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With the Poetry Foundation’s POETRY iPhone app, you can now take hundreds of poems by classic and contemporary poets with you wherever you go.

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U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson today presented the 2009 President’s Environmental Youth Awards to students from around the country for their outstanding contributions in helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve air quality and protect America’s waters. The awards were presented during a ceremony in Washington D.C.

Here is the list of winners from the EPA:

EPA Region 1

Project T.G.I.F.: Turn Grease Into Fuel
Westerly Innovations Network/Westerly Middle School
Westerly, Rhode Island

This group of middle school students, who are passionate about community service, decided to do their part in tackling global warming by creating a sustainable project to collect the town’s waste cooking oil, refine it into biofuel, and then distribute it.

The students presented their project to the local town council and convinced them to place a grease receptacle at the town’s transfer station to collect waste cooking oil from residents. The group also convinced 64 local restaurants to donate their waste cooking oil, which is a by-product of fried food. To collect the waste oil from restaurants and the transfer station, the students collaborated with a local company to collect the waste oil and bring it to a biodiesel refinery where waste cooking oil is recycled into biofuel. Funds received from the refinery for the recycling of the waste oil were used to purchase Bioheat^®, a biofuel, from a local distributor to give to local charities.

This project has been, and continues to be, a success for the environment and local families in need of heating assistance. To date, this project has collected over 36,000 gallons of waste oil and produced 30,000 gallons of biofuel a year, which eliminated 600,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere. The students have donated 4,000 gallons of Bioheat^® to local charities and helped 40 families with emergency heating assistance.

Another important part of the project is educating school children and local residents about energy alternatives. The students have made numerous presentations to the local elementary school and local residents to encourage them to participate in the T.G.I.F. project and to teach them about alternative energy sources, the town’s recycling program, and global warming.

Christos Kortzidi is the stud mayor of Elliniko who went on a hunger strike in 2007 to protect free access to local beaches.

His new strike to protest Greek austerity measures started on April 29 — and by all reports it’s still going.

Greek newspaper HAYGH (translated) profiled the mayor on Saturday in the 17th day of his hunger strike. Chances are he’s still going today — on the 22nd day — as in his last strike Kortzidi made it to 24 days, before claiming victory.

Elliniko City Council President Bill Vassio may also be taking part in the strike, based on this translation of the city council website.

It’s easy to lose track of exactly what the Greeks are protesting. While the crowds on the street today are protesting pension cuts, Kortzidi and others want to block a plan to re-draw municipal boundaries known as Kallikratis:

Kathimerini:

Protests by local authority officials against Kallikratis, an ambitious government plan to redraw administrative boundaries and overhaul local government, continued yesterday with the resignation of the entire council of a municipality in the Peloponnese. Meanwhile, residents of the small town of Siatista, near Kozani in northern Greece, blocked the Egnatia Highway for the fourth day in a row, complaining that their town has not been made the capital of Voios municipality.

The leader of the main opposition conservative New Democracy party, Antonis Samaras, appeared to take advantage of the mood, calling on local government officials affiliated to ND to encourage residents in their areas to oppose the bill, due to be submitted in Parliament soon. “If the government persists with this choice, it will incur a heavy cost,” Samaras said.

Ultimately, every protest in Greece and around Europe is about raising money for the government on the back of the people.

Have we seen the worst?

Check Out: Craziest Photos Yet — War On The Streets Of Athens

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Who knows how much time and money you spent on all those collectibles and costumes in the first LittleBigPlanet? Fear not, when LittleBigPlanet 2 comes along, you’ll still be able to make use of them in the

Smallville has reached the end road. The long-running Superman drama will enter its 10th and final season this fall, network chiefs confirmed during The CW Upfronts in Beverly Hills Thursday.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

At Google I/O this morning, the topic of discussion was mobile; specifically, the Android mobile platform. As of this morning, there are more than 60 consumer devices running on Android, more than 100,000 new activations per day, 50,000 apps in the Android marketplace, and 180,000 registered developers working on apps. Not too shabby.

As the platform continues its rapid growth, Google has announced a number of very significant improvements will be coming to the next version, numbered 2.2 but nicknamed “FroYo,” which address key issues Android has dealt with in the past.

1) Improved Speed — Just as it was rumored, the next version of Android will have a JIT compiler, responsible for a significant (2x-5x) speed boost.

2) Better Enterprise Support — The platform has lagged behind Windows Mobile and BlackBerry in terms of enterprise functionality, but FroYo will include over 20 new enterprise features. These include better Exchange support, with auto-discovery, improved security, and GAL lookup, and new device admin APIs.

3) Cloud-to-Device API — Google services, Chrome extensions, and soon-to-be released Chrome apps will be able to sync with your Android device. If you need directions from Google Maps, it can be sent directly.

4) Tethering — This was also a rumored feature for a few weeks. The feature will be in the “settings” menu, and clicking “portable wi-fi hotspot.”

5) New Browser — The Javascript interpreter in Chrome will be used in FroYo’s native browser, offering a 2x-3x Javascript performance boost. Google’s Vic Gundotra said it will be the fastest mobile browser available.

6) Install apps on SD memory — One of the main problems people had with Android was that you could not install apps on your removable memory card, you were limited to the device’s physical memory, which in some cases was quite limited. In FroYo, apps can be moved to, and launched from, the phone’s SD card.

7) Flash 10.1 and AIR support — This one is not a surprise, as Adobe and Google have both said this would be coming.

8) Web-based Android Market — Without a doubt one of the weakest aspects of consuming apps on the Android Platform was that you were limited to only seeing what was shown on your mobile device’s screen, which in most cases is not very appealing.

9) App auto-updating — When an app you downloaded gets updated, you would get a notification that there was an update available in the Market. You’d have to navigate to the market and click OK three or four times per update just to get it installed. In FroYo, there will be an “Update All” icon, and the ability to check “allow automatic updating” when you download a new app. Apps can be purchased on the Web-based store and synced down to your Android device.

10) Music Sync — Even though it’s got a decent media player, Android devices have never had the music power that iPhone has with its built-in iPod functionality. With FroYo, however, users will be able to sync their local music collection with their Android device and stream wirelessly.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

H2 Technologies Group out of Reno, Nevada is betting on a hydrogen fueled lawnmower engine it is developing and which is due out this summer.

According to NNBW, “Small engines powered by hydrogen would produce no emissions. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency says one gas-powered lawnmower produces as much pollution as 11 cars. If their technology works – and that’s where the lawnmower engine test comes in – H2 Technologies Group’s founders think they can make a compelling case to small engine manufacturers who face strict emissions standards. Over the next couple of years, emissions from lawn mowers and similar equipment will need to be cut by about 35 percent.”

Now, I’ve talked about hydrogen lawnmowers in the past, but this statement above has gotten me to think about hydrogen fueled engines in general, both the internal combustion types and fuel cells. It looks like the market for hydrogen vehicles is developing all around hydrogen cars, starting from the periphery and moving inwards with H2 cars at the center.

The market will implode before it explodes with hydrogen cars, so to speak. As hydrogen forklifts, UAVs, lawnmowers, boats, motor scooters, bicycles, motorcycles, robots, military bionic enhanced legs, golf carts, wheelchairs, shuttle buses, submarines, mining vehicles, military all terrain vehicles and other such technology take off in the market, public acceptance will grow and the reasons to stall on hydrogen car infrastructure will decrease.

Proof of concept will already be there with the commercialization of other hydrogen vehicles outside of the car market. Buses, car fleets, trains, trucks at shipping ports are other examples that will be circling the wagons, so to speak, around mass marketed consumer oriented hydrogen cars.

Telecommunications power backups, residential power backups, corporate power backups, hotel power backups, utility companies using wind, solar and other renewable with hydrogen storage, home hydrogen CHP stations, manufacturing plants such as beer and candy production facilities, data centers, waste water treatment plants, police and fire stations, high schools, universities, airport baggage carts all will most likely develop ahead of a hydrogen car fueling infrastructure. And, this is Okay.

Normalizing hydrogen vehicles in everyday use will serve to mainstream this technology, which will lead to public acceptance. Just as this generation of kids has grown up with PC’s, the Internet, cell phones and Xbox’s, the next generation will grow up with hydrogen vehicles and stationary hydrogen fuel cells.

Even though I’m impatient for hydrogen cars now, I also see the signs that commercialization outside of the H2 car market is happening at a rapid pace. And this commercialization is breaking ground for thousands if not millions of hydrogen cars to follow.

The Obama administration’s longstanding pledge to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay just hit a major obstacle in the House, creating doubts over whether the detention facility can be closed this year — if at all.

Last night the House Armed Services Committee finished this year’s bill authorizing $567 billion worth of defense spending and another $159 billion for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars for the fiscal year beginning in October. Following an administration budget plan announced in February by Pentagon comptroller Robert Hale, the Afghanistan war request contained a vague provision — indeed, not even carrying the words “Guantanamo Bay” — called a “transfer fund” to authorize the purchase of the Thomson Correction Center in Illinois. The administration wants to buy Thomson in order to have a secure facility on U.S. soil to house those Guantanamo detainees it designates for military commissions or indefinite detention without charge. Once the federal government buys Thomson, it can shut down Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay.

Or that was the plan. The actual bill hasn’t been released yet. But buried at the bottom of an extensive summary the committee released last night is an express prohibition on the use of any Defense Department money to buy a new detention facility. According to the bill summary, the bill now requires Defense Secretary Robert Gates to give Congress a report that “adequately justifies any proposal to build or modify such a facility” if it wants to move forward with any post-Guantanamo detention plan.

“The Committee firmly believes that the construction or modification of any facility in the U.S. to detain or imprison individuals currently being held at Guantanamo must be accompanied by a thorough and comprehensive plan that outlines the merits, costs, and risks associated with utilizing such a facility,” the summary text read. “No such plan has been presented to date. The bill prohibits the use of any funds for this purpose.”

That might place insurmountable obstacles to the the so-called “Gitmo North” plan to transfer Guantanamo detainees to Thomson. “They can’t just create Guantanamo North and move everyone up there. That’s clearly barred,” said Chris Anders, a senior lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union who monitored yesterday’s mark-up. “It doesn’t mean that the proposal is dead, but it’s hard to see how it makes a comeback after the House Armed Services Committee says there can’t be money spent on Thomson.”

That’s not all. While the bill doesn’t renew the current Congressional ban on transferring detainees from Guantanamo into the U.S. — set to expire in October — it requires President Obama to submit a “a comprehensive disposition plan and risk assessment” for any future detainee transfer. Congress would then get “120 days to review the disposition plan before it could be carried out.” Additionally, Congress would get a 30-day review period for the proposed transfer of any detainee from Guantanamo to a foreign country in order to check against a detainee inflicting violence against the U.S. or its interests. The summary instructs Gates to tell Congress that any such foreign transfer meets “strict security criteria to thoroughly vet any foreign country to which a detainee may be transferred.”

The bill, which passed the committee on a vote of 59 to 0, will go to the House floor and receive a vote most likely next week. A Senate Armed Services Committee mark-up of the companion bill in the Senate is scheduled for the end of May.

This is a major setback for Obama’s campaign pledge to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. While it’s theoretically possible for an amendment authorizing the Thomson purchase to come back into the bill during floor debate, “this makes it much, much harder for the administration to move forward with the closure of Guantanamo, there’s no doubt about that,” said Vincent Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “It’s hard to see what reasonable options the president has without jumping through congressional hoops that are unreasonable and unnecessary, and it’s harder to move forward both with prosecuting those who are terrorist suspects and releasing to freedom those who are not.”

But beyond the closure of the detention facility itself, the prohibitions now contained in the bill have policy implications for the dispensation of justice for detainees remaining at Guantanamo, a burning political issue all through this year. Those “abhorrent” prohibitions, Warren said, “essentially prohibit the executive from moving forward with its constitutional and human-rights obligations to try people [and] creates a paradigm where the operative default mechanism will be to detain people without trial.” In April, Attorney General Eric Holder pledged to work with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on a new legal architecture for indefinite detention without charge.

Anders took a more optimistic view. If the bill passes, as is likely, the administration “will have to work harder and work faster at what they’ve been doing effectively for the past 16 or 17 months, which is repatriating and resettling detainees one by one who have been cleared and then bring people here for prosecution,” Anders said, even with the new congressional repatriation restrictions. This week, one of those detainees the administration designated for civilian prosecution, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who has been transfered to a Manhattan prison, unsuccessfully urged a federal judge to dismiss his case.

But such an incremental approach would not allow Obama to close the facility until the last detainee either leaves or faces criminal charges, a process likely to take years even without all of the political obstacles that have emerged around terrorism trials and holding terrorism defendants in federal corrections facilities. Additionally, it would require Holder and the Obama administration to abandon a decision that has been much reviled in the civil libertarian community: designating 48 detainees currently held at Guantanamo for continued indefinite detention without charge.

Closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was a bipartisan goal before President Obama took office, with both President Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, rhetorically committed to shutting down an international symbol of American lawlessness. But an effective campaign waged by conservatives to portray the closure as negligent with national security — and Obama and the Democrats as weak for seeking it — has raised the political stakes for Democratic members of Congress. Last year, the Senate voted with 90 votes to prohibit the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo to the U.S., and this year, the still-unresolved question of whether Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the 9/11 conspirators ought to be tried in civilian courts or military commissions has become Holder’s defining challenge. With Republicans hostile to the Guantanamo closure plan likely to gain seats in Congress after the November midterm elections, future attempts at closing the facility are likely to face even greater political opposition.

Requests for comment to the White House and the Office of the Secretary of Defense were not immediately returned.

Google, as expected, has unveiled Android 2.2 — aka Froyo — at its I/O developers conference. Froyo brings some awesome new features to the Android platform, not the least of which is Wi-Fi and USB tethering. Android 2.2 phones have mobile hotspot capability baked right into the platform now. The new OS version also includes huge speed increases in the handling of Java code, which is significant as many apps are written using Java.

In conjunction with this announcement, Adobe formally introduced Flash 10.1 for Android. Flash 10.1 brings full Flash handling to Android and the web browser.

You can see both Froyo and the new Flash in action in this video, including the speed improvements. The Nexus One shown is the fastest Android phone I’ve seen yet, due to the new Android 2.2. In the video this speed improvement is shown against the Verizon Droid Incredible, the previous performance champ.

Note: The Flash 10.1 public beta for Android kicks off today, and Android 2.2 is the minimum system requirement. The new version has dependencies only present in Android 2.2 and will not work with earlier versions of Android. The beta will be available for download in the Android Market, but only for phones with Froyo installed. Google has not yet finalized which handsets will be getting an Android 2.2 update.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d): Google’s Mobile Strategy: Understanding the Nexus One

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It broke through $65, now is trying to make back some of the lost ground, but check out the dive:

(Chart via Finviz)

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Filed under: SUV, Infiniti, First Drive, Luxury

Ask any braniac elementary school student what happened to the dinosaurs, and they’ll tell you they turned into birds. While the mechanics are a bit more complicated than a momma T-Rex hatching a brood of yellow finches, modern science would seem to agree with the concept. When we were in school, the common perception was that those massive lizards parted ways with terra firma courtesy of a jumbo-sized meteor smack. Our Earth Science books called it a mass extinction, and they accompanied the definition with helpful illustrations that depicted contemplative Brontosaurus and Triceratops herds looking off into the distance as a chunk of orange sky plummeted toward the horizon.

So you can’t really blame us for thinking that the SUV would follow a similar natural path. When fuel prices shot up, many rejoiced at the thought of global body-on-frame extinction. This was the event some had been patiently waiting for since the high-riding people movers first supplanted the minivan as the family cruiser of choice. And while we’ve certainly seen weaker species succumb to the heat of pressure from more efficient breeds, the strong continue to soldier on, slowly adapting to a world grown hostile to anything big and thirsty. If you believe Infiniti, that’s exactly what the 2011 QX56 has done – evolved.

Photos by Zach Bowman / Copyright (C)2009 Weblogs, Inc.

Continue reading First Drive: 2011 Infiniti QX56 overcomes the odds

First Drive: 2011 Infiniti QX56 overcomes the odds originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 20 May 2010 11:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Roll Call reports:

Mexican President Felipe Calderon called for the reinstatement of a ban on the sale of assault weapons in the U.S. while reiterating his opposition to a controversial Arizona immigration law during an address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday.

Calderon, citing his administration’s efforts to address the growing violence on the border related to the drug trade, argued that the spike in violence resulted in part from the end of the assault weapons ban in 2004.

Some Democrats on Capitol Hill, as well as Attorney General Eric Holder, have floated the idea of proposing a renewal of the assault weapons ban. But in the face of opposition from the gun lobby — not to mention the conservative Democrats who represent most of the party’s gains in recent elections — that idea has gone precisely nowhere.

Late last week, of course, Google ‘fessed up to the fact that it was accidentally collecting some data being transmitted over open WiFi connections with its Google Street View mapping cars. As we noted at the time, it was bad that Google was doing this and worse that they didn’t realize it. However, it wasn’t nearly as bad as some have made it out to be. First of all, anyone on those networks could have done the exact same thing. As a user on a network, it’s your responsibility to secure your connection. Second, at best, Google was getting a tiny fraction of any data, in that it only got a quick snippet as it drove by. Third, it seemed clear that Google had not done anything with that collected data. So, yes, it was not a good thing that this was done, but the actual harm was somewhat minimal — and, again, anyone else could have easily done the same thing (or much worse).

That said, given the irrational fear over Google collecting any sort of information in some governments, this particular bit of news has quickly snowballed into investigations across Europe and calls for the FTC to get involved in the US. While one hopes that any investigation will quickly realize that this is not as big a deal as it’s being made out to be, my guess is that, at least in Europe, regulators will come down hard on Google.

However, going to an even more ridiculous level, the class action lawyers are jumping into the game. Eric Goldman points us to a hastily filed class action lawsuit filed against Google over this issue. Basically, it looks like the lawyers found two people who kept open WiFi networks, and they’re now suing Google, claiming that its Street View operations “harmed” them. For the life of me, I can’t see how that argument makes any sense at all. Here’s the filing:

Basically, you have two people who could have easily secured their WiFi connection or, barring that, secured their own traffic over their open WiFi network, and chose to do neither. Then, you have a vague claim, with no evidence, that Google somehow got their traffic when its Street View cars photographed the streets where they live. As for what kind of harm it did? Well, there’s nothing there either.

My favorite part, frankly, is that one of the two people involved in bringing the lawsuit, Vicki Van Valin, effectively admits that she failed to secure confidential information as per her own employment requirements. Yes, this is in her own lawsuit filing:

Van Valin works in the high technology field, and works from her home over her internet-connect computer a substantial amount of time. In connection with her work and home life, Van Valin transmits and receives a substantial amount of data from and to her computer over her wireless connection (“wireless data”). A significant amount of the wireless data is also subject to her employer’s non-disclosure and security regulations.

Ok. So your company has non-disclosure and security regulations… and you access that data unencrypted over an unencrypted WiFi connection… and then want to blame someone else for it? How’s that work now? Basically, this woman appears to be admitting that she has violated her own company’s rules in a lawsuit she’s filed on her behalf. Wow.

While there’s nothing illegal about setting up an open WiFi network — and, in fact, it’s often a very sensible thing to do — if you’re using an open WiFi network, it is your responsibility to recognize that it is open and any unencrypted data you send over that network can be seen by anyone else on the same access point.

This is clearly nothing more than a money grab by some people, and hopefully the courts toss it out quickly, though I imagine there will be more lawsuits like this one.

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It’s no secret that I am not fond of the teacher’s unions.  I get into a lot of arguments about this, in which I am accused of being uninterested in any school reforms that don’t involve breaking the power of the teacher’s unions.  Of course, short of the not-very-successful class size reduction schemes, there aren’t many proposed reforms that don’t involve breaking the power of the teachers’ unions. 

Exhibit B is Steven Brill’s new piece on the teacher’s unions in New York, which illustrates just how far the unions are willing to go at the expense of the kids.  (Exhibit A is Brill’s piece on the NYC rubber rooms; he’s clearly assembling the material for a killer book.)  They cost the state a chance at millions because they were 100% completely opposed to things like performance pay, or allowing the district to transfer teachers where they are needed, rather than where they’d like to be.

But in a 403-page appendix to its 348-page application, New
York
included the M.O.U. that actually had been signed by all of its school
districts. It was worded almost exactly as the federal government’s
M.O.U. — except that after reciting everything that would be done to
link student tests to teacher evaluations, and to compensate teachers
and move them up on a career ladder according to those evaluations, the
New York M.O.U. inserted this qualifier: “consistent with any applicable
collective-bargaining requirements.” The same phrase was also inserted
after the promise to “ensure the equitable distribution of effective
teachers” — a reform aimed at allowing school systems to assign their
best teachers to the schools most in need. Then for good measure at the
end of the entire M.O.U. this sentence was added to cover everything:
“Nothing in this M.O.U. shall be construed to override any applicable
state or local collective-bargaining requirements.”

Of course the U.F.T.’s collective-bargaining agreements in New York
City, as well as union contracts in much of the rest of the state,
explicitly prohibit exactly the reforms promised in the application.
Changing that is the point of Duncan’s contest. When I asked Tisch about
this, she pointed to another added sentence, in which each school
system and the union agree to negotiate any necessary contract changes
in “good faith.” That’s the “way we solved that,” she says.

“Right,” Klein says. “That’s like telling a woman you’ll marry her in
the morning.”

Nor is it true, as one often hears, that teachers and principals have
nothing to do with the problems, but are mere hostages of terrible
conditions in their neighborhoods.  Brill points to a charter school
that actually shares all of its resources with a public school in the
same building–even, in some cases, the same families, as some send
different kids to the different schools.

But while the public side spends more, it produces less. P.S. 149
is
rated by the city as doing comparatively well in terms of student
achievement and has improved since Mayor Michael

Bloomberg took over the city’s schools in 2002 and appointed Joel
Klein as chancellor. Nonetheless, its students are performing
significantly behind the charter kids on the other side of the wall. To
take one representative example, 51 percent of the third-grade students
in the public school last year were reading at grade level, 49 percent
were reading below grade level and none were reading above. In the
charter, 72 percent were at grade level, 5 percent were reading below
level and 23 percent were reading above level. In math, the charter
third graders tied for top performing school in the state, surpassing
such high-end public school districts as Scarsdale.

Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents. And the
classrooms have almost exactly the same number of students. In fact, the
charter school averages a student or two more per class. This calculus
challenges the teachers unions’ and Perkins’s “resources” argument —
that hiring more teachers so that classrooms will be smaller makes the
most difference. (That’s also the bedrock of the union refrain that
what’s good for teachers — hiring more of them — is always what’s good
for the children.) Indeed, the core of the reformers’ argument, and the
essence of the Obama approach to the Race to the Top, is that a slew of
research over the last decade has discovered that what makes the most
difference is the quality of the teachers and the principals who
supervise them. Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University

of Washington, reported, “The effect of increases in teacher
quality swamps the impact of any other educational investment, such as
reductions in class size.”

This building on 118th Street could be Exhibit A for that conclusion.

It’s not necessarily that the teachers on one side are worse
teachers–but they operate in a very strict system of limits that, for
example, keeps their workday to exactly 6 hours and 57 minutes, while
the charter school classes run much longer.  Even terrific workers can
underperform in that kind of environment.  It doesn’t strike me that it
is likely to be much of an accident that urban schools have gotten worse
as the teachers’ unions have grown more powerful (though I certainly
wouldn’t argue that it’s the only contributing factor).

The issue with the teachers’ unions is not the unions per
se–agitating for higher pay wouldn’t make much difference, and is
indeed probably a great idea.  The problem is that the structure they
impose makes it almost impossible (though not quite!) to innovate, and
to spread the innovations that work. The cushy job protections and
strict work rules are great for the teachers.  But the schools aren’t
there for the benefit of the teachers.

Craig Venter has taken yet another step towards his goal of creating synthetic life forms. He’s synthesized the genome of a microbe and then implanted that piece of DNA into a DNA-free cell of another species. And that…that thing…can grow and divide. It’s hard to say whether this is “life from scratch,” because the boundary between such a thing and ordinary life (and non-life) is actually blurry. For example, you could say that this is still a nature hybrid, because its DNA is based on the sequence of an existing species of bacteria. If Venter made up a sequence from scratch, maybe we’d have crossed to a new terrain.

Anyway–this news just hit the wires thanks to an embargo break, so I don’t have time to go into more detail. Joe Palca at NPR has posted his article on the subject. For background, please check out these stories I’ve written about this general area of research:

Tinker, Tailor: Can Venter Stitch Together A Genome From Scratch?

The Meaning of Life

The Six Most Important Experiments In The World

Artificial Life? Old News.

The High-Tech Search For A Cleaner Biofuel Alternative

On the Origin of Tomorrow

My Bloggingheads interview with Venter

Update: The scientists are in a live press conference that started a 1 pm.

Senator Bennett, R-Utah, has just announced he will not mount a write-in campaign for the Senate race in Utah. Bennett acknowledged the urging he has received from people around the country and from colleagues in Washington nudging him to run a write-in campaign.

At a press conference on Capitol Hill Thursday, he called the race up until this point “nasty” and the atmosphere “truly toxic.”

The lawmaker then thanked his staff and said his 18-year run is more than most senators get. Bennett has made no decision yet on endorsing any candidate.

The senator’s announcement comes after he failed to place in the top two during Utah’s GOP convention on May 8, thus ejecting him from the primary race.

Bennett came in third behind attorney Mike Lee and businessman Tim Bridgewater. Lee and Bridgewater are set to face-off again on June 22 to determine the GOP’s nominee.

Whoever wins the primary will go up against the Democratic candidate, Utah Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission Chair Sam Granato.

While Bennett came up short at the GOP convention, his loss isn’t seen as a threat to Republicans, who are widely favored to win the seat in November.‬‪ No Democrat has won in a Utah Senate race since 1970.

Nationally, Bennett’s loss has been cited as an example of a growing anti-incumbent sentiment across the country in 2010 elections.‬‪

Initially following the May 8 defeat, a spokesperson for Senator Bennett said he had made no decision about whether he might consider a write-in campaign.‬‪‬‪

Independent Wayne Hill and “Constitution Party” candidate Scott Bradley are also vying for the seat.

Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) announced this afternoon that he will not be mounting a write-in campaign, his only remaining option to retain the seat he has held since 1993.

“If I were to do it, it would revive all of those passions and divide the party in the state of Utah,” he said during a press conference in front of the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s offices.

Bennett became the first incumbent to lose re-nomination this election cycle when he came in third during the state’s GOP convention May 8 in what he called the “nastiest race for a party nomination in the history of Utah.” Businessman Tim Bridgewater and attorney Mike Lee, who came in first and second respectively, will fight for the GOP nomination in the state primary election June 22. During the convention he had kept the write-in option open — he had missed the state deadline to run as an independent candidate — but did not commit at that time to continue his campaign.

“If I’m eliminated, I’m going to go home and get a good night sleep,” he told The Associated Press. “That’s the only commitment I’ll make.”

Bennett did not endorse Bridgewater or Lee during his press conference, but Politico reported Bennett and Bridgewater will meet later today.

Not that “cool kids” or “nerds” is a judgment in any way (or that one is better than the other), but it seems to be how things are shaping up in 2010.  Apple is the cool kid on the block, playing foosball over in the corner with a leather jacket.  Google, on the other hand, is the nerd, sitting in the corner with the calculator and pocket protector thinking “one day, these people will work for me.”  Who will win the battle?

Cast your vote below for the nerds or the cool kids, but be sure to defend your choice in the comments!

{Widget type=”poll” id=”3231421″ name=””Apple vs. Google: Will the nerds or the cool kids win?”}