The radical fringe in America calls it “Frankenfood”. Start growing genetically modified vegetables, they mean to imply, and you unleash on unsuspecting ecosystems and digestive tracts the veggie equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster: something dreamed in the lab by wild-eyed, mad scientists with a tenuous grasp on reality which will run amok when released. The argument over genetically modified food is one that, however, is actually being won by the scientists — and, in the process, it is the protestors who are coming across as more than a little wild-eyed. In India, too, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh’s “consultation” process over the introduction of Bt brinjal has served to demonstrate that the objections to the introduction of this, the first GM crop destined for Indian tables, are less rational and more emotional. (Most vividly on Saturday, when one activist had to be ejected from a public hearing with the minister.)



A certain visceral concern over GM food is understandable: after all, we will be expected to eat something that scientists have tinkered with. But that concern must, in the end, have to give way before solid facts. As one of India’s most distinguished biochemists points out on these pages today, Bt brinjal has been thoroughly and comprehensively tested; perhaps even more compellingly, the theoretical science that backs up arguments for its safety remain unchallenged. Nor should anti-capitalist conspiracy theorists, such as the activist who accused Ramesh of being an agent of biotech giant Monsanto, carry much weight with mainstream opinion: the long development and testing of Bt brinjal featured extensive collaboration between various government agencies, the private sector, and scientists.


In the United States, corn modified by the introduction of pest-resistant genetic strains from the bacteria Bacillus thuringensis — Bt — dominates the market, and has for years. Similarly modified soybeans and vegetable oils have also proved safe and cheap. In India, farmers have taken to Bt cotton in a big way — and paranoid fears that giant foreign combines would seek to make rapacious profits by exploiting small Indian farmers have not materialised. After all, nobody is likely to force Indian farmers to adopt the new variety: it merely adds to their options, and to the options facing the Indian consumer. Some will always remain unconvinced, or call ad infinitum for more and better and longer tests. They should not be able to veto the introduction of GM food forever. This week the environment ministry is to decide on Bt brinjal. A cautionary desire to placate the panicked and paranoid must not be allowed to outweigh the evidence.

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Did birds evolve independently or from dinosaurs? The question has been settled by a recent discovery; the findings are published in the latest issue of Science. A ten-foot long, nearly complete fossil discovered in 160-million-year old mudstone beds in northwest China provides indisputable evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs. The young adult fossil is clearly a transitional one between dinosaurs and birds. It belongs to a new genus of alvarezsauroid dinosaurs: Haplocheirus sollers (meaning “simple, skilful hand”). The discovery has pushed back the fossil record of alvarezsauroid by 63 million years. What is particularly significant is that the fossil unearthed is about 15 million years older than the earliest known bird — Archaeopteryx. To confirm that birds descended from dinosaurs, it was essential to have fossils of bird-like theropods in the early stages of the transition and predating the Archaeopteryx. The absence of such evidence led to a paradox in the time scale (temporal paradox) and made some scientists believe that birds developed independently. While some recent discoveries from the Jurassic Period have challenged the temporal paradox, they were not able to settle the question. They were not truly transitional fossils and shared many morphological characteristics with birds, and moreover the ages of these fossils are “poorly resolved,” as the paper notes. The discovery of Haplocheirus sollers has finally solved the temporal paradox.

Haplocheirus has all the morphological features to be called the transitional form and the earliest among the alvarezsauroid dinosaurs. The curved, serrated teeth and canine teeth indicate it was a carnivore. It is by far the largest alvarezsauroid ever found: big for a bird and small for a dinosaur. According to the authors of the Science paper, certain characteristics of its digits imply that the “hand was fully functional…and retained some grasping ability.” Compared with the Haplocheirus, the derived alvarezsauroid dinosaurs from the Jurassic Period have undergone several morphological modifications that place them later in the evolutionary lineage. There has been “extreme morphological convergence between birds and derived Alvarezsauroid,” the authors conclude. There has been a rich haul of dinosaur fossils from China and the latest discovery establishes that alvarezsauroidea originated in Asia rather than in South America as was originally thought. Looking for fossils in rocks belonging to the late Jurassic Period and the appropriate depositional environment will be the key to find other missing fossils between Haplocheirus and the derived alvarezsauroid.

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So much more intimate than a laptop, and so much more capable than a smart phone – Steve Jobs’ description of the latest offering by Apple defines it quite well. Now that the hype over the much-anticipated iPad has decreased, we can have a look at the device and what it will mean to computer users.

The physical description of iPad is simple enough: It measures 9.56 inches, is 7.47 inches wide and just half an inch in height. At 680 grams for the Wi-Fi model (seven grams more for 3G), it is light and sleek. A 1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip makes it powerful, and the 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen multi-touch display provides a rich visual experience. I have not used one, but the description as a “bigger iPhone” is enough. The iPhone has really changed the way smart phones are perceived, used and sold. The elegance of Apple’s operating system is beguiling – there is nothing like it in any other computing universe.

It is interesting that the iPad’s screen is slightly larger than that of the Macintosh, the first Apple that I owned in 1985. It was the first commercially successful personal computer (PC) to use images, rather than text, to interface with the user, and was way more elegant and user-friendly than comparable PCs, like the IBM PC AT that operated on the Microsoft’s archaic MS-DOS 3.0.

It was simply a walkover. The Mac was fun, and the MS-DOS didn’t even know the word! The screen was black and white, you could not customise anything, but everything you needed, the hardware as well as the software was available out of the box.

Computers and the mouse had existed before Apple took Xerox’s GUI, tweaked it and made computing far more approachable to the normal user. It was not innovation, but implementation that set Apple apart. In fact, Apple normally uses various things that are already available, and puts them together in such a way that not only do they work well together – they also provide an experience that makes users pay a premium.

iPad is getting rave reviews already from the few who have used it. It is a tablet computer, which simply means that it is a slate shaped computer device that has a touch screen and is mobile. The multi-touch screen, which we have seen on iPhone and iPod Touch too, responds not only to touch, but also to gestures. It has access to literally over lakh applications, some free.

All this sets it apart from an ordinary tablet PC or e-reader. The iPad will let you use content – see it, hear it and read it – and also input content through the virtual keyboard on the screen will allow you to do so, say in case you want to answer your e-mails or write something. For many, the announcement that iPad has a keyboard dock is significant, as virtual typing has its limitations, especially when one is typing long documents.

Your digital photos will be displayed and organised in various ways, and you can see movies, or play games. The organiser has a great look and feel, and there are also good word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programmes.

The New York Times was the first paper to come on board the iPad. With a motion sensor, you get the landscape mode, and thus you can read your paper, magazines, etc., on the go. They will come with advertisements, a point which scores over Kindle and enhances the Apple appeal for publishers. Macmillan, HarperCollins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster and Hachette have already come aboard the iPad — you can buy their latest books online.

As of now, Apple store sells books at a higher price than Amazon’s Kindle. There is much speculation that iPad’s media-rich platform will soon have books that just won’t just be words...they will have sound and video, too. Apple has also inked a deal with ScrollMotion, a content technology company based in New York, to handle textbooks for iPad. Will this be the end of the heavy school bag? Not yet, and certainly not here, since iBooks is initially only for the US, but a beginning is being made.

Incidentally, both Kindle and its competitor Nook, brought out by the Barnes and Noble bookstore, use a technology called iInk, which is better for reading long texts, since the screen is not back-lit and thus does not cause eyes to strain.

Browsing on the Web, indeed downloading newspapers and magazines will be significantly impaired by the fact that like there is no support for Adobe Flash, which has become a standard in displaying interactive graphics, animations, etc., while browsing.

The lack of multitasking support is as inexplicable as that of a camera, or for that matter a USB port to enable easier exchange of data. Some of these are things that will probably get sorted out soon, some may never be, and if so, will impact the user experience. Gaming on iPad will probably find many users, but the real aficionados will want (even) more power, and many games run on Flash and Java, both of which are not supported by iPad.

The iTunes store has sold millions of songs and redefined the way people access music online. Over a lakh of applications have been developed for the iPhone, and can be used on the iPad, many are being optimised for this task right now..

iPhone may not be an e-book reader to beat Kindle or Nook, both of which are easier on the eyes in the long run and have a longer battery life; it may not be like the regular Net-books, which have real keyboards and can fold into the pocket; it may not even be a communication device that can replace your smart phone. The iPad is a product of its own kind and how it evolves will depend on what use its owners put it for. Apple has a history of making devices that sell well and shape the future, because they already have a foot in it.

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So scientists are human after all. They are no different from bankers, politicians, lawyers, estate agents and perhaps even journalists. They cheat. They make mistakes. They suppress truth and suggest falsity, especially when a cheque or a plane ticket is on offer. As for self-criticism, that is for you, not me.

I am just ready to believe that the antics of the climate change scientists, revealed in this week's Guardian and elsewhere, have no impact on the facts of global warming. But then I must rely on those same scientists to say so. The Yamal-12 larches may be dodgy, the hockey stick limp and the Amazon stats subject to re-evaluation. The date of 2035 for a Himalayan apocalypse may have been a misprint for 2350 and 40,000 comments didn't spot it. But so what, they all say? The world is coming to an end because we are scientists and, like Nostradamus, we know.

What any layman must find alarming is the paranoia and exclusivity of the climate change community. The preparation of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was apparently like that of a party manifesto. Data was suppressed and criticism ignored. The IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, dismissed sceptics as adherents of "voodoo science". Dark hints were made of commercial interest and Holocaust denial.

Now barely a week passes without another of the "thousands and thousands of papers" Pachauri calls in evidence having its peer-review credentials questioned. Their authors may plead that the evidence remains strong and theirs is no more than what lawyers call "noble cause corruption". Anyone reading the University of East Anglia emails might conclude they would say that, wouldn't they. Yet Pachauri this week issued a Blairite refusal of all regrets for the chaos into which his sloppiness has plunged his organisation.

Climatology is not the only scientific discipline whose dirty linen is flapping in the wind. The wildly exaggerated flu scares promoted over the past decade by virologists and their friends in government have so undermined trust in epidemiology that people are refusing flu vaccination. In the case of the MMR scare, it took London's Royal Free Hospital a shocking 10 years to investigate the scientists responsible, and the General Medical Council to discipline them.

Last week 14 stem cell researchers accused the science journals on which their reputation (and money) depends of corrupting the peer-review process. They protested at their papers being sent for vetting to known rivals. "Papers that are scientifically flawed or comprise only modest technical increments often attract undue profile," they said, while original new material was delayed or suppressed. Sending research papers to rivals in a field of potential profitability is like asking General Motors to pass judgment on the latest Ford.

Science enjoys extraordinary privilege in Britain. The media treats it with the deference of a new clerisy. The BBC devotes exhaustive and uncritical ­coverage to its most obscure doings. Melvyn Bragg dances attendance on the Royal Society. Carol Vorderman is recruited by David Cameron to teach the Tories maths. Fairs and prizes are showered on budding scientists. There are no young bankers of the year, no young management consultants, but young scientists galore. The Times newspaper even boasts a column with the desperate title, Sexy Maths.

I devour popular science, finding its history and its wonder a constant delight. But the public has been asked to put faith in a single profession that it cannot sustain. It is a mystery how so many science teachers can be so bad at their jobs that most children of my acquaintance cannot wait to get shot of the subject. I am tempted to conclude that maths and science teachers want only clones of themselves, like monks in a Roman Catholic seminary.

Criticise any field of science these days and you grow accustomed to such gentilities of academic discourse from the laboratory cloister as, "How dare you", "Get off our patch" and "Jenkins, you are a grade-one ­arsehole". If you report those who regard wind energy as a costly irrelevance to global warming, you cannot discern from the abuse who does and does not have a financial interest in it. (The same is true of blogs.) If you ­question anti-nuclear scaremongering, the threats are little short of "We know where your children live".

Two decades of uncritical flattery appear to have eroded what should be science's central tenets: questioning evidence and challenging assumptions. In the bizarre case of the Himalayan glacier, enough climate change believers wanted cataclysm to be true for none of them to question the evidence, however implausible. Hence the scientist who told a New York Times reporter: "You are about to experience 'the Big Cutoff' from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you."

My acceptance of the human causation of global warming has, as yet, not been dimmed by the shenanigans of the IPCC or the chicanery of the University of East Anglia. Nor is the reality of flu undermined by the World Health Organisation and its allies in the drugs industry. Nor should stem cell research be balked by the shortcomings of peer review. I can read the material myself.

What is alarming is the indifference of the leaders of science to the damage done to their cause. The top professional body, The Royal Society, has shown no inclination to judgment on the climate change controversy. Its ­website remains a bland cheerleader for the IPCC alarmists. The Royal Society took no steps of which I am aware to investigate the scandal of pandemic epidemiology, or the allegations against stem cell peer review. Ethics is not a strong suit of so-called big science. It gets in the way of money.

Science demands, and gets, a weight of expectation. It wants the public to regard its role in society and the economy as axiomatic – with no obligation to prove it. Government buys into this. While the humanities and even social sciences are dismissed as "consumption goods", science is an "investment in our future". A student of English or history is a drone, but a student of science is a hero of the state.

If global warming is as catastrophic as its champions in the science community claim – and as expensive to rectify – its evidence must surely be cross-tested over and again. Yet it has been left to freelancers and wild-cat bloggers to challenge the apparently rickety temperature sequences on which warming alarmism has been built.

No professional body is checking all this. Assertions are treated as scientific fact even when they come from such lobbyists as the World Wildlife Fund (on whose politics see Raymond Bonner's At the Hand of Man). If their conclusions are wrong, they are demanding money with false menaces. If they are right, their abuse of evidence and political naivety jeopardises life on earth. The chief government scientist, John Beddington, might have opined last week that "there is fundamental uncertainty about climate change predictions". What is he going to do about it?

I regard journalism as fallible and its regulation inadequate. But at least, like most professions, it has some. Only when science comes off its pedestal and joins the common herd will it see the virtue in self-criticism. Until then, sceptics must do the job as best they can.

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Steve Jobs, Apple Computers Chief Executive, has done it once again by launching the iPad, a touch-screen tablet computer. The iPad is a magical device with features that allow users to browse the web, check email, work with spreadsheets and charts, play videogames, read books, listen to music or simply watch videos. It remains to be seen how well the iPad will do in the market- whether it will receive the same level of response from consumers as the iPhone did. Some reviewers have given the iPad just the kind of rave reviews that Jobs could have asked for, but others have been less enthusiastic. Some argue that e-readers will find Amazon´s Kindle more handy compared to the iPad, and there are better and better notebooks for those who are looking for smart laptops. But one thing is true: There is no other product in the market that has packaged so many things in a less than 10-inch device. Jobs has strategically carved out a place between the laptop computer and smart phones. And therein lies the trick.

There are also divergent views as to what impact the iPad will have on the reading culture, on the future of books, and on overall journalism. When the iPad was launched on Thursday, The New York Times, Time magazine and National Geographic were among partners whose contents were displayed on the new device. What does this mean? Time’s Digital Operations Vice President Martin Nisenholtz put it succinctly: We are incredibly psyched to pioneer the next stage in digital journalism. The iPad will expedite the readership shift from paper books and newspapers towards the digital format. It may, over a period of time, bring an existential threat to books and the print media; however, it doesn´t mean the end of reading culture itself. Ironically, it may in fact spur the habit of reading, which is on the wane due to the increasing dominance of electronic media, especially television.

When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007 some skeptics doubted its performance and market success. But iPhone hit the market with a bang, gave Apple a much needed turnaround and redefined the mobile phone industry. It actually marked the onset of touch-screen mobile phones, with almost every mobile company scurrying to go touch-screen. Only a genius like Jobs’ can turn around an otherwise sinking company and redefine an entire industry. But with the iPad something even more far-reaching is likely to happen -- it´s likely to become a culture-changing device, significantly altering how people read and how journalism is done

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The 7-magnitude shallow-depth earthquake of January 12, which had its epicentre about 15 kilometres southwest of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, ruptured the long Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault for a length of about 75 km and width of 13 km to 15 km. The extent of rupture along the fault will become clearer after detailed studies are carried out. While the quake relieved a certain amount of accumulated stress, the Fault, according to the United States Geologic Sur vey (USGS), has not been ruptured “appreciably” and still stores accumulated stress. An earthquake results when the rocks fail and the accumulated stress is suddenly released. According to the USGS, aftershocks of magnitude 7 will continue for months; there is also a “small chance” of subsequent quakes being larger than the calamitous one of January 12. It is well known that a sudden release of strain at one point loads another area along the same fault or adjacent faults, and may hasten the occurrence of another quake. The loading-unloading of stress becomes all the more pronounced after a major earthquake. Haiti lies in a seismically active zone between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Another major strike slip fault, the Septentrional Fault, runs across the country. The country is also sandwiched by two thrust faults, one in the north and the other in the south.

Yet Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean region, which resembles a small-scale ring of fire like the one encircling the Pacific Ocean, are largely ignored by the scientific community. Quakes produced by the strike slip faults, Enriquillo and Septentrional, occur at relatively shallow depths. Even smaller magnitude quakes can be felt on the ground, and poorly constructed buildings can get weakened or damaged. Unfortunately, smaller magnitude earthquakes are generally ignored by the global network of seismic stations, which report only quakes of magnitude 4.5 and above. This underlines the need for studying regional seismic activity. Indonesia, which was sparsely instrumented prior to the 2004 tsunami, is better studied today. It is important to study even the smaller magnitude earthquakes in seismically active zones because, over the long term, they may anticipate a remotely possible large earthquake. Establishing or improving building codes will become possible only when a thorough seismic hazard assessment is made. The good news is that it is possible to fast-track the assessment to get a better understanding of the likelihood and nature of quakes over different time frames.

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s third law acquires a whole new force when it comes to Apple Inc. No matter how mundane its improvements, the company exerts a special, disturbing kind of sorcery.



On Wednesday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs ended eight years of speculation and finally showed us the iPad — a seductive slab that promises to upend all our computing expectations. Seen his way, the iPad is a just-right Goldilocks device. It’s handier than a laptop, better than a phone, much more than an e-reader, and cheaper than anyone expected. Unlike netbooks, which are lesser laptops, the iPad promises to be a new and constant multimedia companion. It could teach us all how to read anew, game differently, and it could reduce Kindle to ashes.


It could stop the newspaper industry from keeling over and dying. It is a solid advance in Apple’s touchy-feely interface revolution.


Or not. As David Pogue put it, the iPad is thus far “a vessel, a tool, a 1.5-pound sack of potential.” Whether it supplants existing devices or goes the way of all tablets so far (an awkward third device you don’t want to tote around), one thing’s obvious. Steve Jobs has done his best convincing us that there is an iPad-shaped hole in our lives.


How does this unique Apple thraldom work? Much as I disapprove of the company’s control-freakish ways, I must confess an irrational, techno-bimbo addiction for all things Apple. From the first moment I touched a Powerbook with wary, wondering fingers, I was sold on this silver thing of beauty. The keyboard was moulded to my touch, the dock jumped with eagerness to serve. Like many other Mac users, it was not the engineering chops that mattered; and in fact I use the tiniest fraction of its offerings. And I’m pretty sure that many, many of those who stayed up Wednesday night to slaver over the iPad as it was unveiled, were exactly like me. Not geeky, just superficial.


Why is Apple-love so much more than the sum of its parts? You could call it aura, craving, the feeling that you can’t completely possess the Apple thing, no matter how many Apple things you have. Every Macworld, Apple’s annual trade show, triggers the same cycle of anticipation, rumour, discussion and, more often than not, anticlimax. Wired cites HBS professor David Yoffie’s claim that the iPhone launch, for instance, resulted in headlines worth $400 million in advertising.


Let’s face it, the stuff is not even all that pretty. Design-wise, should not Apple-fatigue have set in by now? The same palette, the same brushed-metal and egg-shell surfaces, the now ubiquitous touch-screen. They are not exactly beautiful, bespoke offerings. But that does not deter the growing tribes of Apple addicts, the maddened chatter on Macforums, the consensus that owning a Mac is somehow hip and special (even in professions where everyone uses a Mac, there is some obscure pride attached to this fact.) It’s hard to convince Apple users to switch, no matter how much more functional other laptops or phones are, how useful, say, an End key could be, how you are losing out on all the software accoutrements and network benefits that a PC person takes for granted. In India, this attachment is ever more inexplicable, with the spotty service, the expense, and Apple’s obvious indifference towards the market. And yet, we carry on resentfully, unable to end this unequal relationship.


Although, over the years that it moved from genius computing to consumer appliances, Apple’s had its share of disappointments and damp squibs. Some, like the personal digital assistant Newton went nowhere, but begat the Palm PDA. Some recent stuff like the iPod Touch and the Macbook Air made splashy entries, but failed to grab the imagination. And remember Apple TV? On the other hand, the iPod and the iPhone have been prescient, spectacular successes. If creativity is pure novelty, Apple does not qualify — after all, digital music players existed before, as did music libraries — but if it is refining and recombining innovations into a single, defining product, then Apple’s got that covered. The iPod is the perfect example of a device that locks you into a tight, suffocating clinch with Apple — hardware, software and Web services work together, leaving you little option outside their appliances. Jonathan Zittrain, tech and law scholar, has crusaded against Apple’s sterile products, which are pre-programmed and controlled by their designers to a frightening extent. Unlike previous “generative” technologies that let users mould them to their own ends, those possibilities have been completely inscribed into the tools themselves. And the iPad, if it manages to live up to the mad glint in Steve Jobs’ eye, holds out even greater possibilities of lockdown — what will Apple’s bookstore look like? Will it end up playing the same gatekeeper role between publishers and readers that it currently does for music, with iTunes?


But then again, there’s no denying that Apple simply bends the market to its will, creating products you did not know you wanted, but simply cannot live without. Fetishising and myth-making aside, there’s no way it could sustain that kind of loyalty if it did not create objects of unprecedented utility. And the iPad might well be all it’s cracked up to be — if the list of its partners in the publishing and entertainment world is any indication, it might be impossible to ignore it. And this is only the beginning of a new kind of device — expect all kinds of tweaks and iterations, just like the iPod went through. Like it or not, there’s no escaping Apple’s enchantment for now.

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Moses came down from a mountain bearing a tablet, on which God's laws were written. Now Steve Jobs, Apple Computer's talismanic CEO, is


hoping to rewrite the laws governing the market for personal gadgets, by releasing
the company's own version of the tablet the iPad. Not quite a phone and not quite a laptop or desktop computer replacement, the tablet seeks to exploit a space between those gadget types. It could also change the way that media is consumed, and eventually provide a new business model to the publishing industry. If it catches on other companies are bound to follow suit, releasing their own version of the tablet.

Although phones are more and more becoming multimedia devices capable of playing videos, taking decent pictures and listening to music, the screen size which, by necessity, cannot be too large limits consumer enjoyment of these activities. And laptops are too cumbersome to drag around just to watch videos or read books. So the tablet could offer an alternative. Not as heavy as a laptop and with a screen that enables an intimate multimedia experience, such a device can cater to our need to always be connected.

One way to regard the tablet is to consider it direct competition to e-book readers like Amazon's market-leading product, the Kindle. With an intuitive touchscreen interface, colour display and additional Web browsing capabilities, tablets pose a threat to purpose-built gadgets which do just one thing. The e-book reader market is just hotting up, with several electronics companies releasing different versions. There was already a market for cheap, portable computers, as the success of netbooks has proven. Consumers don't just use computers to work or study, but also to interact with friends via social media, watch videos, read newspapers and blogs and browse the Web. The latter are things a touchscreen tablet would be great at doing.

There is hope that the device would provide newspapers and magazines with a viable new business model that allows them to start charging for content, while the movie industry is watching keenly to see if the device had the potential to be an iPod for movies and television shows. The new device may not transform distribution models just yet, but the potential is there. And consumers are only going to benefit if more companies get in on the act with their touchscreen tablets.

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Scientists have created baby monkeys with a father and two mothers. Their goal was to eliminate birth defects, but increasing the number of biological parents beyond two could add a futuristic twist to an area where the law already is a mess: the question of who, in this age of artificial insemination and surrogacy, should be considered the legal parents of a baby.

Researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center were looking for ways to eliminate diseases that can be inherited through maternal DNA. They developed, as the magazine Nature reported last summer, a kind of swap in which defective DNA from the egg is removed and replaced with genetic material from another female’s egg. The researchers say the procedure is also likely to work on humans.

The result would be a baby with three biological parents — or “fractional parents,” as Adam Kolber, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, calls them.

He mentioned the idea over lunch at The Times, and it provided plenty of grist for debate among law junkies: Could a baby one day have 100 parents? Could anyone who contributes DNA claim visitation rights? How much DNA is enough? Can a child born outside the United States to foreigners who have DNA from an American citizen claim U.S. citizenship?

One reason these questions are so difficult to resolve definitively is that, even in simpler cases, the law of parenthood is badly muddled. That has been true since the 1980s saga of Baby M.

Mary Beth Whitehead had agreed to a payment of $10,000 to bear a child for William and Elizabeth Stern. The baby girl was conceived with Whitehead’s egg and Mr. Stern’s sperm. After the birth, Ms. Whitehead sued to keep the baby.

The New Jersey Supreme Court declared Ms. Whitehead “the legal mother” and “not to be penalized one iota because of the surrogate contract.” But it allowed the Sterns to raise the child.

In 1993, California came out the other way in a dispute between Crispina and Mark Calvert and a woman they had hired to carry a baby produced with their egg and sperm. All three courts that heard the case ruled for the Calverts, but each gave a different reason. The California Supreme Court finally decided that the person who intended to create the child and to raise it was the mother — in this case, Ms. Calvert.

There is confusion nationwide. Some states have laws expressly permitting surrogate parenthood; others make it illegal; and others have no law at all.

The problem, as Janet Dolgin, a Hofstra Law School professor, wrote in the Akron Law Review, is that legal thinking is deeply divided over how to judge what makes a family.

Since the 1960s, there has been a shift toward recognizing people’s intent in creating familial relationships, as reflected in the rise of no-fault divorce, prenuptial agreements and civil unions. But when it comes to deciding parenthood, courts remain deeply influenced by biology, even when it clashes with intent.

This concern is playing out now in A.G.R. v. D.R.H. & S.H., the biggest surrogacy case in New Jersey since Baby M’s. A woman served as a surrogate for her brother and his male spouse, giving birth to twins conceived with the spouse’s sperm and donor eggs. She signed a contract agreeing that her brother would adopt the children, but the trial court, saying it was following the Baby M decision, ruled that the spouse and the surrogate mother are the legal parents. The surrogate’s brother was given no parental rights.

When technology transforms a legal field — as the Internet is doing now for privacy, and digital music and video are doing for copyright — judges and legal thinkers have to decide what are the important values.

Parenthood cannot be reduced to a formula, but the law should move toward a greater recognition that the intent of the people involved is more important than the genes. That would provide useful guidance for courts to think about fractional parents — especially if the day comes when three or more people want to combine their DNA to create a baby.

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Over millennia, humans have woven myths, legends, and superstitions around solar eclipses. But this phenomenon occurs only because the moon is just the right size and far enough from earth to block out the sun when all three bodies are appropriately aligned. All solar eclipses are, however, not the same. Since the moon’s orbit is elliptical, not circular, its distance from earth varies, apparently changing its size in the sky. So while people in northern India witnessed a total solar eclipse in July 2009, this time it was an annular eclipse. The moon did not cover the entire disc of the sun and it did not get as dark as during a total solar eclipse. In India, the eclipse could be seen by people in the southern parts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. An annular eclipse was last seen from this country in November 1965. If the plane of the moon’s orbit were not slightly tilted, solar eclipses would be occurring at every new moon. There are, in fact, between two and five solar eclipses in any given year but these are visible from different parts of the globe.

But that was not good enough for scientists. In 1715, the British astronomer Edmond Halley published the first prediction of the path of a total eclipse. Since then, scientists have been travelling to the far corners of the world, telescopes and other equipment in tow, to take advantage of the natural phenomenon. Their work has resulted in some major advances. In August 1868, the French astronomer Pierre Jules Cesar Janssen camped in tobacco fields in Guntur in coastal Andhra Pradesh to make his observations. His work led to the discovery of an entirely new element, helium, which derives its name from the Greek word for the sun. Data from a 1919 eclipse validated a prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity that the sun would bend the light from stars. A total solar eclipse remains a major opportunity for studying the sun’s corona, its outer atmosphere that is ordinarily not visible. Such investigations are not possible during an annular eclipse. The Indian Space Research Organisation is, however, using sounding rockets fired from Thumba near Thiruvananthapuram and Sriharikota as well as balloons and ground-based equipment to look at changes that could occur high up in the atmosphere during the eclipse. Most important of all, the eclipse is a rare opportunity for millions of people to behold a grand spectacle and learn some science in the process.

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