Frost, Stopping by woods on a snowy evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The University of Washington has a fascinating ongoing project, Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A), which blurs the line between the living and artificial by creating semi-living entities, perplexing vegetarians worldwide. First, they made Victimless Leather. Cultured in incubators from animal cell lines, nourished with antibiotics, the tissue was attached to a polymer matrix in the shape of a coat. The result is a leather coat that did not require the death of an animal, and as an aesthetic bonus, has no stiches, having been grown in one piece. Second, TC&A made Disembodied Cuisine, growing skeletal muscle over biopolymer as a potential food source. Though it does require an initial biopsy, while the semi-living meat is growing in a lab, the animal can heal. So, semi-living tissue may one day lead to meat for vegetarians and a significant decrease of animal suffering. Other TC&A projects include Pig Wings, which grew wing-shaped semi-living objects out of pig tissue, and Semi-Living Worry Dolls, traditionally used in Guatemala to ward off worries, these seven miniatures represented the TC&A’s worries: biotechnology, capitalism, demagogy, eugenics, fear itself, invisible genes, and the fear of hope. 
It has been recently discovered that Komodo dragons can reproduce asexually. This happens through the process called parthenogenesis (Gr. virgin-creation), when an unfertilized egg develops to maturity by itself, and has been recorded in 70 species of vertebrates, mostly snakes and monitor lizards. In some species, like certain whiptail lizards, this has made the male superfluous, their asexual reproduction produces only female offspring. For most species with it, parthenogenesis is usually the only mode of reproduction, but the Komodo dragon can do both. London’s Chester Zoo’s dragon Flora recently had seven children by the process, which retroactively demystified the four mothered by Sungaï last year (some speculated that she stored sperm inside her, carrying it for over two years since she had last seen a male). Parthenogenesis, by the way, was how the dinosaurs multiplied in Jurassic Park. 
Curiously, the male may actually be unnecessary for mammal reproduction as well. In 2004, researchers lead by Tomohiro Kono at the Tokyo University of Agriculture created a living mouse by combining cells from two female mice. This is not parthenogenesis, since two parents are involved and the process does not yet have a name. But the mouse, Kaguya, named after a princess from Japanese folklore who was found as a baby inside a bamboo stalk, has since conventionally conceived and given birth to a nest of pinkies (baby mice). So the question in the shadows: are males gradually becoming obsolete, have they been peeing in the gene pool, soon to get kicked out? After all, life started out as and in most cases remains asexual (e.g. there are 10 times more viruses on the planet than organisms), the male arose as a sort of anomaly, an exception. Perhaps, the male could one day sink back into the sea of primordeal liquid life, the Lacanian lamella in which by perpetually reproducing itself, one lives forever. But then, considering that evolution tends towards diversity, maybe instead we will see a third sex, with a wonderous new anatomy. Anyway the wind blows, we can always try and make nature bend to technology, right Kaguya?
Robert Anton Wilson - author, philosopher, prophet - left his body at 4:50am yesterday morning, on the binary date 1/11. He will be missed. The following was one of his last post.
WikiLeaks.org, is developing an uncensorable, untraceable Wikipedia designed for the leaking of sensitive documents. The aim is to provide an outlet for people in oppressive regimes (the Middle East, former Soviet republics, Asia and the Sub-Saharan Africa) who risk much more in calling attention to injustice, as well as those trying to uncover corruption in their own governments and corporations. As with Wikipedia, people can interpret and explain posted documents, thereby providing a secure (?) forum for discussion and dissension. According to their website, they have over a million documents already. The idea behind WikiLeaks is that close scrutiny makes government function better, people are more honest when they think they are being watched. Of course, while it wants to facilitate ethical leaking, as with Wikipedia on whose engine it runs, there is no way other than consensus to tell if a document is legitimate. But then again, what we call history, we call so by consensus. For security, WikiLeaks will be using an anonymous protocol known as The Onion Router (Tor), which uses cryptography and rerouting through a network of servers to hide the origin of a message. According to experts, there are still security risks, ones that could have terrifying consequences should the site be hacked, entire groups compromised. For better or worse, WikiLeaks could be a powerful tool for freedom of speech worldwide. It is scheduled to launch in February. [From their homepage:] "Three things can not hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth" – Siddhartha
Experts said that such small transmitters probably have a range limited to a few feet, but could communicate with nearby sensors hidden, say, inside a doorway. Amusingly, the Associated Press image circulated with this story is not a Canadian coin, but a U.S. dollar, one of the hollow coins the CIA acknowledged using to hide messages and film. All this recalls the British spy ‘rock’ fiasco in Russia around this time last year. Nothing is what it seems.