Serendipity

Ser⋅en⋅dip⋅i⋅ty   
1. an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.
2. good fortune; luck: the serendipity of getting the first job she applied for.
Sometimes good fortune not only smiles on you, but invites you in, shines your shoes, cooks you a meal and tries to get you to marry her daugher.

From New Science:

Material slicker than Teflon discovered by accident

A superhard substance that is more slippery than Teflon could protect mechanical parts from wear and tear, and boost energy efficiency by reducing friction.

The "ceramic alloy" is created by combining a metal alloy of boron, aluminium and magnesium (AlMgB14) with titanium boride (TiB2). It is the hardest material after diamond and cubic boron nitride.

BAM, as the material is called, was discovered at the US Department of Energy Ames Laboratory in Iowa in 199, during attempts to develop a substance to generate electricity when heated.

BAM didn't do that, but was found to have other desirable characteristics. "Its hardness was discovered by accident. We had a terrible time cutting it, grinding it, or polishing it," says Alan Russell, a materials scientist at Iowa State University in
Ames.

Those chance findings have now developed into a $3-million programme at the Ames Lab to develop the BAM into a kind of eternal lubricant, a coating for moving parts to boost energy efficiency and longevity by reducing friction.

BAM is much slipperier than Teflon, with a coefficient of friction of .02 compared to .05. Lubricated steel has a friction coefficient of 0.16.

One way to exploit this slipperiness is to coat the rotor blades in everyday pumps used in everything from heating systems to aircraft, says Russel. A slick BAM coating of just 2 microns could reduce friction between the blades and their housing, meaning less power is needed to produce the same pumping power.

The Isle of Dr. Moreau

From the Times Online:

British scientists will be allowed to research devastating diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s using human-animal embryos, after the House of Commons tonight rejected a ban.

An amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill that would have outlawed the creation of “human admixed mbryos” for medical research was defeated in a free vote by a majority of 160, preserving what Gordon Brown regards as a central element of the legislation.

The measure frees British scientists to mix animal and human DNA

by moving a human nucleus into an empty animal egg. These are genetically 99.9 per cent human. As well as true hybrids, it also allows chimeras that combine human and animal cells and transgenic human embryos that include a little animal DNA.

CHIMERA

1. (often initial capital letter) a mythological, fire-breathing monster,
commonly represented with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.
2. any similarly grotesque monster having disparate parts, esp. as depicted
in decorative art.
3. a horrible or unreal creature of the imagination; a
vain or idle fancy: He is far different from the chimera your fears have made of
him.
4. Genetics. an organism composed of two or more genetically distinct
tissues, as an organism that is partly male and partly female, or an
artificially produced individual having tissues of several species.

Society used to have prohibitions against violating the so called "laws of nature." These boundaries are fast disappearing. Once researchers start to mingle interspecies DNA it will only be a matter of time before the freak shows begin. I say this because of two thoughts I have. One is the old adage “What one generation tolerates, the next generation will embrace." The other is "love of money is the root of much evil."

Make no bones about this. Follow the money. People are looking for ways to climb into the public trough and root around to their hearts content. This is true for the global warming crowd and the geneticists have taken a page from the same play book.

The recipe is simple: 1) Offer completely unsubstaniated benefits that will cure disease, disfigurement and disabilities (or scare people to death with half baked theories); 2) Enlist the aid of pandering politicians and before you know it, another entitlement is born.

The researchers (and the corporations sponsoring them) will dig out pitiful creatures who will demand that whatever ails them be remedied with public funding of genetic experimentation. The sniveling cowards who did not fight the original legislation legitimizing this obscene exercise will climb on the band wagon. The few who resist the movement will be branded as reactionary obstructionists/neanderthals and marginalized in the media.

I'm not really sure where it will go, but I believe that the abortion agenda will be tied to this as well as euthanasia. Already they are talking about growing children (or a blasphemous parody thereof) to be used for their organs.

Another free vote saw MPs backed the use of embryo-screeing to select “saviour siblings” suitable to donate umbilical cord blood to sick children, by a majority of 179.

Once the researchers create an appetite for this sort of ghoulish harvest that doesn't pan out from genetic research, they will go after aborted fetuses or infants whose "quality of life" is not acceptable to the parents. Blood money.