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Group Booking Terms and Conditions
Because you are making a Group Booking, there are additional Terms and Conditions that apply. Please read them and click 'I Accept' below to continue with your booking
General Group Booking Terms
By making a group reservation through Hostelworld.com you agree to the following terms and conditions as set by Hostelworld.com and as set by the hostel in question.
- In order to make a group reservation on Hostelworld.com it is necessary to pay a deposit. The balance is due directly to the hostel according to their payment conditions.
- The booking deposit is non-refundable.
- Please note that any cancellations must be notified directly to the hostel at least 24 hours in advance of your scheduled arrival date, unless otherwise stated in the hostel's conditions.
- Hostelworld.com are not responsible for changes or amendments to your reservation once it has been processed. All correspondence with regard to changes to your booking need to be dealt with directly with the hostel.
- Cancellations for reservations must be made directly with the hostel and must conform with the individual hostels cancellation policy (see below)
- It is your responsibility to pay the balance of your accommodation cost to the hostel in accordance with their payment conditions (see below). Failure to do so may result in your reservation being cancelled by the hostel.
- Individual hostels may have special booking conditions relating to group stays, please read the hostel booking conditions carefully before making your reservation.
Hostel Specific Terms & Conditions
The remainder of the amount due will be charged to your credit card 1 week prior to arrival. Should numbers or room selection change, the per person deposit times the number of people who actually travelled will be deducted from the total accommodation charge levvied by the hostel.
The following group types are not accepted by this hostel: Junior / Primary School, High / Secondary School If you have misrepresented the type of group you are booking for, your booking may be cancelled by the hostel."
Any cancellations resulting from agreement to these terms and conditions under false pretences will result in loss of deposit.
숙소 정보
Our shared rooms are individually designed and feature our Premier Capsules—designed for comfort and build-in privacy. Each Premier Capsule comes with premium bedding, privacy screen, outlets and reading lights. Female-only rooms are available. A spacious individual locker and access to the hostel's atrium balcony library and guest lounge are included with any shared accommodation. For private accommodations, each room also features a flat-screen TV and safety deposit box.
Guests will enjoy a café lounge and workspace, 2 on-site bars, a rooftop restaurant, and daily continental breakfast.
The property including all rooms are fully air-conditioned. Complimentary Wi-Fi is offered throughout the property.
Tambayan Hostel is housed in an old Manila mansion from the 1940s in the city of Manila—home to Metro Manila's oldest and most historic sites and major cultural attractions. Tambayan Hostel guests can walk and self-tour the nearby historic neighborhoods of Manila or venture on excursions outside the city with recommendations from our tour desk.
The hostel is surrounded museums, old churches, art centers, the national library, parks, restaurants, bars and nightclub. The historic and bohemian neighborhood of Malate has a very vibrant nightlife.
Robinson Place Manila Shopping is just one block away and the hostel is only four blocks from the Manila Bay coastline and boardwalk. The property is 7.2 miles from Manila Ninoy Aquino International Airport and within 2 miles of Intramuros, Rizal Park and the National Museum.
Tambayan Kitchen+Bar, our on-site terrace restaurant and bar, offers an innovative menu of modern Filipino cuisine boasting local produce and fresh ingredients. The terrace bar also features specialty drinks and inventive cocktails.
Designed for adventurers and travelers who care about exploring new cities with a local point of view and meeting interesting, like-minded people. Tambayan Hostel offers a stress-free stay in Manila and easy access to local culture—come see what we have to offer! 규정 보기
객실 현황 확인
- 무료 와이파이
- Flexible NRR
- 에어컨
- 객실 청소
- 모닝콜
- 인터넷 사용
- 바
- 카페
- Wi-Fi
- 보드 게임
세션 만료
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계정의 비밀번호를 입력해주세요 <% email %>


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Nissan Repairs From Professional Professionals
Nissan vehicles are as diverse as San Bernardino. You might choose the 370Z convertible for sunny summer days, the rugged and durable Titan pickup for backcountry travel, or the luxury of a Maxima for your daily commute. Whatever your reason for owning a Nissan, you can keep it going strong with routine service and occasional Nissan repairs.
In San Bernardino and across all of San Bernardino County, you'll get top-quality Nissan repairs at Eddie's Auto Care. Our team is trustworthy and friendly, delivering excellent customer service to complement the most comprehensive Nissan repairs. The result: confident driving at an affordable price.
The Nissan Dealer Alternative in San Bernardino
Since 1998, Eddie's Auto Care has taken great pride in outstanding Nissan repairs. Thanks to our ASE-Certified technicians, you can trust your Nissan repairs are always performed to the highest standard. We employ cutting-edge technology and tools for an accurate diagnosis every time. Whether your Altima is making CVT transmission noises, your Rogue is leaking engine oil, or your XTerra doesn't shift into 4WD, your exact Nissan repair needs will be addressed promptly.
For Nissan repairs that last, we use OEM and high-quality aftermarket parts at Eddie's Auto Care. All Nissan repairs are backed by our 12-month/12,000-mile warranty for your peace of mind wherever the road takes you.
For Quality Nissan repairs all around San Bernardino, CA, visit Eddie's Auto Care. Call us today or use our convenient online form to book your visit.

subset: commoncrawl


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Google Is Making It Harder to Steal on the Internet
Google is adding a new feature to its search algorithm that will make it harder to find pirated material, effectively making it extremely hard for you to keep up with Game of Thrones next season.
Google is adding a new feature to its search algorithm that will make it harder to find pirated material, effectively making it extremely difficult for you to keep up with Game of Thrones next season.
Google announced the change in a company blog post on Friday morning. This is how they explained they explained the new search:
Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it's a song previewed on NPR's music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.
Google says it's processing more copyright claims now than they ever have, so they're able to more effectively determine which sites are repeat offenders and deserve to be punished. Google elaborated on how the new change will work to Talking Points Memo, saying "we will only be counting valid copyright removal notices, submitted under penalty of perjury by copyright owners, that meet our takedown criteria."
The move is being done to quiet down big media companies who've long thought Google hasn't done enough to combat piracy. It's better than SOPA or PIPA, the piracy bills the change is being called a response to. The head of the Recording Industry Association of America, Cary Sherman, is happy with the move, and so is the Motion Picture Association of America:
"We are optimistic that Google's actions will help steer consumers to the myriad legitimate ways for them to access movies and TV shows online, and away from the rogue cyberlockers, peer-to-peer sites, and other outlaw enterprises that steal the hard work of creators across the globe. We will be watching this development closely – the devil is always in the details – and look forward to Google taking further steps to ensure that its services favor legitimate businesses and creators, not thieves."
Guess this means you'll have to scrounge up the money for HBO Go.


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The Patriot Ignite is the ideal compromise for anyone who'd like a solid-performing SSD without having to overspend. The Ignite comes in two models - 480GB ($179.99, £120.35, AU$231.45) and 960GB ($359.99, £240.67, AU$462.92). The drive is designed to boost your machine's performance by performing 80K IOPs on 4K random reads and 75K IOPs on 4K random writes, all while packing this performance within a slim 0.27-inch (7mm) form factor. Whether you are going to purchase this for a desktop or a laptop, the Patriot Ignite will fit most (but not all) computers.
Competing with drives like the Crucial BX100 ($400, £300, AU$530), and the Samsung 850 Pro (US$399, £232, AUD$420), the Ignite is a versatile, lower-cost, albeit slightly slower performer.
Compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows, 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Mac OS X, and Linux systems, the Patriot Ignite will cover you in most endeavors, though not as rapidly as more expensive devices.
Design and specs
The 480gb Ignite that we tested measures 3.94" x 2.75" x 0.28" (100mm x 69.85mm x 7mm) and weighs an incredibly light 0.26 lbs (116.2g). The drive uses a Phison S10 Series SSD Processor, combined with MLC NAND flash. It features advanced intelligent wear-leveling, ECC recovery at 115bits/2kb, and Advanced Garbage Collection, which all ensure that the Ignite SSD removes invalid data blocks, removes old data, and checks that it is operating properly.
Also included are TRIM support, a DRAM Cache of 512 (for the 480GB model), support for end-to-end data path protection (ETEP), and a reported mean time between failures (MTBF) of two million.
As for security, the Patriot Ignite supports AES 256-bit encryption, which automatically encrypts incoming files and decrypts departing files, which is really cool and tremendously useful.


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Virtualizing succession and sustainability
How do we as a society imagine our future? With social and natural environments changing, often quickly, it's difficult to imagine how our society might look a generation or more into the future. How can we then develop robust solutions for the sustainability challenges we face? Courses in sustainability offer insights; still sustainability science remains a developing field of study.
The solutions are to be found with practitioners, who live, interact and decide in society, says Arnim Wiek. Wiek collaborates with stakeholders from government, business and civil society to create solutions to sustainability challenges, such as climate change or detrimental urban development. At the same time, he is committed to build problem-solving capacity in the next generation of sustainability researchers and professionals.
An assistant professor in the School of Sustainability within the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University (ASU), Wiek is wont to describe himself as a "collaborative researcher and educator." His multifaceted, transformative agenda in sustainability science pursues the question of how research between scientists and non-academic partners is best initiated, facilitated and institutionalized to create and implement sustainability solutions.
One of Wiek's key research strengths is looking forward. For example, in scenario building, a method of complex systems analysis that incorporates the panoply of social, economic and environmental variables within sustainability science to examine potential long-term outcomes, Wiek turns to explore science-based visualizations of future pathways. Such virtualizations draw from an "interdisciplinary suite of methods from sustainability, environmental, decision and computer sciences to gaming, virtualization, education and policy analysis" aimed to enhance the connection between the science and the public.
"Visualizations of future scenarios are powerful tools for exploring the effects of our everyday actions and decisions. In particular, they allow for in-depth examinations of the critical question: what burdens we are willing to place on future generations?" Wiek says.
"Visualizations speak to people," he points out. "But it is important to visualize different possible future scenarios - and not just one, as it is usually done in movies. Only then, with this emphasis on choice, can future visualizations foster our capacity to think in alternatives and sophisticate our decision-making."
"Yet," Wiek adds. "There is still a great deal of research ahead of us to better understand what types of visuals are most informative for different types of decision-makers and most conducive to stimulate actions and behavioral change for sustainability."
How to teach a new generation of responsible citizens to be both empathetic and smart remains a tall order for an emerging field of science. Wiek reserves particular passion for the collaborative advancement of core competencies in sustainability and establishment of a framework for academic program development in sustainability science. This devotion drives his work at ASU, and forms the basis for his American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2010 Forum on Sustainability Science Programs, co-chaired with Amy Fuller, a member of AAAS's International Office. The forum encompasses an open roundtable discussion, a poster session and networking group. This trifecta offers extensive opportunities for the kind of collective, creative dialoguing necessary to affect and improve the way that sustainability science is taught and advanced institutionally. As a prelude to forum discussions, Wiek and Fuller solicited survey responses, an assemblage of core competencies that cut across programs and scientific communities, to launch discussion. Their hope is to advance vetted core competencies in international sustainability science that balance human needs with natural systems and empower "relatively young academic programs in shaping their profiles, designing and revising their academic programs and achieving their ambitious missions."
"Interestingly, we see a strong convergence in the discourse on core competencies in sustainability. The majority of contributions argue for systems thinking, exploring the future, balancing different values, and creating strategies for change - all of which constitute sustainability problem-solving capacity," says Wiek. "This is important because it shapes the profile of our sustainability science programs and professionalizes our field."
"However, we seem to believe that we can just continue with the same old content and teaching habits and still reach the new, ambitious goals we have set forth for our sustainability programs. That is wrong," says Wiek. "We need to fundamentally change what and how we teach if our graduates should be capable of acting and behaving differently in the world—and become the 'change agents' we promise them to become."
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2X faster developmentThe ultimate WPF UI toolkit to boost your development speed.
Syncfusion Excel (XlsIO) library is a .NET Excel library used to create, read, and edit Excel documents. Also, converts Excel documents to PDF files. Using this library, you can create Excel comment with background image.
What is the use of comment?
Comments are used to add notes to individual cells which helps reader with additional content for the data it contains. When a cell has a comment, a red triangle indicator appears in the upper-right corner of the cell. When you rest the pointer on the cell, the comment appears.
Steps to create Excel comment with background image, programmatically:
Step 1: Create a new C# console application project.
Create a new C# console application
Step 2: Install the Syncfusion.XlsIO.WinForms NuGet package as reference to your .NET Framework application from NuGet.org.
Install NuGet package
Step 3: Add an image to your project as an embedded resource using the following steps.
Find and select the image
Properties tool window
Adding Embedded Resource
Step 4: Include the following namespace in the Program.cs file.
using Syncfusion.XlsIO; using System.Drawing; using System.IO; using System.Reflection;
Imports Syncfusion.XlsIO Imports System.Drawing Imports System.IO Imports System.Reflection
Step 5: Use the following code snippet to create Excel comment with background image in C#, VB.NET.
using (ExcelEngine excelEngine = new ExcelEngine()) { //Instantiate the Excel application object IApplication application = excelEngine.Excel; //Add a workbook IWorkbook workbook = application.Workbooks.Create(1); //Open existing image Assembly assembly = typeof(Program).GetTypeInfo().Assembly; Stream fileStream = assembly.GetManifestResourceStream("ExcelCommentWithBackgroundImage.Image.PNG"); //The first worksheet object in the worksheets collection is accessed IWorksheet worksheet = workbook.Worksheets[0]; //Add comment with background image worksheet.Range["D5"].AddComment().Text = "Comment With Background Image"; worksheet.Range["D5"].AddComment().Fill.UserPicture(Image.FromStream(fileStream), "Image.jpg"); //Save the workbook Stream stream = File.Create("Output.xlsx"); workbook.SaveAs(stream); }
Using excelEngine As ExcelEngine = New ExcelEngine() ' Instantiate the Excel application object Dim application As IApplication = excelEngine.Excel ' Add a workbook Dim workbook As IWorkbook = application.Workbooks.Create(1) 'Open existing image Dim assembly As Assembly = GetType(Module1).GetTypeInfo.Assembly Dim fileStream As Stream = assembly.GetManifestResourceStream("ExcelCommentWithBackgroundImage_VB.Image.PNG") 'The first worksheet object in the worksheets collection is accessed Dim worksheet As IWorksheet = workbook.Worksheets(0) 'Add comment with background image worksheet.Range("D5").AddComment.Text = "Comment With Background Image" worksheet.Range("D5").AddComment.Fill.UserPicture(Image.FromStream(fileStream), "Image.PNG") 'Save the workbook Dim stream As Stream = File.Create("Output.xlsx") workbook.SaveAs(stream) End Using
Step 6: Please ensure that System.Drawing.dll is referred to your project.
A complete Windows Forms working example of how to create Excel comment with background image in C# and VB can be downloaded from Create Excel Comment With Background Image.zip.
By executing the program, you will get the output Excel file as shown below.
Output Excel document
Refer here to explore the rich set of Syncfusion Excel (XlsIO) library features.
See Also:
How to add comments to Excel cell?
How to set RTF text to cell comment using XlsIO?
How to format comments in a cell using XlsIO
How to resize comment box using C#,VB.NET?
How do I insert watermark in MS Excel?
How to set background color for a entire worksheet ?
Starting with v16.2.0.x, if you reference Syncfusion assemblies from trial setup or from the NuGet feed, include a license key in your projects. Refer the link to learn about generating and registering Syncfusion license key in your application to use the components without trail message.
2X faster developmentThe ultimate WPF UI toolkit to boost your development speed.
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Support Iceshanty... Get some great gear and forum goodies... Join The Iceshanty Hardwater Militia
0W40 synthetic.
I am usually an Amsoil booster but............ I had to stop running it in my 01 Cat. The 0W-40 says that it's ok for wet clutch applications but after a few oil changes with it I was starting to notice gear slippage and blow by coming out the exhaust. I have now gone back to the factory Cat oil. It seems to have a little more "traction" in it. (lol, not usually a desireable oil property) Amsoil = too good for my machine.
Amsoil is based in Superior Wisconsin, and to the best of my knowledge is not connected to Amway in any way. http://www.amsoil.com/storefront/aff.aspxAmsoil only has one brand of 0W40 for ATVs
I allways run Valvoline 10-40 atv in my 03 Foreman (4000mi.) never any clutch slippage or blow by. The dealer warned me not to run fully synthetic. You may be able to run synthetic in a Sportsman because they're no wet clutches. A Rubicon has multiple wet clutches and would use extreme caution with synthetic oils.
I run Arctic Cat 0W40 synthetic in my kitty because it has wet clutches and the oil is designed for this application. Maybe your dealer is thinking specifically about hondas. I run this oil because Arctic Cat recommends it after break in.
I think arctic cat atv's have belt drive CVT transmissions NO WET CLUTCHES!
what model??
I was looking at a Rubicon....
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Ougon Musou Kyoku Cross
Cheat Codes:
Submitted by: David K.
Fight against Boss Black Battler Team:
Successfully complete Arcade mode under the Hard difficulty setting
without losing any rounds with Black Battler and any other character
on your team. Win the final fight, then you will fight a team of two
Black Battlers.
They will have all character's Meta Ability activated at all times.
Fight as Black Battler:
Successfully complete Arcade mode with a team consisting of Battler
and Rosa.


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The news the other day that the snakehead fish, voracious pond-dominator and alleged traverser of dry land, had turned up in local waters was generally bad, at least for the other fish (and frogs, turtles, and perhaps even fowl) now destined to be devoured by it. But still: snakehead! Who can deny experiencing a little thrill? Three years ago, sightings in Maryland, in a pond behind a Dunkin' Donuts, inspired ominous scenarios; capable (it was said) of walking, or at least of propelling itself along the ground, with its pectoral fins, the snakehead would stride from waterway to waterway, leaving a blighted continent in its wake. Instead, the scare subsided, and, well, the walking thing sort of turned out not to be entirely true.
But now the snakehead—the northern snakehead, Channa argus, which is native to Asia—has come to New York City, by what conveyance no one knows. Scientists with the state Department of Environmental Conservation recently netted five of them in Meadow Lake, in Flushing, Queens, during a routine survey. The picture in the paper, of two torpedo-shaped carcasses laid out next to measuring tape, called to mind mug shots of criminals you've come to root for. It didn't take long for a fisherman or two to start trying to think like a snakehead.
"I'm gonna bring some earthworms," Edwin Valentin, a master flytier at Urban Angler, on Fifth Avenue, said last week, after being persuaded to serve as Quint in a Queens-bound party of three. (Gary Ford, of Fort Greene, furniture-maker and saltwater fisherman, was guy No. 3.) Valentin lives in Bushwick and has been plying these metropolitan waters for more than thirty years. His only experience catching snakeheads is on PlayStation.
The crew convened early Thursday morning at dawn, in the parking lot of the Queens Museum, and proceeded to the northeastern corner of Meadow Lake, a vast but shallow man-made pan of brackish green water, bounded by expressways. The shore was littered with duck feathers, bottle caps, chicken bones, hot-sauce packets, car parts, and coconut shells. Fishing was prohibited, but the only Parks people around were landscapers jousting each other with weed whackers.
A halfhearted chumming effort (a doughnut, a fish stick) brought forth no surface activity. Valentin and Ford rigged up. "I'll try a white grub," Valentin said, tying on a wormy lure. "Here we go." He cast into the lake, reeled, then cast again. A bend in the rod indicated a strike: garbage bag, the first of many. The line snapped. In this way, perhaps, the snakeheads, without lifting a pectoral fin, could wipe out the entire population of Valentin's tackle box.
A man's fitness for fishing is determined in large part by his ability to stave off boredom. In this regard, Valentin was very fit. "If you get pissed off real quick, fishing's not your game," he said. "Shit, snagged again." He had failed to round up real worms ("My fucking brother," he explained. "I told him, get the worms ready, but he fell asleep on me"), so Ford dug in the sulfurous mud along the shoreline, in search of something slimy. "These are bloodthirsty fish we're after," he said. "They don't want a lure." Finding nothing but a heap of maggots ("This used to be a sportsman's paradise," he muttered), he wandered over to a low bridge spanning a channel where the water oozed out of the lake, toward Flushing Bay. He looked down into the murk. It was full of minnows and turtles. He was joined on the bridge by a stocky gentleman who reported having seen a big round head come to the surface. Definitely not a turtle. "I thought it was a piece of wood, but then I said, Hell, no, that's a-a-a snakefish." Valentin was summoned, and he and Ford began fishing from the bridge.
"I think this is where a snakehead would be," Valentin said, casting into the phragmites at the water's edge. Another fisherman, in camouflage chest-waders, came stumbling into view, thigh deep in the lake, trailing black mud. As bait he had a live goldfish impaled on a hook. For the next half hour, the three men fished hard in the heat, catching nothing but garbage. "We've used plastic, poppers, worms—and zero," Valentin said. "If there were a lot of snakeheads, like they said, we would've caught one." Despair had taken hold. One last desultory cast. "Whoa, big head right there! What the heck was that?"
The men fixed their attention on a strange minnow. It was bigger than the others, and less nimble-maimed, perhaps. Its pectoral fins were doing all the work. A theory emerged that it might be a baby snakehead. Ford attached a Styrofoam coffee cup to a hook and tried to scoop it up. Valentin tried to snag it with a lure. This went on for some time. "Got it?" "Damn." "Almost." "Try again." "He's hurt, but he ain't dumb."
Suddenly, a fish the size of a man's arm, as long and as narrow, came shooting out from under the bridge. It leaped clear of the water and rocketed through the air, then skipped once off the surface and disappeared. The men shrieked. "That was the fish!" Valentin said. "That was a snakehead! That was a snakehead! That was a big mama!" No question.Two feet long, everyone agreed. At least.


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Robert Tree Service Company
Best Tree Services in Tuscaloosa, whether you need Tree Removal, Tree Trimming, or Stump Grinding/Removal, call us today for your Free Quote
The Tuscaloosa Tree Service ranks among the top tree service companies in Alabama. We provide services to the entire community of Tuscaloosa and surrounding areas. Nevertheless, our services comprise both home and business project of all sizes and scope, and always at an affordable tree service. Our company's goal is to do the job right the first and in a safe, efficient, and thorough manner. We offer a wide range of services to suit all your tree needs. Our company gives a tree removal cost that is always competitive. Also, we meet your budget as our goal is to become your tree company for life. Robert Tree Service Company got all your tree service needs!
Business Name:
Robert Tree Service Company
2010 11th StTuscaloosa AL 35401United States
Neighborhoods in Tuscaloosa, AL
Academy Drive, Alberta City, Alta Vista, Altadena Forest Estates, Altamont, Austin Subdivision, Buckhead, Bush Hills, Capitol Park, Carisbrooke, Central Pratt, Chapelwood, Cherokee Shores, Coaling, Coker
Things to do in Tuscaloosa, AL
Our Newest Profiles


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UKMO monthly climate summaries report that March 2016 was a little cold in the UK based past history.
The temperature extremes in Scotland make good reading: maximum overall UK temperature of $latex 18.7 ^{o}C$ in Braemar and minimum of $latex -8.7 ^{o}C$ not far away at Altnaharra.
The climate comparisons are different according to which region and data you look at. Residents of Kent will note that the North coast was colder than average by $latex -1 ^{o}C$ whereas the South coast was average when compared to data from 1981-2010 . The same comparison run on 1961-1990 data reveals a normal month for the North Coast and warmer than average conditions by $latex 1^{o}C$ for the South.
Whistable and Herne Bay residents will recognise this picture but will also look forward to the high temperatures we expect in the Thames Estuary during the summer, when the region wins the sunshine race hands down.


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Wonderland's Treasure and Trouble arriving August 2
August 2 is the date marked for the release of Wonderland Online 6.0, "Treasure and Trouble."
The updatewill introduce several new quests, and a new level 120 instance with four legendary guardians facing adventurers. Along with the new content comes new weapons and armor, and a new pet, the Naughty Monkey.
A new server, Pisces, will also launch on August 2, with seven days of double experience for players who start there.
Wonderland Online is published by IGG, which also publishes Zu Online and Tales of Pirates II.
Wonderland Online Gameplay Screenshot
Wonderland Online: Treasure and Trouble Ready for Release
It's been a long time coming, but now an official release date of August 2nd has been set for the new version 6.0 Plus of Wonderland Online (http://wl.igg.com), nicknamed Treasure and Trouble. As if that wasn't enough good news, coinciding with the release IGG will open a new server, Pisces. Best of all, everyone will get the chance to hit the ground running with 7 full days of Double Exp. Here's a sneak peek at some of the new content in Treasure and Trouble.
New Quests
There will be several new quests to try, including the Hot-Tempered Priest, Chinese Culture, Sato's Request and more! If you're looking for something truly epic, try the new Solomon's Treasure quest.
New Instances
If you're at the peak of your abilities and need a new challenge, then check out the new Level 120 instance. Beware! There are 4 unbelievably powerful holy beasts waiting inside who would love nothing better than to tear you limb from limb. Defeating these legendary guardians is worth a king's ransom in rewards.
New Items and Equipment
Adding to the already impressive selection of gears available in the game, the new version includes new weapons and armor that literally shine with power and prestige.
New TOP Pet: Naughty Monkey
One of the cutest additions to Treasure and Trouble has to be this naughty little primate. He's adorable, fun-loving and quite the troublemaker! So if you're the type of player who would love to take a nutty sidekick along on your adventures, this monkey will make you go bananas!
Visit the official Wonderland Online site at http://wl.igg.com for the latest on all the great content coming in Treasure and Trouble. Visit http://www.igg.com to learn more about IGG's growing family of games.
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The future of the pen, once a cult product, was grey until we left the comfort zone of marketing for kids and ignited fireworks in white and orange. We activated, inspired and enthused fourteen to twenty-four-year-olds by inventing a new fun-sport and launching an unconventional, integrated European campaign. Stabilo's image und sales increased significantly – even market growth for pens in general went up.
Effie Finalist


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This morning, Mark Zuckerberg woke up knowing that by the time he went to bed, he'd be $20 billion richer. More power to him. I wonder how that translates into 19th century dollars—and how it compares to the fortunes amassed by Carnegie, Mellon and Rockefeller, to pull three names out of a hat.
The story about the largest initial public offering in history mentioned that—aside from Mr. Zuckerberg and some of his associates, who will be billionaires—at least 1,000 instant millionaires will be created. Stock was Zuckerberg's way of rewarding the people who contributed to developing Facebook and its concept. It is right that they should be richly compensated.
One hopes that Mr. Zuckerberg, who—unlike the aforementioned titans of industry—has made his fortune by creating nothing tangible, will take a lesson from those men, which is that one ought to show one's appreciation for a nation whose free enterprise system made success possible.
Can we look forward to a Zuckerberg Endowment for the Arts, a Zuckerberg Hall, a Zuckerberg Gallery, or a Zuckerberg University to improve quality of life for the masses? In time, we'll find out what kind of character our young, hoodied, flip-flopped multibillionaire possesses.


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Ghosts of Bataan Death March stretch from West Texas to Asia
BATAAN – What lingers along this road?
More than 75 years have passed and many still have no idea of the horror perpetrated in the spring of 1942. Of those who did remember, most have since become memories themselves.
For those who remain, the passage of time has little effect on the starkness of their memories. Recalling the sounds of pain and suffering still carry the same weight of hardship three-quarters of a century later.
They remember the Bataan Death March, on which about 10,000 soldiers died on a trek of more than 80 miles over a week's time.
More:30th Bataan Memorial Death March draws record crowd to White Sands Missile Range
When 'hell really broke loose'
It began in Mariveles, a coastal community on the southern-most tip of the Bataan peninsula on the island of Luzon, after the surrender of U.S. and Filipino forces on April 9, 1942.
It was where what's now known as Kilometer Zero that William "Ed" Dyess gathered with the remainder of men under his command from the 21st Pursuit Squadron. A West Texas native, Lt. Col. Dyess survived his capture in the Philippines but died in December 1943, a hero at 27 shortly after returning home.
Abilene's Dyess Air Force Base, about 35 miles southwest of his home in Albany, was renamed in his honor eight months after opening in 1956.
But on this night, with the fate of him and his men unknown, Dyess had given the order to abandon their airfields. Essential personnel already had been sent away in the few remaining aircraft, while ground crews worked feverishly smashing radios and burning fuel before approaching Japanese troops could seize it.
Dyess ignored orders that called for him to personally evacuate. Instead, in the dark, he led his men south to Mariveles from Bataan Airfield to mobilize as a light infantry unit. Years later, he described the scene for Chicago Tribune writer Charles Leavelle.
"The Dyess Story — The Eye-Witness Account of the Death March From Bataan" is the flyer's memoir published in 1944, after his death, and taken from interviews after Dyess returned to the United States.
"About four miles west of Cabcaben, hell really broke loose. They were blowing up the main munitions dumps, the engineers' dynamite dumps," Dyess said in the book. "Almost anywhere on lower Bataan you could have read a newspaper by the lurid glare."
But late in the morning, word came down that Maj. Gen. Edward King, the leader of the defense of the Philippines after Gen. Douglas MacArthur left, had surrendered to the invading Imperial Japanese Army.
Any lingering disbelief was squashed when Dyess saw what he described as one of the most disheartening scenes of his life – U.S. Army trucks "rumbling down the dust-fogged roads, all hoisted white flags."
More:Meet the 100-year-old survivor who took part in the Bataan Memorial Death March
Order began to break down, injured people – soldiers and civilians – wandered into the street, their hospitals bombed to rubble. The island of Corregidor, only three miles away, could have been a destination but any useful boat had long since been taken and escaping to the hills of the jungle was a sure ticket for malaria.
Dyess took his men and decided to turn around, thinking they might find the rest of the ground crew and perhaps pool their food. But then the Japanese tanks arrived.
"We stopped. We were prisoners," Dyess recalled. "Tanks were charging up and down, firing their machine guns into treetops. Lines of marching Japs were silhouetted against the sky along all the high places. Planes still were bombing the area. Shells continued to fall. The jig certainly was up."
More:Did Dyess AFB commander's great uncle and Ed Dyess cross paths in World War II?
Maria's family marched, too
Maria Cervantes was 13 when her family was swept up in the Death March.
Her father Arturo was a fisherman and the family of nine lived in a hut made of nipa, a palm leaf woven to form walls and the roof. It was easy to repair since the material to do so grew around the home.
But it was no protection against air raids.
"Beneath (the hut) we made a hole, so that when the Japanese airplanes came, we go, we went into the hole," she said.
Now 90 and living in Balanga City, the images of those days still remain strong. She sat for an interview at the Bataan World War II Museum, which is located within the grounds of an elementary school there.
Abilene Reporter-News photojournalist Ronald Erdrich was in the Philippines last month for the USA TODAY Network to cover the dedication of a Visitors Center at Manila American Cemetery designed by a Texas couple.
More:"Voices Of The Fallen": New visitor center honors American, Filipino WWII allies
Just yards away, life-sized statues recreate the image from a photograph of Gen. King surrendering to the Japanese at this very spot. There always has been an elementary school here, and the museum in the middle of the campus.
"You know, there was bombing all the time, so the army pitied the civilians," Maria recalled.
Civilians were evacuated south to Mariveles for the first three months of 1942. Her father found work as a janitor for the army.
But when the Japanese took Mariveles and lined up the soldiers for the march, they told the civilians, too, to stand in line.
"So we are in one line, we walked three nights and three days," she said. "One of my brothers died. We buried (him) only in the ditch."
Malaria claims three of her siblings died during the march: then-7-year-old brother Ernesto, a 2-year-old sister named Nenita and an infant whose name she no longer remembers.
"Ernesto at seven years old, you know, he understands," she recalled of her brother. "He said to me, 'Big sister, we cannot return. I'm going to die.'"
Maria said they ate only once during the three-day march to Balanga, 30 miles away. At night, she heard stories of Japanese soldiers taking women into the forest, those around her desperate to come up with some way to deter the guards.
"One of them said, 'Let's put charcoal on our faces,'" Maria recalled the conversation and had her own ideas about what to do. She shook her head emphatically.
"No, no!"
"Then what?"
"Listen, when the Japanese are coming toward you, you shake with a chill," she pantomimed a shivering motion. "Because they are afraid of malaria!"
Inhumane treatment on the road
The weather in central Luzon in mid-April is brutal. It's the tail end of the dry season known as Amihan. Little to no rain typically has fallen since November and the sun beats down in 95-degree heat under a clear sky.
Prisoners were herded into open fields along the way and told to remain beneath that sun without food or water as Imperial soldiers took their ease. Dyess mentions an older Army colonel after a few moments approaching a Japanese officer, gesturing to the man's tin of meat, canteen of water and then back at the prisoners.
His answer was the officer smashing the can of salmon against the colonel's head, splitting open the man's face. He staggered back to the prisoners, it was their first indication that the Japanese would not respect rank nor age.
For the Imperial Japanese Army, death was preferable to surrender, which meant a complete loss of honor, a deeply personal value from which they defined their worth. In their eyes, surrendered prisoners were less than human, cowards, and harsh treatment rightly deserved. If the situation were reversed, they believed they would obligated to receive the same treatment under their Bushido code.
The fact that many Japanese officers had studied in the West and knew how surrendering Americans would expect to be treated was never a calculation for Japanese commanders in the Philippines.
Of the 75,000 or so captured soldiers marched to the train station at San Fernando – a roughly 80-mile journey from Kilometer Zero — about 65,000 were members of the Philippine Commonwealth Army. Dyess recalled their suffering in vivid detail.
"We had marched about a mile after the sun treatment when I stumbled over a man writhing in the hot dust of the road. He was a Filipino soldier who had been bayoneted through the stomach."
A quarter-mile farther on, they passed a body that had rolled deliberately into the path of trucks.
"The huddled and smashed figures beside the road eventually became commonplace to us," Dyess said. "The human mind has an amazing faculty of adjusting itself to shock. We remained keenly aware that these murders might well be precursors of our own, if we should falter."
Along the road, Imperial soldiers passing in trucks would jab a rifle butt or bayonet into the line of soldiers as they rode by. Occasionally, someone would be yanked out of line and interrogated, then shoved back to the drawn-out procession shuffling northward.
What you did to survive
Maria's family eventually stopped near Balanga, at Puerto Rivas beside the bay. Helping others came at great risk.
"I saved seven people, seven soldiers," she recalled. "I said, as the guard is not looking, carry my brother with the swollen face. I will give you the clothes of my father."
Maria told them to rid themselves of their shoes, otherwise they would be known for soldiers. She told them to make their way to the bay and walk along its shore, someone would surely help them.
"Seven! But my brother died, also."
The subterfuge would never have worked with American prisoners, of course. Maria had seen them, but she had to turn her head. There was nothing she could do for them.
While marching, Dyess came to realize that stragglers who fell behind never were seen again. A "clean-up squad" of Japanese soldiers followed the main body of prisoners. If he looked back in the dark, a brief orange flash would light the night in the near distance, followed by a rifle's report.
Those who dropped were sure to meet their end.
Presently, Dyess began to overtake a captain in the Medical Corps known to him. It didn't appear the man would last much longer.
"Hello, Doc. Taking a walk?" he asked.
"Ed," Doc replied slowly, "I can't go another kilometer. A little farther and I'm finished."
"Well, Doc, I'm about in the same fix." Yet they continued.
After few more kilometers, the dialogue started again.
"I'm done, Ed. You fellows forget me and go on. I can't make another kilometer."
"I don't think I can, either, Doc. I feel just about as you do."
They passed the night that way, Dyess commiserating with his friend while another soldier put a hand behind Doc's shoulder to keep him moving. They were in a loop, repeating the same conversation every hour or so as they walked.
But Doc never fell out.
Civilians were treated no better
The Japanese had been instructed to be more lenient with the civilians, though abuses still continued. Maria's father, Arturo, had been allowed to leave in search of medicine, leaving the family in the care of his wife, Casimira.
In easier times, Maria's mother was the one in the market selling the fish caught by her husband. But the shelling before the fall of Bataan and the subsequent march had sent Casimira into a deep state of post-traumatic shock.
"My mother cannot talk," Maria recalled and at the time she pleaded with her, "Mother, please move, father is not around. Have pity on me!"
But no amount of begging would change the situation. The burden of responsibility fell on 13-year-old Maria.
"So, I lead my sisters and my mother," she said. "Especially my mother."
In Balanga, the Japanese took the elementary school as their garrison. The occupying force demanded children be taught "Nipongo," or Japanese.
"I'm not afraid, I am brave, but I do not talk with the Japanese," Maria recalled.
Still, the chance to attend school offered some kind of return to normalcy, even if it was under the boot of an occupying force. But language and math couldn't drown out the larger lessons of cruelty and horror inflicted on the students.
In the Philippines, "Comfort Room" is the term for a lavatory. In a sickly twist, the Japanese took the women's comfort room as their interrogation chamber.
Maria said she could only last in the school for two weeks before vowing never to return. No matter what was being taught, nothing could hide the sounds of military leaders – Americans, Filipinos and some civilians – as they were interviewed in the comfort room.
"I can hear the screams, the howling, so many were killed there in the torture room," Maria said. "I hear the shouting, the crying, and suddenly I hear, 'Oh, Lord, help me!' Then one of my classmates said, 'Oh, they are being killed!'"
The small building still stands, a gray, cinderblock-like form surrounded by a newer and brighter elementary school. Its door won't open, and a frame-less square hole beside it serves as a window to the black interior.
Looking through the window at the far wall, daylight glows through a simple geometric pattern in the brick, the room's vent. It's easy to imagine it the last sight many ever saw.
Water nearby but not a drop to drink
Prisoners on the march were allowed to keep their canteens but could only replenish them from muddy ruts or ditches along the way. As April waned, the rains were beginning to appear, but their infrequency only washed the filth away from the prisoners' bodies or refilled puddles.
Dyess passed numerous springs just steps from the road, but to reach for one was surely death.
It was what the guards were waiting for.
"Just across the road bubbled an artesian well. Its splashing was plainly audible and the clear water, glistening in the morning sun, was almost too much for my self-control," Dyess recalled, thinking for this he may welcome getting shot, but then chastised himself over his thoughts.
"I have no doubt that they were expecting the thing that happened now. A Filipino soldier darted from the ranks and ran toward the well. Two others followed him. Two more followed these, then a sixth broke from the ranks."
The guards waited until they men were past the ditch bordering the road, and then they shot them.
"Most of the Filipinos fell at the first volley. Two of them, desperately wounded, kept inching toward the water, their hands outstretched.
"The (Japanese soldiers) fired again and again, until all six lay dead."
By now, scarecrows trying to survive
About 15 miles from San Fernando, the column of prisoners passed through Lubao. Windows along the streets were lined with sober faces, watching the Americans and Filipinos as they staggered by in a "scarecrow procession."
From the windows of a large house, food flew through the air to land among the prisoners. It sent the guards into a frenzy, beating passersby, lunging with bayonets and stomping on the food until they turned their rage on the prisoners. Dyess noted the food stopped coming once the townspeople saw how it added to their misery.
The column arrived in San Fernando, having marched five days and more than 80 miles with barely a single bowl of rice eaten during that time. As they entered the city, any open fenced area was commandeered for use as holding pens for the prisoners.
Like other holding pens along the route, this one was overfilled with sick, dying and dead men.
"They were sprawled amid the filth and maggots that covered the ground. Practically all had dysentery," Dyess recalled. "Malaria and dengue fever appeared to be running unchecked. There were symptoms of other tropical diseases I didn't even recognize."
The worst cases were shoved under the flooring of a dilapidated building, most of the people there had died and the rest didn't look like they'd last to morning. But as the sun fell, it appeared they finally would be fed, cooks brought cans of rice and started ladling them to the men.
But just as soon as they began, they stopped with no explanation.
Too disheartened to even swear about it, the men sat down and tried to rest, but the guards were not done yet. With a loud cry, they poured into the compound, bayonets fixed and lunged at the men inside.
"Those of us who were able rose to our feet in alarm. Evidently, we did not appear sufficiently frightened," Dyess said. "The (Japanese soldiers) outside the compound jeered the jokesters within. One (Japanese soldier) then made a running lunge and drove his bayonet through an American soldier's thigh."
It resulted in a stampede with several of the sick and dying men on the ground being trampled as their comrades fell over them. Those in turn were trampled, the guards laughing at the scene the entire time.
On April 15, the group was brought out of the compound and formed into companies of 115 men each. No food or water was given, Dyess said their canteens had been empty for hours, and the men were marched several blocks to the waiting train station.
The Japanese stuffed each company of 115 men into its own cattle car – a capacity easily double or more what it should have held – and then locked the car from the outside. There was no room to turn around, no way to sit, and as the air stifled amid the waste accumulating on the floor, men began dropping face-down into it.
"A jolting, rocking ride began. Many of the prisoners in the boxcar in which I stood were seized by nausea, adding to the vile state of our rolling cell," Dyess said. "The ride lasted more than three hours. Later I heard that a number of men had died in each of the five cars. I don't know. I was too far gone to notice much at the journey's end."
The arena of death
Like many places along the Bataan Death March route, the train station at San Fernando is now a museum. Within stand framed pictures of prisoners led to the station while at one end, the floor is dominated by a life-sized set of statues depicting American and Filipino prisoners under guard by Imperial Army soldiers.
More:'Today, the guns are silent': Manila American Cemetery honors the Pacific War fallen
Behind the building where the platform used to stand, a mare and her foal cropped a verdant swath of grass. Northward, a road picks up alongside the path where tracks on the railroad's right of way used to run.
Tricycles and jeepneys (jeeps left over from World War II modified as mini buses) travel down it now, though the museum's caretaker Jonathan Quiambao said there's talk afoot about reestablishing the railroad for commuting to Manila.
Speaking Tagalog, through my guide Yasmin Coles, the caretaker tells us of another memorial across the street from the station. It sits in a courtyard of stone and native trees, a large boulder covered in red paint except near the bottom where it appears to fade.
A rope barrier surrounds it and bricks make a short path to the monument. Mounted into the boulder is a plaque written in Tagalog and English, dated 1967, remembering the prisoners and the misery they endured here.
Through the translator, Quiambao said a cockfighting arena preceded the current apartment building now behind the memorial. The Japanese thought the arena perfect for holding prisoners.
Quimbao's father-in-law then was 7. The stone and garden marked the place where prisoners' bodies were piled if they died waiting in the arena. As the Japanese took the prisoners away, it fell to the people of San Fernando to bury the dead left behind.
Capas is about 25 miles from San Fernando and after the train ride, it was still another seven-mile hike to Camp O'Donnell. As they started, Dyess was sure a quarter of their number would never make it.
More:Marchers of Bataan: The inspiration behind their participation
'You had no choice but to be strong'
Nestor Ceniza is 97 years-now, but he was 19 when he joined the Philippine Army's 71st Infantry Division in 1941, a Private First Class. When the order to surrender came, it was one he disobeyed, hiding instead in the mountains.
"We escaped; but unluckily, we met a Japanese patrol and we were brought to their station," he said. "We were brought to Camp O'Donnell. There I was confined from May 24, 1942 to January 20, 1943."
We spoke at his home in Balanga, sitting at a patio table outside. Ceniza spent 50 years after the war as a member of the Philippine Constabulary, a national police force.
Dyess and Ceniza were at Camp O'Donnell, a commandeered Philippine army training camp, but neither was aware of the other. In that first week, Dyess estimated Americans were dying at 20 men a day and Filipinos at 150. Those numbers doubled over the next week.
"How can I describe that? It's indescribable," Ceniza said.
As it was along the march, medical care was practically non-existent. If you found yourself in the camp's hospital, it likely meant you'd never leave.
"I suffered malaria, dysentery and beriberi in the concentration camp," Ceniza said. "Of course, you had no choice but to be strong, to get through it."
He had no recollection of the food they ate, much of the experience is shrouded in recollections difficult to access now, for reasons of time, pain or both. What he has committed to memory is the speech given by Normando Reyes from Corregidor's Malinta Tunnel on April 9, 1942.
"The Fall of Bataan" was written by Salvador Lopez in Corregidor as the province was lost to the Japanese and broadcast from the radio shop inside the Rock, known as the Voice of Freedom. The island would hold out another month before surrendering, too.
It is a deeply personal message for Ceniza and it overcomes him when he begins. It stops him a few times; the words sparking memories, the memories in turn fanning embers deeply held.
"For what sustained them through all these months of incessant battle was a force that was more than merely physical," he continued. "It was the force of an unconquerable faith—something in the heart and soul that physical hardship and adversity could not destroy."
Photo Gallery:Images from the 2019 Bataan Memorial Death March
Dyess died a hero, but back home
The Americans eventually were moved to Cabanatuan, about 30 miles east of O'Donnell. Mercifully, or more likely because it was efficient, the prisoners were taken by truck. Treatment improved somewhat, but cruelty and abuse did not wane.
Eventually, Dyess was transferred to a prison in Davao, 650 miles south on Mindanao. From there, he led the escape of nine other American and Filipino POWs, the largest such escape in the Pacific Theater during World War II. For months he evaded captured, finally returned to safety in July 1943.
When Dyess returned to the United States, his story was kept secret. No one wanted to risk offending the Japanese, the calculation being they would treat American prisoners even worse.
It was only after Dyess was killed that his story was released. On Dec. 22, 1943, the P-38 he was flying over Burbank, Calif. lost power to an engine. While he could have abandoned his aircraft and parachuted to safety, it would have meant the airplane crashing into a home, possibly killing those on the ground.
Instead, he flew the plane into a vacant lot where he died on impact.
'Love your enemies'
After a time during the occupation, Maria Cervantes and her family left the Bataan for the far side of Manila Bay. When they returned two years later, the Japanese had been driven out but everything in Balanga City except the church had been burned to the ground.
"I didn't ask, 'Why did you tolerate this, God?' No!" Maria said. "I do not ask questions to God. God permitted it; I said, 'It is up to you, God.' That's all."
In the years since, the Japanese have done much to repair what their countrymen inflicted.
"The Japanese asked me, 'Are you still angry with us?'" she said. "'No, I'm not angry, you helped us.' Love your enemies, pray for them. Love your enemies, and God will reward you.
"I am no longer angry with anybody."
The ghosts remain
There are ghosts at San Fernando, but mostly they exist in the memories of families returning here, looking for evidence or closure of someone lost during the march. Despite so much death, no one thinks of the memorial or the train station as a place where the dead rest uneasily.
Quiambao told my guide that many have made their peace with what happened here, and perhaps the dead have too.
Does anyone fear the ghosts of Bataan?
"Well, people have accepted that they're here already," Quiambao replied. "So, they just let them be."


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The Thistle Inn, built in 1861 as the home of a prominent Sea Captain, has been welcoming guests since 1960. The Thistle Inn stands at the entrance to Boothbay Harbor, a vibrant and picturesque port village on the coast of Maine.
The Inn & Restaurant's period character, unique setting and long history, make it a perfect choice for vacations, getaways or special occasions.
The Thistle is within easy walking distance of the lively town center with its unique shops, art galleries and harbor activities. The Opera House is just down the street and the highly acclaimed Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, Boothbay Harbor Country Club, The Boothbay Railway Village, Maine State Aquarium and other area attractions are all close by.


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Vintage 14K Yellow Gemini Pendant with twin symbol and wrapped rope bezel
Measures 7/8 inches across
Weighs: 2.2 grams
Marked 14k
Chain sold separately
««Vintage Items are Pre-owned and Pre-Loved. They are unique and one of a kind. Any major condition or notable wear will be noted in item description»»


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Esports, online streaming keep AZ high schools up-to-date
It isn't always easy to keep up with this rapidly-evolving digital age, but the governing body for high school sports in Arizona is making the effort to keep up with the changing landscape.
Not long ago, the Arizona Interscholastic Association (AIA) began making available online streaming of high school football games to sports fans in this state. The service, which is provided by subscription through the National Federation of High Schools Network, gives fans who couldn't get to the games the option of watching it in real time from the comfort of their homes.
The quality of transmissions has improved considerably, thanks to improvements in the technology and equipment, and thanks to those improvements viewership continues to increase.
Each "Game of the Week" during football season is carried on the AZPreps365 website. Last season, the subscription-free broadcast of the opener between Centennial High School and Casteel High reportedly drew an audience of nearly 1,700 that were able to watch the match-up between reigning state champions. That set a record, and this year' viewership is expected to continue that trend.
This online streaming of big games is also good for the players since it gives college scouts one more viewing opportunity in their search for high school talent.
Yet another way the AIA is keeping up with the changing landscape in this age of video gaming is the addition of esports to the menu of competitive sports options among the Arizona high schools.
The AIA had hoped to be able to insert an esports season into last year's spring sports schedule, but found that the time it was taking to make all the necessary technical arrangements and hardware requirements would mean moving the inaugural season to the 2019-20 school year.
After an announcement last August that esports would be added to the sports calendar, organizers tried to get the program up and running for a late February debut. But instead, the AIA announced at the start of March that the first season would have to be postponed to make sure that every school in the state had an opportunity to participate.
The inaugural season will offer competition in either Overwatch or Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Additional games could be added later, says the AIA, dependent on being able to secure the rights to other titles. The governing body has partnered with HSEL and Legacy Esports to take care of registration, scheduling, and hosting the servers used by the participating schools. HSEL is currently running programs for high schools in all 50 states and Canada.
The addition of an esports program at the high school level means that those students who don't participate in the 'traditional' sports will now have a chance to compete for a state title. And that's a win-win for the AIA and the students.


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The poet Robert Frost said there are two kinds of teachers: "The kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies." By all accounts, Larry Sultan was the second kind. An accomplished photographer with works in the permanent collections of museums like the Tate Modern, the Whitney and the Guggenheim, he began a 20-year teaching career in 1989 at California College for the Arts in San Francisco, mentoring young hopefuls while observing in his own work the absurdity, pathos and alienation of middle-class suburbia.
His work has been collated in Larry Sultan: Here and Home, which is wrapping up a national tour at San Francisco's Moma through 23 July. Also included is his collaboration with photographer Mike Mandel, Evidence, as well as proto-street art billboards from the beginning of his career, and his final series, Homeland, unfinished at the time of his death in 2009. "It's all about vernacular ideas and extracting that to make something personal and meaningful," explains curator Sandra Phillips.
Sultan grew up in the 50s and 60s in the San Fernando valley, just over the hill from Hollywood. Car culture was cruising into the national fabric, the aerospace industry was taking off and suburbia was starting to sprawl. "Where we came from there was no history to our part of the world," Mandel says. "A generation before us there was almost nothing in the valley. We saw all the development, all shopping malls, the cars and freeway. That was our backdrop."
When Mandel met Sultan in the 70s while studying at Art Institute of San Francisco, conceptual photography was blossoming in Los Angeles with people such as Ed Ruscha, Robert Heinecken, William Wegman and, in other media, Marina Abramović and Chris Burden.
"It was a world away from the sensibility of the valley," Mandel says. "There was a pretentiousness from the history of the beat generation that congregated around North Beach where the school was. That was not our thing." Their thing was billboards. Included in the show is a piece entitled Oranges on Fire, one of 15 original billboards the pair created and installed in over 90 locations throughout the state. It depicted two bare arms against a navy blue background holding a handful of oranges with flames and the title printed above.
"It signified the idea that California had transformed from an agricultural world to an entertainment world, that was the message of the billboard," Mandel explains. "It was a quickly processed image. You'd see it, you'd read the word and then you're on your way. You're driving and you didn't have time to take in the information. You process it, but you don't know what that means. That's what it was about, to remove you from your trance out of ordinary life for a moment."
Like today's street art, Oranges on Fire bypasses compulsory art world machinery –galleries, museums and auction houses – and places that work in direct interaction with the public. For Sultan and Mandel, it made them wonder who their audience was. "You're in a precious world, the art world, where you're communicating ideas that are only part of the academic discourse. And we felt really liberated by the idea of making this work in public."
When the two set out to make Evidence, an NEA grant proved valuable as a government seal of approval that opened the doors of research archives at organizations such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bechtel Corporation, Lockheed Aircraft and others. "There's a lot of fragmentation of peoples' bodies, clinical measuring of things, landscapes, a lot of strange ways of using the landscape as places of experimentation," says Mandel of the 1977 collection of photos culled from archives. "The Evidence photographs suggest things they're not really about. We were able to suggest things cause we put them on facing pages for context, so photos complement or comment on the one before. A lot of our relationships are patterned after Ralph Gibson's understanding of formal relationships. The real message of evidence is that it's a poetic recognition of these losses of human sensitivity in service to technological progress."
Having settled in San Francisco, Sultan made sporadic trips home to see his parents, Irving and Jean. They became the subject of 1992's Pictures from Home, which was an attempt to measure life as it is versus how it was dreamed by juxtaposing their likenesses with stills lifted from home movies.
"It has more to do with love than with sociology," Sultan wrote about the series. "It's very personal, almost embarrassingly personal," Phillips says. "He's extending this with the personal relationships to himself, his relationship to his dad, which was very complicated."
His father, Irving Sultan, represented an emotional quagmire for the artist who recorded the former vice-president of the Schick Safety Razor Company grappling with being forced into early retirement after 20 years with the company. "All I know is that when you photograph me I feel everything leave me," Irving tells his son in accompanying text. "The blood drains from my face, my eyelids droop, my thoughts disappear."
Sultan's final, unfinished collection, Homeland, featured immigrant day laborers looking lost on the edges of suburban neighborhoods. Sultan hired the men and directed them in mundane tasks such as stringing lights, carrying food to a potluck, or watching a ballgame through a chain-link fence, "routines and rituals related to place and domesticity, alluding to the poignancy of displacement and the longing for home", is how he described it.
"It's a question asking: what is homeland? What does that mean? Whose home is it, and what is that?" Phillips says of Sultan's final series before his death in 2009. "I think he was very satisfied with the pictures. There are more in that group than are in the show." With its focus on outsiders in peripheral and in-between spaces, Homeland seems metaphorically fitting for an artist approaching the end of his life. Diagnosed with sarcoma in August of that year, he died four months later on 13 December.
Beginning in 1989, Sultan taught at California College for the Arts in San Francisco for 20 years. Over 400 people attended his memorial service, many of them students. "How can we, or I, account for his influence?" asked former pupil, Jon Rubin, who read the eulogy. "What a remarkable and fortunate group of people we are."
"I saw Larry when he was dying," Mandel recalls. "I got to give him one last hug and kind of reprimand him for going too early. It was so great to be able to work with somebody who you trust so implicitly. He was definitely one of a kind."


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I love getting out in the community and sharing my love of hyper-local cuisine through live cooking demos. To me, there is absolutely nothing better than cooking with the incredible bounty of fresh ingredients that I have access to in the Napa Valley. I use videos quite a bit in my blog to demonstrate the techniques of various recipes. Here, you can see some of my live cooking demos in the Napa Valley and I hope you make some of these great recipes!
Hear the Constrained Gourmet on KVON Radio Wine Country Live!
Hear the Constrained Gourmet on KVON Radio Farmer's Fresh Hour! Forward to min 27:45 for the interview.
Watch some of my live cooking demos from the Napa Farmers Market
If you would like the Constrained Gourmet to provide a demo at your event, please send a message!


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Skip to comments.BioWar - (VERY unusual and interesting article on secret NSA developments...)
Posted on 11/25/2002 5:25:04 PM PST by vannrox
Issue 4.11 - Nov 1996
Wake-up call! Some of the world's farthest-out, cutting-edge, and high-technodazzle biotech thinking is now being done not by scientists and academics, but by the military.
By Ed Regis
On May 9 1996, by email, I received an invitation to attend a biotechnology workshop at the Army War College. The combination did not add up - not immediately. The biotech industry, after all, was engaged mainly in making new drugs or making old ones by new methods: you fiddled with the genes of certain microorganisms and tricked them into producing insulin, human growth hormone, or whatever. Clever, but still rather prosaic - nothing that the army would be holding a conference about.
Then again, some of biotech's more wild-eyed dreamers had imagined lots of semi-science fictional biotechnology applications, like altering an organism's genes to such an extent that you created an entirely new animal, a special-purpose "designer" organism, anything from a new species of lab rat to a human being reverse-engineered for desired traits. Most of this was pretty far-out: people with gills for staying underwater, people with genuine body armor - Mr. Armadillo - hard-shell skins that bullets would bounce off, a human physique that included new-wave musculature, night vision, computer-chip-assisted memory, faster, bigger, and better brains.
But that was Hollywood: that was Robocop, The Terminator, the Six Billion Dollar Bionic Wonder Woman. The army, I thought, couldn't be interested in that, either.
And anyway, why me? True, I was the author of a book about nanotechnology, a science in which tiny molecular robots would be able to assemble any object, substance, or structure permitted by the laws of nature. These robots, I'd written, "could be programmed by some enemy power - or worse, a terrorist group - to slip over the border on a gust of wind, enter your body, and turn your bones to slime."
Aha. A concept of military interest.
And in an earlier work I'd talked about converting ordinary everyday humans into "transhumans," fabulous turbocharged specimens who sailed across the universe, learned its secrets, became omnipotent, and lived forever. Both of these books argued that all of this stuff, insane as it was, could really happen. None of it violated natural law.
And then, suddenly, I could see the whole picture: the conference, titled Biotechnology Workshop 2020, would focus on battles to be fought in the future. These battles would not be limited to the hand grenades, assault rifles, and land mines of the 20th century - they would feature entirely new categories of weapons, munitions based on the biotech advances that would occur in the interim. The army, I concluded, was looking to produce fleets of attack microbes - maybe even a race of supersoldiers - by tinkering with DNA, the molecular basis of all life. And they wanted my far-seeing, penetrating, and all-knowing advice and counsel.
So of course I said yes.
The Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, at the crossroads of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Interstate 81, was a scene of vast amounts of truckage and muckage, engine noise and diesel fumes. The campus is ordinary: red brick classroom buildings, athletic fields, health clinic, chapel, a bunch of little white clapboard houses where the officers live. From the looks of it, it could be a college campus anywhere in the country.
Except for Collins Hall, site of the workshop and home of the army's Center for Strategic Leadership. At the time of the conference, the place had just been constructed, and it looked as if it had been built to stage an opera about a rocket launch. It was bristling with architectural setbacks and galleries, balconies and turretlike structures. Entrance to the building was highly restricted: you checked in with a guard, got an electronic access key, and were admitted through a turnstile. You exited the same way. "If you walk out the wrong door, you'll be shot," joked one of the officers.
The workshop was to take place in the Normandy Conference Room, the army's version of NASA Mission Control Headquarters - a tall, square, hushed chamber done in soft grays and greens. A large white screen at the front was flanked by digital clocks and electronic signboards that said, in red lettering: "Unclassified" and "Not Recording." Underneath the signs were large panes of one-way glass, as if we'd be under observation by a bank of psychiatrists. On the walls farther back were oil paintings the size of murals, of battle scenes - the Normandy invasion, one supposed - scenes of explosions, fires, and hot gases, of smoke rising and structures collapsing, walls turning into rubble, jeeps capsizing, cannons firing, soldiers running, falling, calling out....
The focal point of the room was an enormous U-shaped conference table on which stood 20 or so computer terminals and, facing them, an equal number of plush, green, high-backed chairs. One of the participants, sitting down, did not like the view: "All you can see is the whites of the backs of their computers," he complained. He was hot for "eye contact." He would not get much of it.
The two dozen experts now settling in were about half military and half civilian. The latter were in fields such as virology, evolutionary theory, and commercial biotechnology and hailed from such places as UCLA, Rockefeller University, the National Institutes of Health, the Institute for Biological Detection Systems, the Center for Human Performance and Complex Systems, and from firms called Nanotronics Inc. (a nanotechnology R&D firm) and Orion Enterprises Inc. (a consulting firm with military clients). The army people, some in uniform and some not, were from Fort Knox, the Pentagon, the Aberdeen Proving Ground, and so on, and were attached to places with names like Future Battle Directorate, Battlefield Environments Directorate, and US Army Chem/Bio Defense Command - whatever that was.
This was the setup: We'd be given a series of expert briefings on biotechnology, on biotechnology and the army, on recent work in "human performance enhancements," and the like. Then we'd be given three alternate versions of the general world situation circa 2020, along with a specific conflict situation in each case. Our job was to somehow take these three hypothetical scenarios, gaze into a crystal ball, and divine the future of biotech weaponry. The army would then be guided by our mystic visions when funding time came.
There was a slightly Through the Looking-Glass feel to it all, as if this roomful of people would be any better at soothsaying than a bunch of chimpanzees. As if to underscore the point, Lieutenant Colonel Joe Pecoraro, then chief of the Army Research Laboratory's Future Technologies Institute, the agency sponsoring the workshop, explained that the whole proceeding would be conducted on nonattribution rules, meaning that who said exactly what could never be reported to anyone else.
Finally, a word from Major George Hluck, the facility's smiling and cheery "knowledge engineer." Our computer terminals, he said, as the display screens came to life, were for the use of the "Topic Commenter," the army's implementation of a real-time chat function. The chat feature would enable each of us to share our private thoughts with the others. This was the high tech equivalent of passing notes back and forth under the desk, and having it at our disposal here was almost too good to be true.
We were not dissuaded from using the chat function; in fact we were encouraged, almost pressured, to do so. Please use it at any time! Pass along those notes! Just type in your comments about anything at all - but especially about the briefing in progress - then press the Send key and Bingo! your words will magically appear, anonymously and unsigned, on everyone else's computer screen.
And so a minute later, clickata-clickata-clickata, anonymous comments were bubbling up on our displays, trenchant observations on the order of:
It is ethically questionable to solicit anonymous comments.Darn, what a SUPER briefing that was!!!
July 2020, and Turkey is at war with Iran and Syria. The latter two countries, sick of their constant water shortages, have invaded Turkey and taken control of a major dam and reservoir. Turkey, after mobilizing its troops, calls upon the United States for assistance.
The US sends a total of 300,000 troops, plus navy and air force backup units, into the area. Together, the combined US forces are supposed to (1) throw the invaders out of Turkey, (2) advance into Iran and Syria to incapacitate the main forces of those countries, and (3) "locate and neutralize Iranian and Syrian nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, their means of delivery, and their production facilities."
That was "Defense Planning Scenario 1."
Scenario 2 was not much different, except for the fact that Iran and Syria were now threatening to drop a nuclear bomb on a major Turkish population center. The US, in response, sends in eight army assault units plus special operations forces, to (1) attack enemy headquarters, (2) destroy their command, control, and logistics sites, and (3) wipe out their weapons facilities.
In July 2020, however, this is no problem. First of all, our foot soldiers are protected by biocamouflage, clothing that changes color automatically, allowing the troops to visually merge with the background. Their outer garments sense the ambient temperature and harmonize with it, rendering the wearer imperceptible to temperature-sensing devices, heat-seeking weapons, or infrared detectors. The troops become as invisible as chameleons, for the same reasons, and by essentially the same biological mechanisms.
The enemy, however, is not invisible - not to the army's newly developed artificial smart noses. The Americans ferret out their adversaries by means of biosensors, biologically based olfactory sensing units that discover the presence, location, and strength of opposing troop concentrations by detecting - believe it or not - their odors, the characteristic airborne molecules or "downstream effluents" they discharge.
Having pinpointed the enemy battalions, the US troops now advance toward them and deploy a full range of nonlethal, nonhuman bioweapons - antimaterial microbes, for example. These genetically engineered organisms have been programmed to eat the rubber from enemy vehicles, decimating their tires, engine gaskets, coolant hoses, and fuel lines. Other antimaterial microorganisms infiltrate fuel tanks and turn their stores of gas and diesel oil to masses of incombustible jelly. Still others selectively target and destroy the adversary's silicon devices: they eat the insides of their computers, command and control systems, navigational instruments, and anything else containing a silicon chip. These spreading, hungry bioagents immobilize enemy forces by turning their hardware into blobs of goo.
In latter-day military parlance, this is "soft kill" - disabling the enemy's infrastructure. "Hard kill" - physically maiming or killing the adversary - has not gone out of style in 2020, but there are now some distinctly improved methods of doing it. Enemy leaders, for example, can be knocked off by means of genetically engineered superpathogens that are so selective in their behavior they're capable of targeting specific individuals, verifying their identities by means of their DNA sequences. They'd have been able to erase Adolf Hitler from the face of the earth while leaving everyone else whole and unharmed.
Out on the battlefield, meanwhile, complex tactical decisions are made by biocomputers the size of sugar cubes. Stored in the computer's biomemory are summaries of the most successful battle strategies in history, from the ancient Greeks to the present, plus local terrain maps, dictionaries of the native languages, guides to local flora and fauna, maybe even a list of Turkey's best restaurants, complete with menus, prices, and ordering information.
The American troops, however, instantly "grow" their food and drink, their fuels and supplies - including bullets and explosives - by manufacturing them on-site, molecule by molecule, out of the biofeedstock molecules that they carry along with them. Such on-the-spot "bioprocessing" technologies have revolutionized troop supply and logistics, doing away with the long and vulnerable provisions caravans of yore.
These well-fed and continually replenished soldiers are kept healthy and disease-free by means of DNA vaccinations that have made them immune to all known pathogens. Old-style vaccinations worked by introducing mild viruses into humans with the object of provoking an immune response. These new vaccines avoid the risks of injecting people with deadly agents; they work, instead, directly at the DNA level. Patients are injected with specially tailored strands of DNA that cause their immune systems to generate the entire array of needed antibodies. In consequence, the subjects become immune to every pathogen they might encounter, everything from yellow fever, malaria, and hepatitis to cholera, Ebola, and HIV - plus whatever new-wave viruses have freshly emerged.
If and when they finally go into battle, the troops are safeguarded by microbe-grown body enclosures that hold back not only poison gases and biological and chemical agents but also the otherwise deadly projectile. The bodysuit, in addition, increases the wearer's overall strength by means of precisely placed artificial musculature that boosts the power of arms, legs, fingers, and toes. The soldier's protective helmet is equipped with bio-based, high-resolution night-vision devices that effectively turn darkness into daylight.
Any injuries sustained in spite of all this camouflage, nourishment, biological immunity, and physical protection are cured with accelerated healing technologies. In the field, wounds are speed-healed by the application of enzymatic growth factors and are then patched over by intelligent bioadhesives instead of dumb bandages. Those more seriously hurt are put into suspended animation before being medevac'd out to hospitals, where artificial blood, bones, tissues, and ligaments - even whole organs - are bioproduced and implanted into the injured as needed.
And then, when it's all over, the troops clean up as they go by the use of sophisticated "bioremediation" systems. Fleets of programmed microbes decontaminate and detoxify the entire area, leaving it in a condition as good as, if not better than, it was in the first place.
By the time the soldiers leave, it's as if the war had never happened.
We at the army's biotechnology workshop, unfortunately, had not come up with any of this. More bizarre than some of the crazed ideas themselves was the fact that all of our thinking had been done for us, well in advance, by the army, and by the workshop's organizers, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of McLean, Virginia. SAIC, whose gaming division runs war games for all branches of the military, had been hired by the army to research, plan, and moderate the whole two-day extravaganza.
Steven Kenney, of SAIC's Strategic Assessment Center, had FedExed all of us a little read-ahead package, 200 pages of technical, semitechnical, and popular writings about the latest biotech advances and their potential application to warfare. Included, among other things, were several chapters from biotechnology textbooks, an article from Scientific American about directed molecular evolution, and two pieces from Wired: "Neurobotics," by Michael Gruber (Wired 2.10, page 110), about using rat-brain tissue to solve chemical-engineering problems; and "Gene Genie," by Thomas Bass (Wired 3.08, page 114), about the DNA computer. Also included were excerpts from the army's own in-house STAR 21 report, compiled by the National Research Council. Subtitled "Strategic Technologies for the Army of the Twenty-First Century," it sketched out a representative sampling of biotech weaponry. Capping the read-ahead were two SAIC-produced white papers titled "Biotechnology - Projections," and "Biotechnology - Military Applications." Collectively, these documents laid out everything for us, chapter and verse, in great and exhaustive detail. Our function, it seemed increasingly evident, was merely to cough back up their sum and substance. The participants themselves soon noticed as much:
This is, in many respects, a repeat of the read-ahead.The workshop seems to be a rehash of already extant laundry lists of technologies to me. Our contribution may be the addition of the preface "bio-" to all other nouns relating to warfare.
The question arose, then, as to why the workshop had been held - especially in view of its roughly US$100,000 price tag.
"Three reasons," Joe Pecoraro, the Future Technologies Institute chief, said a couple of months later. "One, there was the hope that someone would say something unique. Did that happen? I'm not sure.
"Another reason was that I wanted to get a notion from the military themselves as to which applications would be of most use to them. Just because something's got a use to the civilian sector doesn't mean it's got any use to the military.
"And I wanted to get a line on costs. How feasible is any of this, in terms of cost and development time?"
Some months prior to the workshop, Kenney, coauthor of SAIC's white paper on the military applications of biotechnology, actually had given Pecoraro at least some of what he was looking for. Kenney had contacted representatives of eight military organizations - the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth and the Army Armor Center at Fort Knox, among others - specifically to get their views concerning biotech's military potential, and he had then incorporated a summary of their opinions into the white paper.
As for the workshop, it did not yield the ranking of biotech applications that Pecoraro was after. At the end, participants were asked to list the several military applications in order of their probable usefulness in warfare. But when they did that, the SAIC-designed algorithm for this - a formal mass-voting procedure conducted with the aid of comically misnamed "meeting facilitation software" - underwent a meltdown in a huge bonfire of the technologies. No two participants could agree on what, if anything, the required numerical scores meant, or on what basis they should be assigned. As one of the participants remembered it later: "We rated items against undefined criteria, using a numerical rating scheme in which the numbers assigned had meaning only to the individual scorer. Then, we averaged these scores to obtain a totally meaningless number. God forbid that someone actually use the results for something!"
In view of the manner in which they were obtained, that was an unlikely prospect.
James Valdes, who gave us the Army and Biotechnology briefing, is the army's scientific adviser for biotechnology. He works at what in the old days was the Edgewood Arsenal, part of the Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland. In these times of nomenclature inflation, it has become the Edgewood Research, Development, and Engineering Center, and Valdes works at the US Army Chemical and Biological Defense Command.
Physically, the place hasn't changed much over the years. It's a flat spit of pine barrens that juts out into Chesapeake Bay. Deer graze calmly along the roadsides, beside chain-link fences topped with alternating coils of barbed wire and razor wire. Inside the first fence is a no-man's-land, then another identical fence. Watchful TV cameras point up and down the no-man's-land, and rusted signs nearby read: "Warning," "Danger," "Restricted Area," and (the biggie) "Use of Deadly Force Authorized."
Jay Valdes, who runs Edgewood's biotech program, did postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins in neurotoxicology. He's a precise, personable, and friendly type, a nautical chap who keeps a 20-foot sailboat out on the Chesapeake and can rattle off the differences between schooner, bark, sloop, ketch, and yawl as easily as he can enumerate the several varieties of nerve gas.
The army's "contaminant degrading" organisms are nothing new to him. There are tons of them at Edgewood, and they aren't even genetically engineered. They're just plain microbes, just standard, run-of-the-mill soil bacteria, albeit ones with specialized eating abilities and acquired tastes. Some of them eat petroleum products, a proficiency they've acquired all by themselves.
"If you have a site that's been contaminated with petroleum products," Valdes explains, "then just by natural selection, the microbes that live in the soil will have evolved mechanisms to enable them to degrade petroleum products. The microbes that eat them survive; the ones that don't die. Thus, they select themselves out."
So if you want to get rid of, degrade, or otherwise "dematerialize" a patch of petroleum, you merely go out to a contaminated site and collect samples of the indigenous soil bacteria. You bring them back to the lab, separate out those that eat the noxious pollutants, and then culture up big vats of them. Later, you go back out into the field and deposit the cultured petroleum eaters wherever they're needed. Not long afterward, the microbes have converted the noxious pollutants into harmless, or maybe even helpful, by-products.
Formally, this is known as in situ biodegradation; the process works so well against a wide range of contaminants that several private cleanup companies now ply the trade commercially. The army's biodegradation needs are somewhat specialized, however, there being large stockpiles of chemical agents - mustard gas, for example, left over from the good old days - that by law must be destroyed and turned into innocuous waste. Biotechnology can play a role here, because if you can identify the specific enzyme that a microbe uses to degrade a given chemical, then you can manufacture the enzyme itself and apply it to the chemical directly.
"And if you can identify the gene that codes for the particular enzyme that breaks down your pollutant," Valdes explains, "then you can clone that gene and produce that enzyme in large quantities."
At the Process Engineering Facility, a new $15 million building at Edgewood, the needed enzymes are produced in fermentation tanks and then tested for effectiveness on 20-foot-tall columns of contaminated soil. If the process works in the lab, it ought to work just as well in the field; the hope is that these experiments will yield an environmentally friendly way of turning poisonous agents into benign substances.
The hot-ticket item in military biotech circles these days, however, is the biosensor, an electromechanical device that detects airborne molecules in extremely small amounts. Valdes and his colleagues are now developing biosensors. The simplest consist of a computer chip topped with a layer of biological molecules that selectively bond with molecules of a known compound. When such a "recognition event" occurs, the computer chip sends a signal, informing the human observer that there are molecules of the substance floating about: a toxic gas, perhaps, or an explosive. If and when they become effective at sniffing out a wide range of deadly agents, biosensors promise an enormous payoff, both within the military and in civilian environments, such as airport luggage security checkpoints.
Other biotech marvels are in their earliest developmental stages, both in the army and in private industry. Researchers at an army R&D center at Natick, Massachusetts, are working on biocamouflage materials. Koors, an Israeli food company, is experimenting with an algae that produces glycerol, a key ingredient in many strategically important compounds. And at the laboratories in West Point, Pennsylvania, researchers at Merck & Co., a pharmaceutical firm, are in early clinical trials of a DNA vaccine against tuberculosis and another one against influenza. Also targeted are hepatitis, malaria, and HIV.
Those applications are probably doable in the relatively near term. Farther out, in the stargazing realm, are the more gee-whiz notions like food-producing machinery in the battlefield, microbe-grown bodysuits, suspended animation, and performance-enhanced supersoldiers. Although conference members agreed that such things were in principle possible in the sense that they violated no known laws of nature, they could not agree on when, if, or by whom any of them might be converted to practical realities.
"Who can judge that?" asked one of the military scientists after the workshop. "The future applications of biotechnology are dependent upon scientific advancements and economics, much more so than the needs as perceived by the likes of us."
"I think there is a reasonable chance (50-50) of success in most of these areas," said another attendee.
"I think we'll see some of the biocamouflage material by 2020," said a third. "Perhaps limited bioproduction of alcohol as a fuel."
"The bulk of the applications, in my opinion, are realistic in the sense of being performable tasks," said still another. "This, provided that adequate resources are forthcoming."
And provided that the research is allowed by law. Today, because of international treaty conventions against all forms of offensive biological weapons research, the United States is prohibited from developing any such fancy gimmicks as DNA-targeted superpathogens.
As for the prospect of nonlethal bioweapons ever completely replacing bombs and bullets, this, say the experts, probably will not happen: "There will always be a need, in warfare, for violence," said Joe Pecoraro. "We will never find a technological solution that removes violence from warfare. The implements that we use to conduct the violence I can't predict, but it will be there."
Scenario 3. July, 2020: Brazil invades Venezuela seeking to acquire its newly discovered oil reserves. Venezuela appeals to the United States for help, and we respond by sending in the biotroops.
This time, according to the scenario, we've got technology to burn: biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics - all of it has been developed and has succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. Wars, therefore, are now conducted long-range and by remote control. Robotic combat and remote telepresence have replaced traditional ground warfare. On this battlefield of the future, intelligent robots outnumber humans.
Maybe. Or at least so we thought. As to what would really happen in the warfare situations of the future.... Well, who knew?
We have to realize that what we are doing is scripting a major Hollywood movie about fighting an imaginary war with weapons that don't exist yet, with technologies that are still largely on the drawing boards and whose development and time frame is unknown. Is this anything more than military science fiction?
Military science fiction or not, the workshop held two surprises for me. One was that in 2020, a generation away, the United States, according to all three scenarios, would still be sending troops winging off across the oceans like passenger pigeons, at the slightest provocation.
The second, bigger surprise was my realization that some of the world's farthest-out, cutting-edge, and high-technodazzle biotech thinking was now being done not by scientists or academics but by the military, and not just the army. The air force's scientific advisory board has done a study, known as "New World Vistas," that looks 20 to 30 years into the future and foresees many of the same biotech devices and gadgetry.
There is a reason for the military's farsightedness. The main elements of the biotech revolution are now available to pretty much anyone, meaning, like it or not, that the nation's enemies - even just a handful of terrorists, perhaps - might already be developing offensive bioweapons. Biotechnology is, after all, "small science," the province of desktop machinery and lab glassware as opposed to particle accelerators or nuclear reactors; you don't need a Manhattan Project or an Apollo Program to pursue it.
"Some potential adversaries may be ahead of us in this technological area," says the army's STAR 21 report. "The United States did not keep the secrets of atomic warfare for long, even in the secretive atmosphere of the 1940s and 1950s. In the communicative, mobile, commercial world of the next 30 years, the data for both defensive and offensive biotechnological breakthroughs will be uncontainable and, essentially, public information. Almost any country will be able to possess the data."
With which those countries could create some spectacularly damaging stealth microbes.
"They could destabilize economies," says Jay Valdes at Edgewood. "They could selectively wipe out crops and livestock, and they could do it with plausible deniability. 'Oh, your rice crop got rice rust! Oh, so sorry!'
"I don't want to give anybody any ideas about how to do this," he adds, "but I think it would be fairly straightforward."
So, the biowars may be out there in the dim distance along with biomaterials, biomimetics, bioproduction, biocoupling, bioremediation, biocomputers, biochips, biosensors, biofeedstocks, biogenetics, and all the other assorted bios.
By the end of the bioworkshop, anyway, we were up to our bioears in biothoughts:
After bio-bombing by Bio-52s, bio-gones will be bio-gones.
Bio all means.
I'm going home, bio-bio.
Abios amigos.
Copyright © 1993-2002 The Condé Nast Publications Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1994-2002 Wired Digital, Inc. All rights reserved.
Look at the response in Britain to hoof and mouth. It was more a national security type of response.
That would be a good trick. But how do you train the microbes to only eat one in ten?
Anybody with a worse grasp of english then this engineer should not be writing/editing/proofreading.
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