Today there are 150 children, all conceived with sperm from one donor, in this group of half siblings, and more are on the way. “It’s wild when we see them all together ”” they all look alike,” said Ms. Daily, 48, a social worker in the Washington area who sometimes vacations with other families in her son’s group.

As more women choose to have babies on their own, and the number of children born through artificial insemination increases, outsize groups of donor siblings are starting to appear. While Ms. Daily’s group is among the largest, many others comprising 50 or more half siblings are cropping up on Web sites and in chat groups, where sperm donors are tagged with unique identifying numbers.

Now, there is growing concern among parents, donors and medical experts about potential negative consequences of having so many children fathered by the same donors, including the possibility that genes for rare diseases could be spread more widely through the population. Some experts are even calling attention to the increased odds of accidental incest between half sisters and half brothers, who often live close to one another.

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Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday. He was 56.

The death was announced by Apple, the company Mr. Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage.

A friend of the family said that Mr. Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer, with which he waged a long and public struggle, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment. He continued to introduce new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.

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A form of cloning has been used to create personalised embryonic stem cells in humans, say researchers.

Genetic material was taken from an adult skin cell and transferred into a human egg. This was grown to produce an early embryo.

Stem cells have huge potential in medicine as they can transform into any other cell type in the body.

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“A total of 37 punchings was made for every bond.”

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American scientists will again sweep the majority of Nobel prizes at this week’s award announcements in Sweden, analysts have predicted. But they have also warned this dominance may soon come to end.

David Pendlebury, a citation analyst who has correctly predicted 10 Nobel winners since 2002, believes that the countries of the east, particularly China, will soon start to rule the awards for science’s greatest prize.

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The mission, Obama added, showed that Al-Qaeda and its allies will find “no safe haven anywhere in the world.” But some ethicists are raising questions about whether the killing violated international law. University of Notre Dame international law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell released a statement calling the strike an illegal mission. “Derogation from the fundamental right to life is permissible only in battle zones or to save a human life immediately. The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki did not occur in these circumstances,” she said. In an interview with managing editor Kim Lawton earlier this year, O’Connell discussed her ethical concerns about the increased use of drones for targeted killings outside official combat zones. Lawton also talked with retired Lt. General David Deptula, who oversaw the US Air Force’s drone program from 2006 until 2010.

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Never have scientists had so much readily accessible, real-time data about what people say. Twitter, the service that allows users to send text updates of up to 140 characters out to the public, publishes more than 200 million messages, or tweets, a day. Compared with information from cellphone records and social-media sites, Twitter texts are as timely as a pulse beat and, taken together, automatically compile the raw material of social history.

As Twitter’s message traffic has grown explosively, so has the scientific appetite for the insights the data can yield. Dozens of new scholarly studies over the past 18 months by computer-network analysts and sociologists have plumbed the public torrents of data made available by Twitter through special links with the company’s computer servers. This research has harnessed the service to monitor political activity and employee morale, track outbreaks of flu and food poisoning, map fluctuations in moods around the world, predict box-office receipts for new movies, and get a jump on changes in the stock market.

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Willow Garage, a start-up in Menlo Park, Calif., has designed a robot called the PR2 that bears some resemblance to “The Jetsons'” beloved Rosie. It’s still under development, but already the PR2 can fold clothes, fetch a drink from the fridge, set the table and even bake cookies.
The robot’s backers aren’t ready to say just how soon the PR2 will hit the mainstream market. Right now it costs too much, does too little and is too slow to be of interest to most consumers. But to many experts, the idea of a skilled and intelligent household robot finally is drawing near.

“The technology is much closer than most people think,” said Andrew Ng, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University. “We’re not yet there, but I think that in less than a decade the technology will exist to have a useful household robot.”

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For decades after they were discovered in a cave, the Dead Sea Scrolls were allowed to be examined closely only by fewer than a couple dozen scholars and archaeologists.

Now, with infrared- and computer-enhanced photography, anyone with a computer can view these 2,000-year-old relics, which include the oldest known copies of biblical text and a window on the world and times of Jesus.

High-quality digitized images of five of the 950 manuscripts were posted for free online for the first time this week by Google and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where the scrolls are housed. The post includes an English translation and a search feature to one of the texts, the Great Isaiah Scroll.

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A successful, long-term defense of traditional marriage will require a renewal of our moral and social imaginations. We must continue to fight to preserve marriage in the courtrooms, legislatures, and polling booths. But these are largely holding actions. Until sexual discipline comes to seem humanizing rather than alienating, most Americans will find traditional sexual mores off-putting, and even those who endorse traditional norms will continue to downplay them in the public square””and in the pulpit. In a far more complicated way, the same holds for gender roles, childbearing, and child rearing. Until our common culture reaffirms the essential and inevitably social significance of the difference between men and women, as well as the role of fertility in sex and marriage, Americans will fail to grasp the skull-thumping obviousness of male”“female union as the essential feature of marriage.

Proponents of same-sex marriage like to pronounce it “inevitable.” Their confidence is based on the progressive conceit that modernity always and everywhere weakens and dissolves the power of traditional norms and practices. But this is not true. During the nineteenth century the social influence of Christianity in America grew dramatically. Victorian England saw a profound remoralization of society. And the diffusion of modern economic systems, science, and technology throughout the globe in recent decades has not led to the diminishment of religious passions, as so many predicted, but instead their increase. History is not a ratchet that turns in only one direction.

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Boeing Co. handed over the key for its first 787 wide-body jet to All Nippon Airways on Monday after years of delays, marking a long-awaited milestone in the history of commercial flight.

Thousands of workers gathered for the ceremony at Paine Field, outside the building where the planes are assembled, with many finding shelter from the rain under the wings of two yet-to-be-delivered 787s. The actual first ANA 787 was nearby at the Future of Flight aviation center, where it was being prepared for a reception Monday night and its flight to Japan today. The plane goes into service in November.

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By air, land and sea – the nation’s largest counter-terrorism squad is on the beat in America’s largest city. One thousand officers – many of them armed like soldiers – are part of a presence that is meant to send a message: New York City is too tough a target. NYPD counter-terrorism is the creation of police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Ray Kelly: We’re the number one target in this country. That’s the consensus of the intelligence community. We’re the communications capital. We’re the financial capital. We’re a city that’s been attacked twice successfully. We’ve had 13 terrorist plots against the city since September 11. No other city has had that.

Kelly is a classic cop. He started as an NYPD cadet and rose all the way to commissioner. He left the force before 9/11. But within four months of the attack, the mayor asked him to come back.

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In the end, Stuxnet may have set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions by years. But it also could prove a Pyrrhic victory for its still-unknown creator ”“ a sophisticated cyberweapons nation state that [ Ralph] Langner argues could be the US or Israel. Like the Hiroshima bomb, Stuxnet demonstrated for the first time a dangerous capability ”“ in this case to hackers, cybercrime gangs, and new cyberweapons states, he says in an interview.

With Stuxnet as a “blueprint” downloadable from the Internet, he says, “any dumb hacker” can now figure out how to build and sell cyberweapons to any hacktivist or terrorist who wants “to put the lights out” in a US city or “release a toxic gas cloud.”

What follows are excerpts of Langner’s comments from an extended interview:

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The company didn’t reveal any details about the conference, but it has been widely speculated that Amazon will announced its long-awaited 7″ Kindle tablet. The e-reader-tablet hybrid is expected to be equipped with a color screen, video-streaming services, an improved user interface and to be powered by Google’s Android operating system.

It’s estimated that the Kindle tablet will be priced around $250….

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A former employee of American Superconductor Corp. was convicted in Austria on criminal charges in a corporate espionage case linked to China’s biggest manufacturer of wind turbines.

The conviction on charges of fraud and industrial espionage may buttress American Superconductor’s allegations against its once-biggest customer, Sinovel Wind Group Co. Ltd.

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An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles traveling faster than light — a finding that could overturn one of Einstein’s long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.

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The tools of communication have changed. Use of social media has exploded, and the new services have influenced the way we interact with one another.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, LiveCast, blogs, gaming sites, online comment forums and many other interactive electronic platforms — they are fast and easy ways to fire off electronic messages, to forgo formalities, to avoid proofreading. And it’s common to reach a multitude with a few key strokes.

With speed and breadth, however, comes risk. As people rely more and more on social media, privacy diminishes and the opportunity to offend increases.

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A California startup is extending social media to the dead.

I-Postmortem Ltd., based in Palo Alto, allows clients ”” while still alive ”” to create an interactive memorial to themselves through photos, letters, poems, and audio and video files.

After death, a client can also send timed messages ”” to a son on his 21st birthday, say, or a daughter on her wedding day.

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Watson, the IBM supercomputer that defeated the world’s best “Jeopardy!” playersthis year, has found a job in medicine. It won’t be consulting with patients, but a version of the game-show champion could appear in examination rooms, offering assistance to flesh-and-blood physicians. But how soon might you see Dr. Watson? And could Dr. Watson be better than your doctor?

I’ve worked in software development for more than 25 years ”” never for IBM ”” and was amazed by Watson’s ability to understand language, solve problems and present answers in the form of a question as Alex Trebek coolly looked on. While I don’t think most doctors need to worry about their jobs anytime soon, Watson-esque technology offers a powerful diagnostic tool that could bring dramatic benefits to health care. The prospect of a robotic caregiver might not seem comforting, but Watson’s first appointment will be a watershed moment. This is an app way beyond anything on an iPhone….

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For years, computers have been creeping ever nearer to our neurons. Thousands of people have become cyborgs, of a sort, for medical reasons: cochlear implants augment hearing and deep-brain stimulators treat Parkinson’s. But within the next decade, we are likely to see a new kind of implant, designed for healthy people who want to merge with machines. With several competing technologies in development, scientists squabble over which device works best; no one wants theirs to end up looking like the Betamax of brain wear. Schalk is a champion of the ECoG implant because, unlike other devices, it does not pierce brain tissue; instead it can ride on top of the brain-blood barrier, sensing the activity of populations of neurons and passing their chatter to the outside world, like a radio signal. Schalk says this is the brain implant most likely to evolve into a consumer product that could send signals to a prosthetic hand, an iPhone, a computer or a car.

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Just three months into its launch, the New Media Project at Union Theological Seminary has already gained footing in exploring improved ways in which pastors and lay leaders might use new technologies to strengthen their communities.

“This increasingly rich theological discussion seems to be striking a chord of interest among religious leaders who are thinking about the impact of technology on religious life,” said the Rev. Verity A. Jones, project director and former publisher and editor of DisciplesWorld magazine. “I am encouraged that the discussion is getting some traction.”

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An unsuspecting Oregon couple’s ascendance to YouTube stardom happened by accident….

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An internet security company has demonstrated a new weapon against deeply rooted malware that takes control of PCs and turns them into zombies.

McAfee said it has activated built-in security features and added software to Intel microprocessors, known as chips, to stop cyber criminals from infecting PCs via advance persistent threats, rootkits and zero-day attacks. Infected PCs can be directed to steal private identities, financial data and to send out spam.

If the new technology catches on, the pain of ensuring anti-virus software is up to date and running on a PC could become a thing of the past. It may even pave the way for similar hardware-based technology to be included in other internet-ready devices such as cars, TVs and teller machines.

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Police in London have arrested a 31-year-old man in connection with allegations of unauthorised trading which has cost Swiss banking group UBS an estimated $2bn (£1.3bn).

Kweku Adoboli, believed to work in the European equities division, was detained in the early hours of Thursday and remains in custody.

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Testosterone, that most male of hormones, takes a dive after a man becomes a parent. And the more he gets involved in caring for his children ”” changing diapers, jiggling the boy or girl on his knee, reading “Goodnight Moon” for the umpteenth time ”” the lower his testosterone drops.

So says the first large study measuring testosterone in men when they were single and childless and several years after they had children. Experts say the research has implications for understanding the biology of fatherhood, hormone roles in men and even health issues like prostate cancer.

“The real take-home message,” said Peter Ellison, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard who was not involved in the study, is that “male parental care is important. It’s important enough that it’s actually shaped the physiology of men.”

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A year ago, when chemotherapy stopped working against his leukemia, William Ludwig signed up to be the first patient treated in a bold experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ludwig, then 65, a retired corrections officer from Bridgeton, N.J., felt his life draining away and thought he had nothing to lose.

Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells ”” a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors ”” and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig’s veins.
At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.

A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia….

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Belgian security firm GlobalSign has temporarily stopped issuing authentication certificates for secure websites.

It comes after an anonymous hacker claimed to have gained access to the company’s servers.

If confirmed, it would be the second security breach at a European certificate authority in two months.

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Recent studies are showing how tumors sidestep targeted cancer drugs by activating other growth-promoting molecules. The findings may help doctors develop new drug combinations that squelch the resistance, said Pasi Janne, senior author of the study and a medical oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

“Until now we didn’t know what caused acquired resistance to Erbitux,” Janne said in a telephone interview. “Our hope is that this will very rapidly translate into clinical trials” of new drug combinations. The study, done in collaboration with researchers at Kinki University School of Medicine in Osaka, Japan and other universities, is published today in Science Translational Medicine.

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To dissuade the owners of electric cars from recharging their vehicles at peak times, and encourage them to do so in the wee, small hours of the morning instead, some electricity companies are introducing off-peak pricing for electric cars. Off-peak pricing is a common way of persuading people to run appliances such as washing machines at times of low demand. It is, though, a rigid arrangement that cannot respond to fluctuations in the requirement for power. Far better, reckon Alex Rogers and his colleagues at Southampton University, in England, for car owners to be represented in their interactions with the local power supplier by agents that can negotiate a deal on their behalf. These agents would bargain with one another, and with the power company, to charge the cars in an area in the most efficient way. The twist is that the agents Dr Rogers proposes to recruit for the task are not people, but computer programs.

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