Филип Керр - The Second Angel

The vomeronasal organ, or VNO, consists of a tiny pair of dents on either side of the nasal septum. For centuries this organ was thought to have no important function. Today, 90 percent of all prophylactic medicines are administered in this way.

‘Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life, and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.’ Deuteronomy 12:23. Cf. Deuteronomy 12:16, Genesis 9:4, and Leviticus 17:11.

Under a ruling of the Supreme Court (Directive 35/56a. Proper Means of Carrying Out Executions) mutilation and bloodshed are considered necessary in all cases involving blood felony, not least to demonstrate the state’s power over the offending individual. The greater the mutilation and bloodshed, the greater the demonstration of the state’s power. Breaking on the wheel was a method of public execution in France until the invention of the guillotine, toward the end of the eighteenth century. The past few years have seen its reintroduction throughout the commonwealth.

Spermatid is a form of presperm. The treatment, known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection, is based on a technique in which a single sperm is selected and injected into the egg in laboratory conditions.

With adequate fluid replacement, total fluid volume is restored to a blood donor within seventy hours. It is normally eight weeks, however, before the donor’s iron stores can be completely replenished and before the donor is legally eligible to make another deposit. This safeguards against people building up deposits of blood in their accounts at the expense of their own health.

While latex condoms have proved to be an effective barrier to the transmission of viruses such as HIV, they have dismally failed to prevent the spread of P2. The virus is a very small molecule, much smaller than HIV, and typically less than a micron in diameter; even double-dipped latex compounds contain microscopic holes averaging one micron. Recently condoms were tested in an in vitro system simulating key physical conditions that can influence viral particle leakage through condoms during oral sex. A suspension of fluorescent-labeled microspheres modeled P2 in semen, and condom leakage was tested spectrofluorometrically. Leakage of P2-sized particles through latex condoms was detectable in 65 percent of all condoms tested.

Synthetic Melanophore is different from photochromic or morphing materials. Melanophore disperses or concentrates color in molecules containing smart pigment granules. Color change is determined by ambient light and the wearer’s body temperature. Melanophore can actually change color to match whatever background it comes into contact with. That the chameleon can do the same is a commonly held misconception.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century there were an estimated 500,000 tons of gold in the sea, ten times the amount of bullion held on reserve. The price of gold was around four hundred U.S. dollars per troy ounce. Today the sea contains less than 50,000 tons, and the price of gold is just over two hundred dollars. What happened to the gold market in the twenty-first century was exactly what happened to the amethyst market in the nineteenth century. A glut in supply effectively killed the price.

Hyperbaric oxygen is of value when blood transfusion cannot be carried out. Hyperbaric hotels have multiple luxury-grade chambers that are normally compressed with oilless medical-grade oxygen at 6 ATA (165 feet of seawater) or greater. These were originally pioneered by Jehovah’s Witnesses whose religious beliefs prevented them from accepting transfusions or any form of blood product. But with the advent of P2, such establishments arc now widespread. Guests at hyperbaric hotels breathe normally or through an oral/nasal mask. There have been anecdotal reports showing dramatic, if temporary, relief of P2 crises with hyperbaric oxygen, and the effect of the virus does appear to be markedly reduced under hyperbaric conditions. However, as yet, there has been no large-scale study to confirm its overall usefulness clinically.

Just as microtethnology aimed to produce ever-smaller devices, so chemistry aimed to produce ever-larger molecules. This is the essence of nanotechnology: It is really an extension of chemistry, and a bottom-up technology in which building is done from a molecular scale up. But even today, when nanotechnologies affect all of our lives, people still find the concept hard to understand, and part of the problem has to do with language. A novel like The Incredible Shrinking Man, by Richard Matheson (1957), provides an excellent illustration of how alien the small world is to huge creatures like human beings. We have no experience of the molecular world and this makes it hard to comprehend. But the bottom line is that all matter is made of molecules, and these can be manipulated. And when that happens, matter can be changed. As the visionary of nanotechnologies, Richard Feynman, said as early as 1959, ‘Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance.’

The October Revolution of 1905; the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917; the August Revolution of 1991; the Trogatyeluay Revolution of 2007; the Pyatay Revolution of 2017; the Second October Revolution of 2026; the Fascist Revolution of 2027; the Easter Revolution of 2036; and the Kravapooskanye Revolution of 2040.

Talisman is a time-capsule pharmacological nanomachine from Bayer. Principally it contains the hormone vasopressin to replace what is lost from the pituitary gland during the consumption of alcohol. The nanomachine also attacks acetaldehyde, a toxic product produced by the liver, and quickly breaks it down into acetic acid and carbon dioxide. Other slow-release ingredients include vitamin C, vitamin B, milk thistle, and evening primrose oil. Other time-capsule-pharmacological-nanomachine (TCPN) products, such as Pussyfoot and Soberas, prevent any alcohol from entering the bloodstream.

During the past century, the effect of global warming has not been to increase temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, as scientists once predicted, but, as a result of its impact on the Gulf Stream, to cool it. During the early years of this century, a massive flow of melt-water from the Greenland Ice Sheet put an end to the Gulf Stream, triggering a near calamitous cooling throughout northwestern Europe.

What is Neo-Modernism in architecture? This is not the surrealist phase of Modernism once suggested by the twentieth-century critic Frank Kermode, but something else. The essence of the movement is that we live in a world in which everything is subject to rapid change. So rapid that for a designer to try and make sense of change, or even to keep up with it, is impossible. Thus the hallmark of Neo-Modernism is impermanence: Since fashion quickly reduces all design to stylistic desuetude, it is only the transient and the unfinished that have any real meaning and significance. Perhaps the most famous example of a Neo-Modernist building is the new European Parliament building in Berlin.

William Henry Gates III. Born Seattle, Washington, 1955. Founded Microsoft, today the world’s largest computer hardware and software company, in 1975, with Paul Allen. Still CEO of the company at the age of 114, although there are persistent rumors that he is being kept alive on a life-support system at the Paul Allen Memorial Hospital in Seattle.