicated here.

At certain times in history, such as during the Great Enlightenment, differences have been sought out and appreciated. Differences of opinion and, especially, departures from the generally accepted wisdom of the age, have been important to the growth of thought, the evolution of society and industry.

Today is the age of the Great Enlikenment, to coin a word. Everything and everyone is lumped into categories in order to make sorting through the vast amount of information we face more manageable. Differences are minimized and undervalued.

The Great Enlikenment is good sometimes, at least it has salutary qualities, in that it makes teaming up with others by identifying a common goal or enemy quite easy. It also makes mass markets viable, because different products and services are lumped together by people of little imagination and, eventually, the differences disappear through competition and consolidation, so that vast amounts of revenue can be funneled through a narrowly defined organization. The Great Enlikenment makes fashion possible, even the "rebels" who redefine fashion, because sooner rather than later, we'll be dressed like the rebels. It makes George W. Bush possible, because when he looks out from a podium, he sees people screened for their agreement with his policies.

A fumbling attempt has been made recently to disqualify 22,000 African Americans (likely Democrats), but only 61 Hispanics (likely Republicans), as alleged felons.