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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

lchic - 02:03pm Apr 22, 2003 EST (# 11385 of 11500)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Iraq - That prisoners underground are in tombs subjected to determined FLOODING

wouldn't the offer of rewards for information

help

locate any still surviving men

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lchic - 02:09pm Apr 22, 2003 EST (# 11386 of 11500)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

The USA should look at the last half century track record re foreign policy

It's usual in most countries for foreign policy to be within the Parliament

for it to be subject to discussion

The USA method of siding with defunct right-wing regimes throughout the world and preventing the will of the people to progress - and rid themselves of medieval-religious-lordships

seems to be one reason why the USA gets the thumbs down

Take a look at the vast numbers of people who have been uprooted and had to resettle because of USA-involved conflicts

Is there any discussion in the USA to put foreign policy back with the Parliament?

lchic - 05:51pm Apr 22, 2003 EST (# 11387 of 11500)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

BRAIN http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,591-654497,00.html April 22, 2003 Science

Taming of the brain By Anjana Ahuja

Our brains grow smaller as we become more civilised, says a prominent scientist

(prisons) BETHLEM, BROADMOOR, Rampton. They are the ultimate symbols of ostracism, places where the mad, bad and dangerous are banished as punishment for violating the norms of society, and to protect the peace-loving majority from the marauding minority. Those institutions are evidence of how much we value our collective peacefulness. Such places are merely one tool for curbing human behaviour that threatens it. We have constructed elaborate laws to ensure that aggression, violence and criminality are restrained, punished and discouraged, with some countries even executing those who disrupt — say, by committing murder — the communities in which they live.

In fact, according to one prominent scientist, human beings are taming themselves. Just as our forebears bred wolves to create a more agreeable species, the domesticated dog, human society is gradually banishing aggressors from its own gene pool. Communal living demands it — in modern societies, co-operation with neighbours will usually get you farther than confrontation. Which is why the people who don’t play by the rules are excluded, either by execution, exile or incarceration.

And why, generation upon generation, there are slightly fewer bad apples left in the barrel.

The radical idea that Homo sapiens is domesticating itself comes from Richard Wrangham, a respected professor of anthropology at Harvard University. This theory, as yet unpublished, could explain one enduring mystery in the fossil record of human history. The size of the human brain expanded impressively and steadily as it evolved over the past million years or so, but suddenly it flipped. At somewhere around 50,000 years ago, give or take a few thousands of years, it started shrinking.

Wrangham noticed that domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild counterparts — and now postulates that the breeding out of aggression in our own species may be responsible for our own less voluminous brains. He notes that the gentle bonobo has a smaller brain than a chimpanzee (the two species are genetically very similar but bonobos live in comparatively peaceful communities), and that dogs are similarly less endowed compared with wolves, their snarling cousins. “It looks as though human beings fit very nicely into the same model,” Wrangham says.

The downsizing of the human brain is a relatively new scientific conundrum, and only in recent years have experts turned their attention to it. Wrangham says that his ideas are a work in progress; he is writing a book on the topic. However, he is already up against opponents who believe that the relatively small modern brain is merely mirroring a relatively small modern body (smaller species tend, on the whole, to house smaller brains). The orthodox theory goes something like this: we no longer need the brawn of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, so we have become physically smaller. Since a smaller body can be choreographed by a smaller brain (and the human body likes economy), the brain shrank in proportion.

Our brains are about 10 to 15 per cent smaller than they were 30,000 years ago, which roughly reflects the drop in body mass. For example, the Cro-Magnon, who lived in Europe between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago, had a brain size of about 1,600cc, compared with about 1,300cc for a typical male brain today (the brains of females, interestingly viewed as the less aggressive sex, are slightly smaller, averaging around 1,200cc). Cro-Magnon is typically described as a tall, muscular hunter — it is thought that he routinely surpassed six feet in height. An average male today weighs 25 per cent less than his brutish ancestor, Neanderthal man.

In recent human history, the theory continues, body mass fell, large

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