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In the first half of the 20th century, scientists misunderstood the ocean's currents, and had only a murky understanding of plate tectonics and the fauna of the briny deep. The experts squinted through homemade cameras at ocean bottoms, thinking they were as barren as the Moon.

But our empirical techniques have evolved. Modern oceanography – that is, the chemistry, zoology and geology of 71 per cent of the world's surface – is now a cutting-edge science. Today, scientists embarking on a research project can gird themselves with an arsenal of probes, microchips and electronic microscopes to model complex currents, for example (handy when investigating oil spills, as in the Gulf of Mexico recently), or to sniff out spawning whales.

It was Britain that kick-started this revolution. In 1949, the Government funded our sceptred isle's first National Institute of Ocean-ography (NIO), based in Surrey. The institute proceeded to push back the frontiers of the discipline, until its eventual dissolution in 1973.

driver from www.independent.co.uk

Why bother remaking La Femme Nikita? The 1990 French action film about a criminal-turned-government assassin already has been remade as a U.S. feature film  starring Bridget Fonda and as a basic cable TV series starring Peta Wilson.

"It's been done," concedes executive producer Craig Silverstein, who's behind the CW's forthcoming Nikita reboot.

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But after screening the pilot for Comic-Con attendees Saturday, he explained why he chose to take on the task.

"I knew it would be important to come up with a unique take," said Silverstein, whose producing credits include Bones, K-Ville and Standoff. His Nikita takes place after the titular character has escaped the dubious agency that recruited her — in this version, it's The Division — and is in pursuit of answers.

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The fast-moving pilot will remind action fans of the early days of Alias and Dark Angel. In other words, good stuff to be had. Shane West and Lyndsy Fonseca also star.

"No one's told her story after the fact," star Maggie Q said. "No one knows where she is going."

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On Monday morning, a week ago, the Congressional Budget Office predicted  that, for most people, insurance would cost the same or less if the Senate's health care reform bill passes. By the afternoon, critics of health care reform rushed to the microphones, claiming vindication. CBO, these critics insisted, had determined reform would mean higher costs!

What happened? The simple answer is that the critics were being deliberately deceptive. And they almost certainly were. But there's also a more complicated answer. The critics were taking advantage of widespread confusion over the definition of cost--a confusion that has been hanging over this debate for the last few months and is continuing to distort it.

Until now, the CBO, which is Washington's official scorekeeper, has been assessing reform proposals largely on the basis of how they would affect the federal budget. And whenever CBO has issued one of its assessments, critics have focused largely on CBO's estimates of government outlays--that is, the amount of money a bill would require Washington to spend on expanding government health insurance programs or providing people with financial assistance to buy insurance.

These numbers inevitably sound big. Most of the bills CBO has analyzed have called for outlays in the neighborhood of $1 trillion over 10 years. And while that figure represents just a fraction of the total federal budget--government outlays for the same period will be more than $40 trillion--it still represents an increase in what Washington will be spending. That's bound to upset anybody whose primary concern is the size of government.

But sometimes government needs to grow, in order to take on responsibilities the private sector can't handle on its own. And when that's the case--as it seems to be with health care--the only relevant question is whether an initiative adds to the federal deficit. Here, the news has been largely good. The bill before the Senate now would raise some tax revenue while finding savings in other government programs. The net result, according to CBO, would be lower deficits overall. (It reached a similar conclusion about the House bill.)

Of course, that's not the end of the story. The most important issue for most Americans isn't what the government spends on health care. It's what they, as individuals and families, spend on health care. That's the question the CBO finally addressed this week--although the findings were, in fairness, a bit hard to follow.

The vast majority of Americans with private insurance get coverage through employers. For these people, CBO predicted, premiums would stay about the same or come down a bit if the Senate bill became law. That wouldn't be the $2,500 in annual savings that President Obama famously promised during the campaign. But it also wouldn't be the huge hike in premiums critics had been predicting.

Where the price of health insurance would start to change radically is in the non-group market--that is, for people who buy on their own, as individuals, rather than through an employer. Premiums for these people, who number a little more than 30 million, would tend to go up. That's one of the points reform critics seized upon in their press conferences.
But the more interesting and relevant story was why CBO expected premiums to go up. For the most part, CBO found, it was because people would be getting health insurance that provided more benefits and covered medical bills more completely--coverage that often wasn't available to people in the non-group market before. In many cases, CBO determined from its economic models, people would actually opt to buy more expensive insurance than necessary simply because they valued the added protection.

In addition, CBO noted, while premiums in the non-group market would rise, the majority of people buying insurance on their own would simultaneously become eligible for federal subsidies. For the majority of these people, the subsidies would more than offset the increase in premiums, so that they'd end up paying less--even as they were getting better coverage.

To be sure, not everybody would be so lucky. People making more than four times the poverty line, or $88,000 a year for a family of four, wouldnt be eligible for subsidies. They'd end up paying more. So would some, although not all, people who now have cheap insurance because they are young, healthy, and have minimal benefits. They'd be a small minority of the total U.S. population, but still a few million people. They, too, figured prominently in last week's anti-reform propaganda.

But it's virtually impossible to design a reform scheme that doesn't, in the early stages, involve at least some transfer of money away from the healthy and wealthy. The point of insurance is to pool risk, bringing in contributions from relatively healthy people, so that medical bills don't fall too heavily on the sick. And if government is going to offer subsidies to the poor and middle-class, it's bound to finance those subsidies through taxes on the wealthy.

Keep in mind that CBO is very skeptical about reform's ability to make medical care itself less expensive. If it turns out that better use of information technology, more scrutiny of treatments, and other innovations reduce the incidence of wasteful medical treatments--as many experts believe will happen--then it's possible everybody, even the very healthy and very wealthy, would end up spending less on health care, at least in the long term.

And if not? Then even those few people who do end up paying more for their insurance would still gain something: The peace of mind that they'll still have coverage even if they suddenly stop making a lot of money, as well as the knowledge that insurance will meet their needs if they get sick. That's something worth celebrating, even if the reform critics don't agree.

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Lewis and Clark journeyed into the Ameri¬can wilderness to find out what the U.S. had acquired when it purchased Louisiana, and the Appolo astronauts rocketed to the moon in a dramatic show of technological muscle during the cold war.

Although their missions blended commercial and political-military im-peratives, the explorers involved all accomplished some significant science simply by going where no scientists had gone before.

Today Mars Zooms (Isl^JtB 58) as humanity's next great terra incognita (;fc S^I^ife). And with doubtful prospects for a short-term financial re¬turn, with the cold war a rapidly fading memory and amid a growing empha¬sis on international cooperation in large space ventures, it is clear that im¬peratives other than profits or nationalism will have to compel human beings to leave their tracks on the planet's reddish surface. Could it be that sci¬ence, which has long played a minor role in exploration, is at last destined to take a leading role? The question naturally invites a couple of others: Are there experiments that only humans could do on Mars? Could those experi¬ments provide insights profound enough to justify the expense of sending people across interplanetary space?

With Mars the scientific stakes are arguably higher than they have ev-

er been. The issue of whether life ever existed on the planet, and whether it persists to this day, has been highlighted by mounting evidence that the Red Planet once had abundant stable, liquid water and by the continuing contro¬versy over suggestions that bacterial fossils rode to Earth on a meteorite (Bl 5) from Mars. A more conclusive answer about life on Mars, past or pre¬sent, would give researchers invaluable data about the range of conditions under which a planet can generate the complex chemistry that leads to life. If it could be established that life arose independently on Mars and Earth, the finding would provide the first concrete clues in one of the deepest mys¬teries in all of science: the prevalence of life in the universe.

The monkey doesn't live there anymore. The monkey moved—to Kentucky—and took his people with him. And I was glad because I couldn't listen anymore to his wild scream¬ing at night, the twangy yakkety-yak of the people who owned him. The green metal cage, the porcelain table top, the family that spoke like guitars. Monkey, family, table. All gone.

And it was then we took over the garden we had been afraid to go into when the monkey screamed and showed its yellow teeth.

There were sunflowers big as flowers on Mars and thick cockscombs bleeding the deep red fringe of theater curtains. There were dizzy bees and bow-tied fruit flies turning somer-saults and humming in the air. Sweet sweet peach trees. Thorn roses and thistle and pears. Weeds like so many squinty-eyed stars and brush that made your ankles itch and itch until you washed with soap and water. There were big green apples hard as knees. And everywhere the sleepy smell of rotting wood, damp earth and dusty hollyhocks thick and perfumy like the blue-blond hair of the dead.

Most likely I will go to hell and most likely I deserve to be there. My mother says I was born on an evil day and prays for me. Lucy and Rachel pray too. For ourselves and for each other... because of what we did to Aunt Lupe.

Her name was Guadalupe and she was pretty like my mother. Dark. Good to look at. In her Joan Crawford dress and swimmer's legs. Aunt Lupe of the photographs.

But I knew her sick from the disease that would not go, her legs bunched under the yellow sheets, the bones gone limp as worms. The yellow pillow, the yellow smell, the bottles and spoons. Her head thrown back like a thirsty lady. My aunt, the swimmer.

Hard to imagine her legs once strong, the bones hard and parting water, clean sharp strokes, not bent and wrinkled like a baby, not drowning under the sticky yellow light. Second-floor rear apartment. The naked light bulb. The high ceilings. The light bulb always burning.

I don't know who decides who deserves to go bad. There was no evil in her birth. No wicked curse. One day I believe she was swimming, and the next day she was sick. It might have been the day that gray photograph was taken. It might have been the day she was holding cousin Totchy and baby Frank. It might have been the moment she pointed to the camera for the kids to look and they wouldn't.

Maybe the sky didn't look the day she fell down. Maybe God was busy. It could be true she didn't dive right one day and hurt her spine. Or maybe the story that she fell very hard from a high step stool, like Totchy said, is true.

It has been so since the 1960s when packaged food first appeared with the label: "store in the refrigerator".

In my fridgeless Fifties childhood, I was fed well and healthily. The milkman came daily, the grocer, the butcheri $\~$ ), the baker, and the ice-cream man delivered two or three times a week. The Sunday meat would last until Wednesday and surplus ( ^'J^&^l ) bread and milk became all kinds of cakes. Nothing was wasted, and we were never troubled by rotten food. Thirty years on, food deliveries have ceased, fresh vegetables are almost unobtainable in the country.

The invention of the fridge contributed comparatively little to the art of food preservation. A vast way of well-tried techniques already existed-natural cooling, drying, smoking, salting, sugaring, bottling...

What refrigeration did promote was marketing-marketing hardware and electricity, marketing soft drinks, marketing dead bodies of animals around the globe in search of a good price.

Consequently, most of the world's fridges are to be found, not in the tropics where they might prove useful, but in the wealthy countries with mild temperatures where they are climatically almost unnecessary. Every winter, millions of fridges hum away continuously, and at vast expense, busily maintaining an artificially-cooled space inside an artificially-heated house — while outside, nature provides the desired temperature free of charge.

The fridge's effect upon the environment has been evident, while its contribution to human happiness has been insignificant. If you don' t believe me, try it yourself, invest in a food cabinet and turn off your fridge next winter. You may miss the hamburger^, >XH13 ), but at least you'll get rid of that terrible hum. 1 1. The statement "In my fridgeless Fifties childhood, I was fed well and healthily."

Most episodes of absent-mindedness — forgetting where you left something or wondering why you just entered a room—are caused by a simple lack of attention, says Schacter. "You're supposed to remember something, but you haven't encoded it deeply."

Encoding, Schacter explains, is a special way of paying attention to an event that has a major impact on recalling it later. Failure to encode properly can create annoying situations. If you put your mobile phone in a pocket, for example, and don't pay attention to what you did because you're in-volved in a conversation, you'll probably forget that the phone is in the jacket now hanging in your wardrobe (^§). "Your memory itself isn't failing you," says Schacter. "Rather, you didn't give your memory system the information it needed."

Lack of interest can also lead to absent-mindedness. "A man who can recite sports statistics from 30 years ago," says Zelinski, "may not remember to drop a letter in the mailbox."-Women have slightly better memories than men, possibly because they pay more attention to their environment, and memory relies on just that.

Visual cues can help prevent absent-mindedness, says Schacter. "But be sure the cue is clear and available," he cautions. If you want to remember to take a medication (35^) with lunch, put the pill bottle on the kitchen table — don't leave it in the medicine chest and write yourself a note that you keep in a pocket.

Another common episode of absent-mindedness, walking into a room and wondering why you're there. Most likely, you were thinking about something else. "Everyone does this from time to time," says Zelinski. The best thing to do is to return to where you were before entering the room, and you'll likely remember.

The research community will rightly be alarmed at these developments, which have two objectives: to arouse public attention and to frighten people working in research with animals. The first need is that everything should be done to identify those responsible for the crimes and to put them on trail. The Defence Research Society has taken the practical step of offering a reward of 10,000 pounds for information leading to those responsible, but past experience is not encouraging. People are unlikely to be tempted by such offers. The professional police will similarly be confronted by the usual problem of finding a needle in a haystack.

That is why the intellectual(^PiR^T)community in Britain and elsewhere must act more vigorously in its own defence. There are several steps that can be taken, of which the chief one is to demand of all the organizations that exist with the declared objectives of safeguarding the interests of animals that they should declare clearly where they stand on violence towards people. And it will not be enough for the chairmen and chairwomen of these organizations to utter placatory(^ttW)statements on behalf of all their members. These people should also undertake that it will be a test of continuing membership in their organizations that members and would be members should declare that they will take no part in acts of violence against human beings. Even such undertakings would not be fully effective: people, after all, can lie. But at least they would distinguish the organizations entitled to a continuing voice in the dialogue with the research community about the rights of animals in research from the organizations that deserve no say.

HARRISBURG, Pa. — Two Pittsburgh-area TV stations are reversing a decision to pull a commercial attacking Democratic policies and the voting record of U.S. Senate candidate Joe Sestak.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Friday that the stations are restoring the ad that the business advocacy group sponsored.

An official for sister stations WPGH and WPMY declined to comment.

Sestak, a second-term congressman from the Philadelphia suburbs, had complained to stations about the accuracy of various statements in the ad.

The stations told the Sestak campaign earlier this week that it pulled the ad because the claim that Sestak voted with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi 100 percent of the time is untrue.

Sestak's Republican opponent Pat Toomey cites Congressional Quarterly statistics that show 97 percent of Sestak's votes aligning with Pelosi's.